11 Feb 2013 Food Bites 2012
TODAY, social technology has displaced the newspaper, magazine, TV and people as a preferred mealtime companion. When you consider that 45% of all adult eating occasions are alone and 39% of consumers engage in social media while eating, you get a sense of the marketing potential for engaging consumers at mealtime…
The Hartman Group on our rapidly changing food culture, read more
Can bad food witch become good food fairy?
BUT maybe the food industry can re-nature products. Maybe it can make the best of the food we care about — whole grains, fibre, and vitamins, minerals and antioxidants — convenient and accessible. Sure, it’s unlikely. But not impossible.
If technology, scale, industrialisation and relentless marketing have been the forces of nutritional evil, maybe they can be the forces of nutritional salvation. The food industry, pretty much everyone recognises, has a lot to answer for. Some forward-looking companies are already beginning to find some of the answers — and more need to follow.
Corby Kummer, US foodie writer and food industry critic
Fragmentation and change on the food landscape…
AS is often the case with significant new market shifts, the leadership and the best pointers towards success are coming from entrepreneurial companies, rather than from global giants. Management at the biggest companies has expectations of high sales, rapid growth – and a self-damaging impatience with anything that fails to get past their perception of being ‘too weird’ or ‘too niche’. There are too many senior executives who have failed to appreciate two significant shifts in the world of food that are both creating opportunities – while also threatening to slowly erode established business models.
Editorial in New Nutrition Business, on new food distribution success stories; read more
From McDonald’s and Heinz…
…innovation does not have to be rocket science
WE’RE in the food business, not rocket science. But we’ve sold one billion packs of Dip & Squeeze [new product format for foodservice]. We didn’t meddle with the formula [of Heinz ketchup]; look what happened with New Coke. We just changed the delivery mechanism. It’s going back to what our founder said – doing the common thing uncommonly well.
Dr Michael Okoroafor, VP global packaging innovation and execution, Heinz
McDonald’s on why it ditched lean finely textured beef…
IT is perfectly safe, but there was a bad perception about it and we decided to stop using it. There is more to selling than just science. If people don’t want it, there is a reason to take it out. Maybe it sounds cowardly but this was a business decision.
Business only has two functions: innovation and marketing!
LIKE most of my peers in the marketing industry, I get inventors and clever thinkers contacting me with something new they have developed. Their stories are all the same: “We can’t get any of the big stores to stock it,” or “We can’t find anyone to make it.”
What they are finding out the hard way is that in business today the big idea is the easy part. Getting the consumer to buy something, however, takes a lot of marketing. And the more unique the product, the more marketing it needs. And the more unknown its brand name, the more marketing it needs. And marketing today costs a lot of money.
The result is that hundreds of thousands of great product ideas end up on the scrapheap or gathering dust in the inventor’s garage. The big lesson one generally learns from failed new products is that when marketing is missing, so is success. There are exceptions, but these are
extremely rare.
Chris Moerdyk, corporate marketing analyst, advisor and media commentator Read more
The rise and rise of perishables and fresh food
…AN aggregate shift away from packaged food began long before now and even long before the recession began. If we look at the volumetric trends from 2003 until 2009, we see that fresh food (raw fruits, raw vegetables, grains) have been steadily growing while packaged food (everything in a package) has been steadily, inexorably declining.
While most companies would look for category-level causes for volumetric decline in big packaged food categories, the problem is really cultural: food culture is changing in a long-term manner that packaged food companies have yet to truly accept.
The shift towards fresh food is one that we know from field research is going on at all ends of the socioeconomic spectrum because cooking with fresh foods offers struggling consumers a stronger value proposition than spending extra money on convenient packaged food solutions and the growing desire for healthier meal experiences composed of fresh fruits, vegetables and grains casts most packaged foods in a poor light for more educated consumers.
Packaged food companies need to find ways to use their existing cash to broaden their portfolios to include more fresh food experiences and new trademarks that can credibly promote them.
The real opportunity is in fresh, packaged foods. What we call the Third Grocery Sector. This is the sector driving phenomenal growth in yoghurt, hummus, refrigerated meal components, etc. And we find it to be largely a world of small independent producers who have a better alignment with long-term food culture trends, unfortunately, than many of the largest packaged food companies in the world.
James Richardson, Senior Vice President, The Hartman Group, read more
Snacking is it!
WE’VE been talking to our customers a lot about snacks during the past five years because we’ve seen consumer behaviour change so much. They’ve redefined what a snack is. People used to think a snack was chips, cookies or crackers. Now snacks are beverages, mini-meals or three items on a tray.
Kim Holman, director of marketing, Wixon Foods, Wisconsin
The power of Jane Doe
BLOGGER Bettina Siegel should become the Poster Girl for what can happen when the food industry gets blindsided by criticism it never saw coming. Siegel, not a scientist, not a food industry guru, but a consumer with her own blog who was first to broadcast her disgust with so-called “lean finely textured beef” (aka pink slime), and who gathered a quarter-million signatures on a petition against the ingredient.
That’s power right there, when a veritable Jane Doe can round-up 250 000 people to join a fight against a food ingredient that virtually anyone with a food science degree can tell you is quite safe to consume.
Proof again that what drives the marketplace is perception; anyone who banks on facts to drive an argument with consumers is doomed to lose it.
Bob Messenger, US food industry observer and publisher of The Morning Cup
Science, the media and an undiscerning public!
THE lean finely textured beef (LFTB) debacle that’s played out over the past weeks demonstrates the dominance of media bias, public relations spin and the power of blogs and social media over science. Because of the way the issue has been framed, anyone from the scientific community or anyone at all who tries to interject facts into the discussion is put in the position of defending “pink slime”.
Most retailers and restaurants have bowed to consumer pressure and announced that they will no longer use LFTB. Unfortunately, they have little choice. The issue has become so sensationalised that consumers are demanding that it be removed from ground beef.
This issue hit home because we understand how the product has been misrepresented. We can see how the misrepresentations may cause irreparable damage to the manufacturers of LFTB and result in the loss of jobs. The issue is a setback for food safety and beef industry as a whole.
Red meat is bad for you? Burger off!
WHAT is really striking is that the eat-meat-die-young panic keeps rearing its ugly head so regularly, based on study after study with equally feeble risk ratios and numerous confounding factors.
This suggests that the constant desire to scare those of a carnivorous bent has little to do with the evidence – which is shakier than a cow with BSE – and more to do with the prejudices of those who want us all to live a less red-blooded lifestyle. The particular desire to promote lentil-munching over hot dogs and burgers rather suggests a general sniffiness towards mass-produced food, too.
The most accurate answer to the question of whether red meat and processed meat are bad for you is this: we just don’t know. My hunch is that the health risks are non-existent – in practical terms, they are pretty much irrelevant – but given the difficulties of conducting this research, it’s hard to believe we could ever know if one particular type of food is especially bad for us. Still, that won’t stop the medics and the researchers from trying to enforce their food rules on us anyway.
Rob Lyons, spikedonline.com, commenting on the latest red meat scare. Do read his sage analysis refuting this and other scare studies
