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Editor’s Stuff: SA’s top food and beverage brands!
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 Food and beverage brands feature markedly in the The Sunday Times Top Brands Survey whose results were announced this week. The survey, now in its 15th year, gauges consumer sentiment towards brands, delivering valuable insights to business leaders and marketers in South Africa.
KOO has been pushed off the winner’s perch this year by another regular winner, Coca-Cola. That these two stalwart brands reign high in SA consumer sentiment conveys much about the power of great advertising and marketing, as well as the value proposition they hold.
Congratulations to the top brands!
 There is a duly eclectic range of articles in today’s newsletter, something for all interests and tastes. One that piqued my interest, if not my taste, is this:
Two young American entrepreneurs have developed a high protein bar using crickets that they say have superior nutritional qualities and can go a long way in making insect consumption mainstream.
Enjoy this week’s read…
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SAAFFI Events (SA Assoc of the Flavour & Fragrance Industry)
Short-training courses, Aug 27, Jo’burg: Yeast, Yeast Extracts & Yeast-based Reaction Flavours; Cocoa and Chocolate, both presented by Carst & Walker. More details
FOODStuff SA is a hub for food-bev industry recruitment:
look for a job or advertise your company’s positions! Click here!
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| Local News and Developments |
Unilever has launched its Flora Buttery spread in South Africa. In a distinctive golden pack, it has all the taste of butter, but 70% less saturated fat, to give consumers the best of both. Adding a dash of butter, or “butteriness”, to a vegetable spread, rather than the reverse, is a new form of hybrid to the local market.
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Again leveraging the growing taste for cider, Distell has added a new variant to its popular Savanna range, Savanna Dark.
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Shoprite Holdings, the largest retailer in Africa, said this week in announcing its annual results, that it plans to continue an ambitious expansion drive – despite missing earning expectations which an unapologetic CEO Whitey Basson put down to the SA consumer “being under distress, especially the middle class consumer in the five to seven LSM…”
The company warned this week that forecast earnings for year to June would be between 80 percent and 100 percent lower than 2012. The results were also affected by its acquisition of an effective 64.2 percent shareholding in New Foodcorp Holdings.
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In a bid to ensure it is able to harness the ongoing strong demand in Africa, SABMiller has announced two major investments in the region, in Uganda and Zambia.
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Frozen vegetable giant, McCain Foods, has implemented a number of top-level structure changes in the past few weeks in its local office, with a new MD taking over from Louis Wolthers who has been promoted to a Global McCain Foods leadership role.
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Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance has announced it is hosting a FREE Food Safety seminar in Jo’burg next month – where attendees can tap into the expertise of Cor Groenveld, LRQA global head of food safety and chairman of the board of the Foundation for Food Safety (owner of FSSC 22000).
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Floating cows and a burst of bubbles heralded the launch of Cadbury Dairy Milk Bubbly in August 2012 and now Mondelez SA has launched the aerated chocolate slab in mint flavour.
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Caturra Coffee has introduced a new concept to the SA food service market – a cost effective and efficient way to serve filter coffee to large groups of people.
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Arniston Bay Wines has announced the release of two wine-based ‘taste infusions’, exotic blends in Graviola and Passion Fruit, and Mint Aloe and Lemongrass, flavours.
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South Africa is a paradoxical land of the fat and the hungry, where poor food choices are piling on the kilos without staving off rumbling stomachs, according to the new HSRC health survey, Sanhanes-1.
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A Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) South Africa Focus Day, will be held in Jo’burg on September 11, 2013.
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Food Science, Technology and Ingredients Stuff
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Scientific American has made a statement denouncing the mandatory labeling of genetically engineered food in response to pending GMO-labelling legislation in nearly half of the US states. The organisation believes that labelling based on unfounded fears will shun an increasingly beneficial and promising technology that is widely considered safe.
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Tech entrepreneurs like Sergey Brin (Google), Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Peter Thiel (PayPal) have put their money into developing meat alternatives. Why? Because they just might be the future of food.
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Australian researchers have found a way to improve the hydrating qualities of beer, without compromising on taste. By adding electrolytes to the amber ale, the researchers from a Queensland university may even have found a way to avoid a post-drink hangover.
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UK consumer champions Which? reports millions of Britons suffer “wrap rage”, as modern-day technology and moulded plastic packaging infuriates shoppers.
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Newspaper headlines are full of them. Advocacy pamphlets love them. Lobby groups abuse them. Companies exploit them. Big numbers are the stock in trade of propagandists who use fear and indignation to stir the unwitting, the unthinking and the uncaring into action.
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Marketing, Trends, Innovation and NPD
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With frozen food sales declining and fresh prepared foods growing, this US and global trend is seeing the redirection of products from the freezer case toward the deli counter.
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Ice cream does do something funny to a lot of us: it makes us nostalgic and happy and helps us recover from heartbreak. The world is more colourful, slower-paced and simply more fun with an ice cream. There are a few reasons why this is the case… A great essay that charts the artisan reinvention of the world’s favourite comfort food.
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SABMiller has started importing ‘fresh’, unpasteurised lager to the UK, as global beer companies are forced to find new ways to rekindle drinkers’ waning enthusiasm for the amber nectar in developed markets.
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As MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch InBev struggle through another down year, executives have routinely cited bad weather and the sagging economy as reasons why consumers are buying less Miller Lite, Bud Light and other so-called ‘premium lights’ in the US. But could it just be the taste? A new survey suggests that could be the case.
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Freedom Foods Group, the Australian free-from (dairy) cereal and snacks firm, has expanded its product range with the launch of a long-life, non-dairy, quinoa-based milk.
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In Steamboat Springs, a small town in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado, Grant Fenton believes he has found the next big idea. An entrepreneur, he’s hoping that his frozen PowerIce bars will reach well beyond sports nutrition and rehydration.
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Tea is the world’s most consumed beverage, outpacing bottled water, carbonates, beer and coffee. But tea still lacks the high value found in competing beverage markets which equals opportunity.
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Health and Nutrition
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Eating ‘super broccoli’, developed by scientists at the Institute of Food Research (IFR) in Norwich, three times a week can help to ‘re-tune’ the metabolism and this could protect against age-related diseases such as obesity, Type II diabetes and cancer, according to new research.
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We seem to be addicted to everything these days: phones, sex, shopping, Facebook … and junk food. There is, of course, a vast difference between serious clinical addiction and figure-of-speech ‘addiction’. Of course we need food to live, but can we become dependent on certain unhealthy foods in the same way that we can on drugs?
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Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, believe the body mass index (BMI), based on the weight and height, is not an accurate measure of body fat content and does not account for critical factors that contribute to health or mortality.
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Seaweed: The green superfood you’re not eating You’ve likely chewed on seaweed wrapped around a sushi roll, but few Westerners would consider picking up a bag of the stuff at the grocery store. It might be time for a change: Seaweed is filled with antioxidants, calcium and a broad range of vitamins, but that doesn’t begin to scratch the slippery brown surface of this fascinating food.
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The world gulps hundreds of millions of cups of coffee every day — so what is all this java doing to our brains and bodies?
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Weird, Whacky and Wonderful Stuff
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A team of top UK chefs are hoping to set a new world record by preparing a total of 105 dishes in one day from one single giant cabbage.
No time for coffee? Spray caffeine on your skin Patent-pending Sprayable Energy is now available and itwillmakeyoutypelikethis. Caffeine is America’s favourite drug, bar none, especially in coffee. Sometimes people don’t have time for a leisurely cup of joe and just want a quick fix.
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When it comes to the thousands of animal carcasses that litter the Montana’s roads and highways each year, there is only one logical thing to do: eat them.
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Food bites…2013: The candy-hyperactivity myth: one of many to ignore
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 “ALTHOUGH sugar is widely believed by the public to cause hyperactive behaviour, this has not been scientifically substantiated. “Twelve double‐blind, placebo‐controlled studies of sugar challenges failed to provide any evidence that sugar ingestion leads to untoward behaviour in children with Attention‐Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or in normal children.
“Likewise, none of the studies testing candy or chocolate found any negative effect of these foods on behaviour. For children with behavioural problems, diet‐oriented treatment does not appear to be appropriate. Rather, clinicians treating these children recommend a multi-disciplinary approach. The goal of diet treatment is to ensure a balanced diet with adequate energy and nutrients for optimal growth.”
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Food and beverage brands feature markedly in the The Sunday Times Top Brands Survey whose results were announced this week. The survey, now in its 15th year, gauges consumer sentiment towards brands, delivering valuable insights to business leaders and marketers in South Africa.
There is a duly eclectic range of articles in today’s newsletter, something for all interests and tastes. One that piqued my interest, if not my taste, is this:
“ALTHOUGH sugar is widely believed by the public to cause hyperactive behaviour, this has not been scientifically substantiated. 
