IFT
If You are Going to Serve Food, Learn to Cook
I spent part of this week at IFT, which is the show for food technology. Many of the companies that were there had ingredients to promote, and did so with sampling. A fine strategy if you want to prove your ingredient doesn’t affect the taste of foods, but one caution—learn to cook and bake. A good half of the samples weren’t tasty and some were borderline inedible. As one marketer pointed out, they don’t sample their ingredients because their company isn’t in the cooking business. Smart.
Too bad the company that put out the really bad buffalo chicken nuggets didn’t bother eating them. Would have saved me and a lot of passersby the trouble of throwing these out.
Why you need an American Agency
For any number of products, the US is one of the top markets in the world, hence the desire from companies all over the globe to sell into the US. From herbal teas to the most obscure B-to-B widgets imaginable, you can’t escape good foreign advertising.
It’s good foreign advertising because it works well—I am assuming—in the country of origin. But here, not only does it fall flat, the attempts at Americanization range from dumb to laughable to insulting. That’s not to say the American companies haven’t committed their own international faux pas. Ad books are littered with the legendary stories of “Coke adds life”, “Fly Leather”, the Chevy Nova and “It Takes a Tough Man to Raise a Tender Chicken” (actually, it’s a tough village). It’s probably safe to assume that most American companies have learned their lesson by now and at least hire a localization firm, if not another agency.
But the international hits keep coming. Lately, I have seen trade ads for German companies who spell America and other words with a “k”, English copy written by non-native speakers that doesn’t read well in English and my new favorite, above. I think it’s a weight-loss tea. You can’t see it, but their slogan is “Just Drink It”.
Small Changes: Thoughts on Wellness 09 Conference
Eat more soup. Have some almonds. My two biggest personal take-aways from a few days at IFT’s Wellness 09 conference.
Beginning with the Center for Disease Control’s overview of America’s dietary habits (with a state-by-state map demonstrating the uptick in obesity rates from the 1980s’, replete with some of the most unattractive food photography I’ve ever seen) to the sad knowledge, courtesy of NPD Market Research, that America still feeds itself the same five basic meals for dinner in 2008 as we did twenty years ago.
Whenever I attend a show like this—a great peek into the minds of nutritionists and food scientists—I come away with the resolution that today’s the day I start my macrobiotic diet. But then, I’m prone to making sweeping, large-scale changes. Or at least prone to thinking that I will.
Which brings me to the mantra expressed over and over again at the conference: “Small Changes.” The powers that be in the food nutrition world have pretty much given up on (for good reason) the concept that the American consumer will ever kick our terrible eating habits, even with the strongest of intentions. But it took a “Joint Task Force of the American Society for Nutrition, Institute of Food Technologists and International Food Information Council” to draw this conclusion?
