Category Archives: food

October 4, 2019 · 2:01 pm

McRib And You

The big news this Foodie Friday is the return of the McRib sandwich. It’s only going to be around for a limited time and only at select McDonald’s stores (which is about 10,000 of them). If you’ve never had one of these babies, it’s a pork patty formed to look like pork ribs (but boneless) on a bun with pickles and onions and a fair amount fo a sweet barbeque sauce.

I’d be very dishonest if I said this concoction appalls me since I’m a fan of the thing, or at least I was before I both quit eating a lot of carbs (45g in this baby) and lived in a place where real BBQ pork sandwiches are easier to find than a decent deli. When it hit the market back in 1981, it was a dud. It’s been released every so often since into a limited number of outlets and it sells out.

There is something any business can learn from the McRib or the pumpkin spice craze at Starbucks or Dunkin’. It’s the smart tactic of giving customers a reason to come back. There is a restaurant here in town that I patronize on a regular basis. The food is quite good but there are rarely any specials. It gets boring, frankly. I’ve tried pretty much everything on the menu. Something special might get me to make a special trip as opposed to the every 10 days or so when I want a really good burger.

There is something else. Here is a quote from a marketing professor at Northwestern:

For fast-food chains in particular, which rely on familiarity, holiday items can offer consumers some variety. “You need consistency because that’s the brand mantra,” said Chernev. “But no matter how much you like something, consuming something different … increases the enjoyment of what you consumed before.” Chernev says it’s a neat marketing ploy: Although a specialty item may be exciting on its own, it can also remind consumers how much they like the basics.
In my mind, it’s like how being on vacation often reminds you of how much you like being home if that makes any sense. In any event, every business needs to think about how a special product promotion (vs. a sale price promotion) can provide an overall lift to the business.  Got it?

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September 27, 2019 · 3:15 pm

What A Waste

In addition to it being Foodie Friday, it’s also trash day. Every Thursday night I wheel the trash and recycling bins out to the curb to await their pick-up Friday morning. That also means that each Thursday I go through the fridge and toss any food that has reached its expiration date or any leftovers that didn’t manage to get consumed after they were cooked sometime in the previous 5 days. In all candor, it’s one of the more frustrating things for me since I absolutely HATE to waste food.

Yes, I was of the generation who had parents that reminded us that children were starving in Europe (which they actually were as the continent rebuilt after WWII) and elsewhere but I don’t think that’s really what bothers me. It’s also not the feeling like I’m tossing cash money into the trash bin although that in effect is exactly what I’m doing. I just don’t like to waste anything. That’s one of the many reasons I’ve always admired Jacques Pepin who would always demonstrate how to make use of every scrap of food on his cooking shows.

This from a Food52 piece:

The average American ends up throwing away a full 103 pounds of spoiled food each year, according to a recent survey of 2,000 people conducted by OnePoll for Bosch home appliances. That works out to an average of 4 items a week, or the weekly equivalent of $53.81. All told, per the survey results, the average American adult will waste 6,180 pounds of food in their lifetime.

Food isn’t the only area where we waste perfectly good things either. Plastic bags are a plague, for example. I’m surprised stores still offer them or don’t hand out reusable bags. My supermarket sells big reusable bags at cost and will replace them for free if they rip. Trader Joe’s does something similar. It’s good for the customer, good for the environment, and good for the business since they don’t have to purchase as many single-use bags.

There is a lot of waste in business, of course, and I don’t just mean single-use bags. We produce reports that no one reads just because the report has always been produced. We don’t look at the analytics of what we’re doing on the web and in social media to understand if the bang is commiserated with the buck – the time and effort – we spend making those platforms hum.  We waste time in endless group email chains to solve a problem when one brief meeting would serve to fix the whole thing.

Be waste averse. Not just in your fridge but in your office as well. Your wallet and your CFO will thank you!

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September 20, 2019 · 2:58 pm

Variations On A Pimento

Happy Foodie Friday! Years ago I started serving pimento cheese as one of the snacks I had available as guests arrived for Thanksgiving. I can’t recall what started me down this path. As a Yankee, it was not a food that I’d eaten other than hearing about it being offered as a sandwich on-site during the annual Masters Tournament. The guests liked it and I served it thereafter. In fact, it became a household staple of sorts.

Little did I know at the time that I’d end up here in the South where pimento cheese is as common as mosquitos. What I didn’t understand, however, is how its use is as widespread as it is nor the seemingly endless number of variations, both personal and commercial. Everyone’s mama makes THE BEST pimento cheese and you can go from tailgate to tailgate at any pregame and find out just how different a single food can be. Of course, one look in any southern supermarket will tell you the same thing. There are dozens of brands and often several flavors (jalapeno pimento cheese, anyone?) from each brand.

As with many things southern, pimento cheese was born in the north and moved here. This is a terrific history of the stuff from Serious Eats but in a nutshell

The original version started out as something quite different: the marriage of cream cheese and canned pimentos, two popular and newly-available products of the industrial food trade.

It evolved into the basic grated cheese (usually cheddar), mayo (Duke’s, please) and pimentos recipe over time. The variations upon that basic theme are endless. I caused a bit of a stir when I presented my variation on the theme by adding green onions and Worcestershire sauce to mine, using two types of cheese. A friend ridiculed me until the friend’s mama tried it and loved it. So much for my Noo Yawk tinkering!

This is the third time I’m writing about pimento cheese and yet each of the posts has been different. Why I raise this topic here at all in a business blog is that it reminds me that not everything we do in business has to be completely new or innovative. Just taking something that’s basically good as is and making it a little better can be a win. Think about how Apple made the mp3 player better or Amazon transformed online shopping. eBay made a better auction engine and the Japanese saved their economy by taking things that were developed elsewhere and improving them.  It’s not finding the needle in the haystack that transforms your business. It’s often figuring out how to make the haystack itself just a bit better.

I’ve yet to sample any pimento cheese here that is made in a way that’s delicious but incomprehensible. Most of the time, it’s a variation that is smart and understandable and makes you wonder why you didn’t try that. I think a lot of the great things in business are just like that, don’t you?

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