Category Archives: food

August 24, 2018 · 9:12 am

Crying To The Kitchen

This Foodie Friday, I want to write about something that’s been on my mind for the last month. It was about a month ago that I made my initial – but definitely not my last – visit to Skylight Inn. If you’re not familiar with the place, it’s the premiere BBQ joint in North Carolina and certainly one of the best in the country. It specializes in whole hog, eastern North Carolina BBQ, which is chopped meat combined with a vinegar and pepper sauce. It’s simple food but incredibly difficult to do well, and very few anywhere do it as well as this place.

Why has it been on my mind for a month? Because I had an experience which has only happened once before in my life. The food was so unbelievably good that it brought me to tears. I’m not kidding. The last time this happened was in Venice and my poor daughter had to endure me running into the kitchen to hug the chef while weeping praise in my bad Italian. While I didn’t run to the pit this time, I did run back for another plate.

The question I’ve been asking myself since my Skylight visit, besides when I can find the time to go back, is what other consumer experiences have brought about a similar reaction. I couldn’t think of any, which is unfortunate. While I realize that there is something multi-sensory about food (we see it, we smell it, we touch it, we taste it), I think it’s an interesting question for any business to ponder. How can what we offer prompt an overwhelmingly good feeling in our customers? How do we get them to be thinking about their interaction with us a month or more after it takes place? How do we instill that goal into every person and every touchpoint that engages with a customer or potential customer?

We may never send our consumers running to the kitchen weeping with joy but it’s not a bad goal to have, is it?

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , , , ,

August 17, 2018 · 8:17 am

Pushing Addiction

Foodie Friday! I came across a piece recently that got me thinking. Even though it’s food-related (or we wouldn’t be discussing it today!) I think it touches upon a subject that is common across other areas of business. Let’s see what you think.

The article was in The Guardian and it seeks an answer to the question “why are we so fat?” The author had stumbled upon a picture from 1976. It showed beachgoers and the first thing he noticed was that there weren’t any fat people. He wondered why into his social media channels and every answer he got was wrong, much to his surprise. It wasn’t because we eat more or are less active (thanks, Internet) or due to antibiotic use or less exercise or even due to chemicals in our food. What seems to be the cause is:

While our direct purchases of sugar have sharply declined, the sugar we consume in drinks and confectionery is likely to have rocketed (there are purchase numbers only from 1992, at which point they were rising rapidly. Perhaps, as we consumed just 9kcal a day in the form of drinks in 1976, no one thought the numbers were worth collecting.) In other words, the opportunities to load our food with sugar have boomed. As some experts have long proposed, this seems to be the issue.

The main reason there is sugar in damn near everything (start reading labels more carefully if you don’t believe that) is that sugar is addictive. It defeats our natural appetite regulators. We aren’t eating more but we’re eating lower quality and getting more of our calories in the form of sugar and the food producers are doing this knowing that it will trick us into eating more than we need. They want us addicted and constantly hungry. We eat more; they sell more.

You think food folks are the only ones doing this? Tobacco manufacturers are cited in the article as doing pretty much the same thing. You might be doing it as well if you’re constantly focusing on “engagement”. The job of the product people at Facebook and others is to get you to keep coming back for another dish. All those little alerts on your phone are the digital equivalent of your gut saying “I’m hungry – feed me!”

If there is anyone in your business whose job it is to break down consumers’ self-regulation, you might want to think about if you want to be in the same business as a drug peddler. Many food companies are pushing an ultimately fatal addiction. So are many tech companies. Are you?

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Reality checks, Thinking Aloud

Tagged as , , , ,

August 10, 2018 · 4:04 pm

Blockheaded?

This Foodie Friday we’re going to have a think about blockchain. If you’re thinking that “food” and “blockchain” don’t relate as well as, say, peanut butter and jelly, apparently you’re underinformed.

If you’re unfamiliar with blockchain, you probably ought to do something to learn about it since it’s weaving its way into everything these days. Basically, it’s a list of records called blocks which are linked to one another cryptographically in a publicly available ledger. It makes tracking things easy and it’s an extremely secure method for doing so.

Applying blockchain to food is happening. Think about a chicken you find at the market. What if you could scan the package and know everything about the contents? When the bird was born and where, what its diet was, if it’s GMO-free, etc., when and where it was processed, packed and shipped, ad infinitum. Cool, right? It’s also possible with food that routinely gets mislabeled as something else: fish. It makes everything traceable, which is a big help with respect to food safety.

I see two issues. One is the cost. Think about what’s happened in digital advertising. We’ve layered on technology to buy and sell ads and at the same time, we’ve added a huge layer of cost. Blockchain in the food area won’t be cheap, I’m sure. We’ve also made the entire industry less transparent, and while blockchain is just arriving in the ad world, it points to the fact that there are a lot of bad actors out there.

This points to the bigger issue which is an old, familiar one: GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out. Who is to say that the information in the system is accurate? The data may say one thing while the truth might be quite different. Criminals will learn how to cheat the blockchain just as they have learned how to game the ad business out of billions of dollars every year. While we will be able to trace food we won’t be able to tell if it’s been adulterated without a robust system of inspection.

Do I think this technology belongs in the food business? Probably – the benefits of things such as pinpointing shelf-life or finding the sources of bacterial outbreaks quickly are huge. I guess I wonder about the cost – at what price will this all happen? Will the benefits only accrue to those who can afford to pay for the food that’s blockchain certified? What do you think?

Leave a comment

Filed under food, What's Going On

Tagged as , , , , ,