Category Archive

Food Tool for the Week: Niches
by Tysha Shay

Today, there aren’t many industries in the U.S. that can claim near double-digit growth, but bottled water has been one of them. And, according to Beverage Marketing, the value-added category is expected to double in the next five years.* With a category this hot, niches are where opportunities for growth lie.

Check out these two niche innovators:

Fortifido - The “first-ever fortified water for pets with real functional benefits.”

Charles Calise, director of innovation for Cott Beverages Inc. North America (which is the manufacturer of Fortifido), said that “as a company, we look to make sure we stay innovative and ahead of the curve…and we know that trends in the pet category quickly follow trends in the human category.” So there you go. All the cool dogs will be lapping up Fortifido this summer. Now if they could just invent a cap that doesn’t require thumbs to open.

Activate Drinks – Vitamin-enhanced waters that don’t get mixed until the consumer is ready to drink them.

Working on the premise that vitamins loose their potency in water over time, Activate Drinks are packaged in bottles featuring an innovative cap, in which the vitamins and other supplements are stored separately to protect their freshness. With a twist of the cap, the ingredients are released into the water.

* Source: Springwise.com & Ad Age

Food IQ is a Marlin strategic partner that understands consumer consumption influencers and applies them to make your business future-ready. They’ve also got a pretty darn interesting blog.

Food Tool Of The Week
by Chef Rob Corliss of FoodIQ


Suntory Time in America.

Here’s the promised Japan download from our pre-show get together at the Nation’s Restaurant News Culinary R&D conference a few weeks ago. One breakout session focused on the impact Japanese cuisine and culture are continuing to have here in the States. In the rapidly blossoming back-and-forth of the global market, figuring out just who has what impact on whom can be like untangling Christmas lights. But there’s definitely an ongoing wave of Japanese influence on menus and trends in the U.S.

Here are just a few thoughts.

Japanese cuisine has influenced foodservice more and more.
4 major influences of Japanese cuisine:

• Sushi crossover (sushi is said to be $2.8 billion/year; supermarkets have led the sushi revolution; 9,000+ Japanese restaurants in 2005)
• TV influence (Iron Chef, and now Iron Chef America)
• Travel experience (US travel to Japan jumped 78% from 1995-2005)
• Globalization

Japanese is slowly appearing on chain menus. Growth will be ingredient-driven.
Biggest Japanese menu ingredients:

• Wasabi
• Miso

Standard menu fare:

• Teriyaki
• Soy sauce
• Tempura
• Hibachi

Trend-setting with Japonais in Chicago.
Their approach:

• Signature sushi
• Fusion cuisine
• Innovative presentations
• Approachable ingredients

Japonais signature desserts:

• Use of ingredients beyond traditional Japanese desserts
• Unexpected flavor combinations and preparations

Japonais signature cocktails:

• Cucumber passion
• Geisha martini
• Pineapple mojito
• Green tea martini

Japonais’s thoughts on future trends for American Japanese dining:

• Push the envelope with ingredients
• Restaurants focusing on one style of preparation
• Japanese fast food

Washoku, by Elizabeth Andoh (cookbook author and Japanese expert).
Washoku means “harmony of food. ” The term is a way of thinking about what we eat and how it can nourish you. There are 5 principles of Washoku:

• 5 colors
• 5 tastes
• 5 ways
• 5 senses
• 5 outlooks

Food IQ is a Marlin strategic partner that understands consumer consumption influencers and applies them to make your business future ready.

Food Tool for the Week
by Chef Rob Corliss of FoodIQ

I just finished up the annual Nation’s Restaurant News Culinary R&D conference. This is a pre-conference conference for chefs, just ahead of MUFSO, which started Sunday. I thought it would be pertinent and appropriate to recap the past two days of education. Hang on to your bullet points.

Fruits are big

• Seasonal
• Varieties
• Sweet-savory combos

The Big 4 Flavors are still the Big 4 Flavors

• Caesar
• Cajun
• BBQ
• Buffalo

The Big 4 Techniques

• Grill
• Roast
• Deep Fry
• Broil/Charbroil

Dayparts

• Breakfast has the highest growth
• Breakfast has high interest and high innovation
• Breakfast can be served all day

Snacking

• Growing by leaps and bounds
• 2–4 p.m. is most popular snack time
• 1/2 of all QSR growth was between 2–4 p.m.
• Evening snacking is growing; 10PM–5 a.m.

Ethnic

• Two approaches: authenticity and small bites

Flatbread

• This is all over the place with mentions, usage and interest

Freshness

• This is a “mega trend”
• Freshness is ranked by consumers in 3 way: 1) flavor, 2) health and 3) value

Impact of gas prices

• Gas prices effect how consumers spend their dollars at home and away from home
• Village Inn ran a unique promo (which highlights the impact of gas prices): All-you-can-eat pancakes for the price of a gallon of gas. I believe this was $3.06.

Green

• This is huge, but encompasses many things. It is environmental, complex and evolving.
• Green can be (to name a few) cage-free, eco-friendly, fair trade, hormone-free, locally grown, natural, organic, sustainable, etc.
• It seems that special interest groups support green more than consumers
• “Localvoire” = person whom eats locally grown food

Healthful

• FoodIQ has touched on this before. We concur and believe that lifestyles are about “healthful” versus healthy or dieting.
• Look at Steak n Shake’s lighter choices program, Hardee’s turkey breakfast club sandwich.

Ingredients

• When you talk about flavor, it comes down to ingredients.
• Ingredients are about flavor, quality, ethnicity, premium and healthful.

Pizza

• Seen in more and more areas
• Subway pizza program, Dunkin Brands breakfast pizza, Panera

Portions

• Operators will continue to look at this and try to figure out future directions.
• TGIF’s right portion, right price program.

Salads

• Are turning up more and more on sandwich builds

Minis

• Mini indulgences are gaining more traction.
• Seasons 52 mini dessert flight; Chili’s sweet shots; Jack in the Box chocolate overload cake, Coco’s mini pork sliders.

Premiumization

• It’s all about quality and callouts that resonate with consumers.

5 Future Directions to Watch

• Smoking (food, that is)
• Bigger, fattier is striking back
• Make & Take operations are proliferating (more of a threat to retail)
• Organics (though they have lessened)
• Are health concerns driving innovation?

A Few Beverage Trends/Thoughts

• 57% of people are willing to try a different cocktail (more so than food, as a drink is less risk and price).
• A major opportunity for impulse buys.
• Suggestive selling, on-premise promos are important.
• Cocktails are very interactive.
• Beer programs are becoming even more regionalized. Beer is for both refreshment and culinary usage.
• Beverage is an occasion-based purchase
• Beverages can tell a story

There’s more—including a fascinating look at how Japanese cuisine and culture are making a huge impact on American menus—but that’s probably enough edible download for one day.

And speaking of downloads, check out the inaugural FoodIQ podcast right here. It was done in conjunction with Nation’s Restaurant News, and it’s all about being future ready (which comes in a lot handier than being past ready).

Food IQ is a Marlin strategic partner that understands consumer consumption influencers and applies them to make your business future ready.

Food Tool for the Week
by Susan Wood of FoodIQ.

Think you can’t stand the chile heat? Here’s a little something that might make you rethink your spice aversion — chile peppers and other spices might actually keep you healthy. Adding spice to a diet can curb hunger, strengthen muscles, improve your mood and potentially cure or lessen a variety of health problems. Here are a couple examples:

According to a study in the British Journal of Nutrition, women who added 2 tsp. of dried red pepper on their food consumed fewer calories in later meals of that day. (So go ahead and add hot sauce to your eggs in the morning. You’re dieting!) Also, adding the Indian spice curcumin aids in muscle repair after heavy exercise, according to researchers at University of South Carolina at Columbia.

Chiles are a hugely popular spice and the second most common spice in the world, following salt. Which is good to know, given all the health benefits associated with chile peppers. A substance called capsaicin causes the heat of chiles and other peppers. This substance is the link to many health benefits (or so we’ve been reading).

Check out these health issues and their associated spicy cures. (Our lawyers would like to remind you that Food IQ does not have a physician on staff, so you should consider this for informational/entertainment purposes only.)

Arthritis
A protein ion receptor binds with capsaicin to manage chronic pain. Capsaicin cream can help east the pain of arthritis when rubbed on stiff joints by eliminating the ability of nerve cells to transmit pain.

High Blood Pressure
The consumption of chile peppers increases peripheral circulation and lowers blood pressure. Peppers which are high in Vitamins A and C and bioflavinoids also help strengthen blood vessel walls, thus helping the walls to be more elastic and better able to adjust to changes in pressure.

Headaches and Migraines
A topical capsaicin cream called Zostrix has been found to relieve the pain of headaches when applied inside the nostril 2x a day. There is speculation that pepper powder when snorted will offer some migraine sufferers relief. Snorting anonymous powders in the ladies room at work, however, has been shown to have serious side effects. Namely, getting fired.

Depression
Chile peppers increase endorphin production, thus potentially elevating your mood.

Flu
Eating hot peppers can potentially reduce the discomfort of the flu because of its promotion of sweating. It also helps to open up clogged breathing passages.

Muscle Pain
Apply a cut-up pepper to the source of the pain for fast (delicious) relief.

Poison Ivy/Poison Oak
Dried peppers mixed with water and applied to the rash will cut the itch and speed the drying process.

Sore Throat
A spray made of 1 T 80 Proof Spirits, 1 T water and 1 tsp hot pepper powder may reduce or eliminate sore throat pain for up to 3 hours.

Ulcers
Most people will say to avoid spicy foods if you have an ulcer, but apparently hot peppers inhibit the growth of the bacteria that causes certain ulcers, so go ahead and have some spice.

Sources: Alyson McNutt English, SELF ; The Chile Man, Sweat ‘N Spice

Food IQ is a Marlin strategic partner that understands consumer consumption influencers and applies them to make your business future-ready.

Food Tool for the Week
by Chef Rob Corliss of FoodIQ.

At FoodIQ, we look at a varied mix of websites, TV shows, magazines and lifestyles in general to identify the next influencers to impact our lives (and thus help position our client’s current and future products). This week, courtesy of Trend Hunter, we found out that sometimes these influencers come from the humble vending machine. Here’s your pre-jump synopsis:

Sixteen of the most innovative vending concepts out there, including machines that will let you do the following in public: straighten your hair, watch commercials in return for a free drink, rent a bike, eat pizza, buy and/or appreciate tiny works of art and, of course, donate to your favorite charity.

Take a look.

Food IQ is a Marlin strategic partner that understands consumer consumption influencers and applies them to make your business future ready.

Food Tool for the Week
by Chef Rob Corliss of FoodIQ.

Here at Food IQ, we love the unique and the bizarre, especially when it’s edible. This week’s Food Tool is an imaginative list of the world’s most unusual restaurants. One of our local favorites even made this international list of the incredible. Lambert’s Cafe, Home of Throwed Rolls (that’s right,“throwed”), is just down the road from Food IQ Central, and a big hit for busloads on their way to/from seeing Yakov down in Branson, as well as ornery kids all across Southwest Missouri.

Check out the whole list. A few more favorites are De Kas, Dinner In the Sky (saw this on TV recently), Urban Pooch, B.E.D., Karne Girabaldi (thirteen seconds? Really?) and Kinderkookkafe. Plus, who can deny the weird, deja vu-laden experience of dining in a restaurant staffed entirely by twins?

Food IQ is a Marlin strategic partner that understands consumer consumption influencers and applies them to make your business future ready.

Food Tool for the Week
by Chef Rob Corliss of FoodIQ.

While traditional product placement refers to integrating a real brand into a fictional environment, an idea that’s gaining traction is to create a fictional brand in a fictional environment and then release it into the real world. Voila! Reverse marketing.

This July, as you’ve probably heard, eleven 7-Eleven locations in the United States and one in Canada were transformed into Kwik-E-Marts as part of a special one-month promotion for the upcoming The Simpsons Movie. It was all part of a campaign to hype the big-screen debut for the long-running television cartoon, which loves to parody convenience stores. (“Who needs the Kwik-E-Mart? I…doooooooo!”)

“We wanted to make sure the movie stands out as a true cultural event this summer,” said Lisa Licht, a marketing vice president at Fox. “It has to stand out from other summer movies and TV shows.” The Fox/7-Eleven deal is an example of a practice called reverse product placement. Instead of just putting products prominently in a movie or TV show, fake goods move from the screen to reality. In some cases, 7-Eleven has contracted with manufacturers of similar products to make their Kwik-E-Mart counterparts. Malt-O-Meal, the Northfield, Minn., cereal maker, conjured up the recipe for KrustyO’s. In others, existing products were simply renamed. One flavor of 7-Eleven’s own Slurpee was sold as “WooHoo! Blue Vanilla” Squishee for the month.

At 7-Eleven, they’re hoping it shows the ubiquitous chain has a trait seen in few corporations — the ability to laugh at themselves. “We thought if you really want to do something different, the idea of actually changing stores into Kwik-E-Marts was over the top but a natural,” said Bobbi Merkel, an executive for 7-Eleven’s advertising agency, FreshWorks, a unit of Omnicom Group Inc. “It shows they get the joke.”

7-Eleven did not do any TV to promote The Simpsons program, but is doing 30-second radio spots. They felt their customers were mobile, so radio made the most sense. 7-Eleven executives had surveys showing a strong overlap between their customers and fans of the show and had hoped to hear the sound of cash registers ringing.

And ring they have. Since the promotion started July 2, more than 960,000 cans of Buzz Cola have been guzzled up. Perhaps fans were washing down their pink Sprinklicious donuts, the type favored by Homer Simpson. The convenience store chain has sold more than 880,400 of the donuts nationally in the past three weeks. The company has also sold 1.1 million Simpsons Squishee-Slurpee cups. In total, the convenience store chain has sold more than 3.4 million units of Simpsons merchandise and generated 64.3 million clicks on its web site. The promotion ended July 31.

Click here to view a store.

Other recent examples of reverse product placement include Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, which spun out of the Harry Potter books and movies, and Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. restaurants, which opened after the movie “Forrest Gump.” The video industry is seeing a surge of interest with reverse product placement, as companies are seeing the potential dollars, exposure and consumer connections a strategic promotion could bring their business.

Food IQ is a Marlin strategic partner that understands consumer consumption influencers and applies them to make your business future ready.

Food Tool for the Week
by Chef Rob Corliss of FoodIQ.

This week finds me wanting to reflect and write about something I find quite intriguing, with its continuous marketing evolution and commanding presence. Water: we all need it to sustain life; we cook with it, wash with it and sip it; some just more expensively, inquisitively and acutely than others.

Most of us don’t give water much thought. Sure, we see the various selections in our hotel room, grocery stores and restaurant visits, but have we truly experienced water at its pinnacle? I was in the same mindset, until viewing a web video featuring the eclectic café and water bar Via Genova in West Chester New York.

Via Genova is the proud home of 80 waters and has been generating east coast “foodie and non-foodie” buzz from its diverse offerings and featured $55 bottle of water called Bling H2O. That’s right, two 5’s and less than 1 liter. This water comes in a frosted bottle sparkling with Swarovski crystals (choose from gold or blue). The ritzy refreshment is bottled at a Tennessee spring and purified in a nine-step process that includes ozone, ultraviolet treatment and micro-filtration. By the way, this is not even their most elite water offering.

The attention to detail and passion for the water selection is outstanding. Here is a quick Via Genova recap:

• They offer waters from around the world, which resonate with multiple cultures and tastes.
• All of the waters have natural purity and reflect new and ancient offerings.
• Selections (by the bottle or case) include glass, plastic, still, sparkling and naturally carbonated.
• Water varieties may include 10,000 BC, volcanic water, glacial water, oxygen rich “baby” water, medicinal spa waters and the preferred water of the Hollywood stars.
• 10,000 BC comes in a corked, foil wrapped glass bottle – like a fine wine.
• Water consultation appointments, anyone? Water experts are available for wedding and event planning.
• They pair their food menu with the luxury waters (even water with salad). Water paired with food…now that touches a chef’s heart.
• The water bottles look more like collector’s items.
• They have been featured on Yahoo, ABC and will be on NBC and Forbes to name a few.
• They recommend keeping your water out of sunlight and serving it at 55°F.
• Interesting to note is that NO water is ever served with ice, as this would ruin it and be blasphemous!

Who knew water had such a rich history? This is hydration at its finest.

More food for thought.

Last year, Americans spent more on bottled water than on iPods and movie tickets. That equates to a whopping $15 billion.

Food IQ is a Marlin strategic partner that understands consumer consumption influencers and applies them to make your business future ready.