Tag Archives: brand

Idea Soup

Menu Engineering

We live in a world of brands, pitches, advertising, promotions, PR, consumer research, product placement, focus groups, and 24/7 spin. So, it should come as no surprise that even that ubiquitous and utilitarian listing of food and drink items from your local restaurant — the menu — would come in for some 21st century marketing treatment.

Fast food chains have been optimizing the look and feel of their menus for years, often right down to the font, color (artificial) and placement of menu items. Now, many upscale restaurants are following suit. Some call it menu engineering.

From the Guardian:

It’s not always easy trying to read a menu while hungry like the wolf, woozy from aperitif and exchanging pleasantries with a dining partner. The eyes flit about like a pinball, pinging between set meal options, side dishes and today’s specials. Do I want comforting treats or something healthy? What’s cheap? Will I end up bitterly coveting my companion’s dinner? Is it immoral to fuss over such petty, first-world dilemmas? Oh God, the waiter’s coming over.

Why is it so hard to decide what to have? New research from Bournemouth University shows that most menus crowbar in far more dishes than people want to choose from. And when it comes to choosing food and drink, as an influential psychophysicist by the name of Howard Moskowitz once said: “The mind knows not what the tongue wants.”

Malcolm Gladwell cites an interesting nugget from his work for Nescafé. When asked what kind of coffee they like, most Americans will say: “a dark, rich, hearty roast”. But actually, only 25-27% want that. Most prefer weak, milky coffee. Judgement is clouded by aspiration, peer pressure and marketing messages.

The burden of choice

Perhaps this is part of the joy of a tasting or set menu – the removal of responsibility. And maybe the recent trend for tapas-style sharing plates has been so popular because it relieves the decision-making pressure if all your eggs are not in one basket. Is there a perfect amount of choice?

Bournemouth University’s new study has sought to answer this very question. “We were trying to establish the ideal number of starters, mains and puddings on a menu,” says Professor John Edwards. The study’s findings show that restaurant customers, across all ages and genders, do have an optimum number of menu items, below which they feel there’s too little choice and above which it all becomes disconcerting. In fast-food joints, people wanted six items per category (starters, chicken dishes, fish, vegetarian and pasta dishes, grills and classic meat dishes, steaks and burgers, desserts), while in fine dining establishments, they preferred seven starters and desserts, and 10 main courses, thank you very much.

Nightmare menu layouts

Befuddling menu design doesn’t help. A few years back, the author William Poundstone rather brilliantly annotated the menu from Balthazar in New York to reveal the marketing bells and whistles it uses to herd customers into parting with the maximum amount of cash. Professor Brian Wansink, author of Slim by Design, Mindless Eating Solutions to Every Day Life, has extensively researched menu psychology, or as he puts it, menu engineering. “What ends up initially catching the eye,” he says, “has an unfair advantage over anything a person sees later on.” There’s some debate about how people’s eyes naturally travel around menus, but Wansink reckons “we generally scan the menu in a z-shaped fashion starting at the top-left hand corner.” Whatever the pattern, though, we’re easily interrupted by items being placed in boxes, next to pictures or icons, bolded or in a different colour.

The language of food

The Oxford experimental psychologist Charles Spence has an upcoming review paper on the effect the name of a dish has on diners. “Give it an ethnic label,” he says, “such as an Italian name, and people will rate the food as more authentic.” Add an evocative description, and people will make far more positive comments about a dish’s appeal and taste. “A label directs a person’s attention towards a feature in a dish, and hence helps bring out certain flavours and textures,” he says.

But we are seeing a backlash against the menu cliches (drizzled, homemade, infused) that have arisen from this thinking. For some time now, at Fergus Henderson’s acclaimed restaurant, St John, they have let the ingredients speak for themselves, in simple lists. And if you eat at one of Russell Norman’s Polpo group of restaurants in London, you will see almost no adjectives (or boxes and other “flim-flam”, as he calls it), and he’s doing a roaring trade. “I’m particularly unsympathetic to florid descriptions,” he says.

However, Norman’s menus employ their own, subtle techniques to reel diners in. Take his flagship restaurant Polpo’s menu. Venetian dishes are printed on Italian butchers’ paper, which goes with the distressed, rough-hewn feel of the place. I don’t use a huge amount of Italian,” he says, “but I occasionally use it so that customers say ‘what is that?'” He picks an easy-to-pronounce word like suppli (rice balls), to start a conversation between diner and waiter.

Read the entire article here.

Image courtesy of Multyshades.

Environs, tD

From Finely Textured Beef to Soylent Pink

Blame corporate euphemisms and branding for the obfuscation of everyday things. More sinister yet, is the constant re-working of names for our ever increasingly processed foodstuffs. Only last year as several influential health studies pointed towards the detrimental health effects of high fructose corn syrup (HFC) did the food industry act, but not by removing copious amounts of the addictive additive from many processed foods. Rather, the industry attempted to re-brand HFC as “corn sugar”. And, now on to the battle over “soylent pink” also known as “pink slim”.

[div class=attrib]From Slate:[end-div]

What do you call a mash of beef trimmings that have been chopped and then spun in a centrifuge to remove the fatty bits and gristle? According to the government and to the company that invented the process, you call it lean finely textured beef. But to the natural-food crusaders who would have the stuff removed from the nation’s hamburgers and tacos, the protein-rich product goes by another, more disturbing name: Pink slime.

The story of this activist rebranding—from lean finely textured beef to pink slime—reveals just how much these labels matter. It was the latter phrase that, for example, birthed the great ground-beef scare of 2012. In early March, journalists at both the Daily and at ABC began reporting on a burger panic: Lax rules from the U.S. Department of Agriculture allowed producers to fill their ground-beef packs with a slimy, noxious byproduct—a mush the reporters called unsanitary and without much value as a food. Coverage linked back to a New York Times story from 2009 in which the words pink slime had appeared in public for the first time in a quote from an email written by a USDA microbiologist who was frustrated at a decision to leave the additive off labels for ground meat.

The slimy terror spread in the weeks that followed. Less than a month after ABC’s initial reports, almost a quarter million people had signed a petition to get pink slime out of public school cafeterias. Supermarket chains stopped selling burger meat that contained it—all because of a shift from four matter-of-fact words to two visceral ones.

And now that rebranding has become the basis for a 263-page lawsuit. Last month, Beef Products Inc., the first and principal producer of lean/pink/textured/slimy beef, filed a defamation claim against ABC (along with that microbiologist and a former USDA inspector) in a South Dakota court. The company says the network carried out a malicious and dishonest campaign to discredit its ground-beef additive and that this work had grievous consequences. When ABC began its coverage, Beef Products Inc. was selling 5 million pounds of slime/beef/whatever every week. Then three of its four plants were forced to close, and production dropped to 1.6 million pounds. A weekly profit of $2.3 million had turned into a $583,000 weekly loss.

At Reuters, Steven Brill argued that the suit has merit. I won’t try to comment on its legal viability, but the details of the claim do provide some useful background about how we name our processed foods, in both industry and the media. It turns out the paste now known within the business as lean finely textured beef descends from an older, less purified version of the same. Producers have long tried to salvage the trimmings from a cattle carcass by cleaning off the fat and the bacteria that often congregate on these leftover parts. At best they could achieve a not-so-lean class of meat called partially defatted chopped beef, which USDA deemed too low in quality to be a part of hamburger or ground meat.

By the late 1980s, though, Eldon Roth of Beef Products Inc. had worked out a way to make those trimmings a bit more wholesome. He’d found a way, using centrifuges, to separate the fat more fully. In 1991, USDA approved his product as fat reduced beef and signed off on its use in hamburgers. JoAnn Smith, a government official and former president of the National Cattlemen’s Association, signed off on this “euphemistic designation,” writes Marion Nestle in Food Politics. (Beef Products, Inc. maintains that this decision “was not motivated by any official’s so-called ‘links to the beef industry.’ “) So 20 years ago, the trimmings had already been reformulated and rebranded once.

But the government still said that fat reduced beef could not be used in packages marked “ground beef.” (The government distinction between hamburger and ground beef is that the former can contain added fat, while the latter can’t.) So Beef Products Inc. pressed its case, and in 1993 it convinced the USDA to approve the mash for wider use, with a new and better name: lean finely textured beef. A few years later, Roth started killing the microbes on his trimmings with ammonia gas and got approval to do that, too. With government permission, the company went on to sell several billion pounds of the stuff in the next two decades.

In the meantime, other meat processors started making something similar but using slightly different names. AFA Foods (which filed for bankruptcy in April after the recent ground-beef scandal broke), has referred to its products as boneless lean beef trimmings, a more generic term. Cargill, which decontaminates its meat with citric acid in place of ammonia gas, calls its mash of trimmings finely textured beef.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Industrial ground beef. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]