Kraft Foods Inc. to Cut Salt in its North American Foods
(AP/1010 Wins) Kraft Foods Inc. said Wednesday that it will cut the salt in its products that are sold in North America by an average of 10 percent over the next two years to appeal to health-conscious consumers. (Click HERE for full story)
Walmart Replaces Cut SKUs, Recommits to Price Rollbacks
(Submitted by Philip Cop, Marketing Director, Chiba, Japan)
(Store Brand Decisions) Walmart is accelerating its price rollback program and replacing some of the products it cut during aggressive SKU rationalization because some of the cuts cost the retail giant valuable market baskets and shopping trips.(Click HERE for full story)
Opinion: Old Is the New Young
(Brandweek) Planners, account directors and researchers are typically busy people. Under a barrage of internal and client demands, it's hard for us not to fall into shorthand approaches sometimes. For instance, when targeting different age groups. But it's time for a wake-up call. (Click HERE for full story)
For Old Labels, a Little Zest
(The Wall Street Journal) Recipe developers at Campbell Soup Co. spent months testing and tasting before reaching a decision: "Chicken With Sun-Dried Tomatoes" was safe enough to print on the back of a can of cream-of-mushroom soup.
Some of the most beloved American dishes started as back-of-the-package recipes, designed in corporate test kitchens to sell more cans of soup, bags of noodles and boxes of cake mix. Campbell, for example, says 30 million "Green Bean Casseroles," a recipe created in 1955, are made using its cream-of-mushroom soup between Thanksgiving and Christmas each year.
America's increasingly sophisticated palate, influenced by TV cooking shows, celebrity chefs and gourmet ingredients, presents a problem. Food companies need to figure out how to update their recipes to entice today's more ambitious cooks to use products that might otherwise sit on the shelf for months. The recipes must make cooks feel like they're doing more than just adding eggs to a mix, but not use so many ingredients to require a special trip to the store. If they get too trendy, they risk alienating their core consumers.
With the sun-dried tomatoes recipe, "we wanted to be pushing, but pushing gently," says Jane Freiman, who oversees the Campbell test kitchen at the company's Camden, N.J., headquarters. "We are looking for familiar, with a twist."
Cooks can now make "Sea-Salted Smoky Almond Bark" from the back of Nestlé's Chocolatier baking bars, serve up "Bruschetta Chicken Bake" from Kraft Food Inc.'s Stove Top Stuffing box and whip up "Chai Latte Cupcakes" using a recipe from General Mills Inc.'s Betty Crocker Web site. Betty Crocker is also experimenting with using coffee in a meat marinade.
"People have become way more adventuresome," says Roz O'Hearn, a Nestlé spokeswoman. "Even in small towns, there are a lot of flavors available today that were not found in supermarkets 20 years ago."
For a recipe to make the back of the package, Nestlé tracks usage on its Web site, where the company can measure the popularity of "Rosemary-Kissed Chocolate Satin Tart" or "Chocolate Shortbread Olé," which has cayenne pepper. Nestlé also logs comments from customer emails and calls to its toll-free line.
Many food companies have had trouble increasing revenue. Overall U.S. soup sales at Campbell fell 8% from November through January, over the year-ago period, and condensed-soup sales were flat. Revenue at Kraft grew by less than half a percent in the fourth quarter, over the previous year's period.
Ms. Freiman, who has a degree in home economics, scours food magazines, watches cooking programs and scans restaurant menus in search of ideas.
Many trends are too ambitious for the woman Campbell sees as its prime consumer: a woman, age 35 to 54, with a household income between $20,000 and $120,000. She cooks dinner three to four times a week. She doesn't have the time, inclination or skill to experiment with unfamiliar ingredients or techniques, but she still wants recipes that will reliably please her family, the company says.
"If it requires a culinary degree to execute, nobody's going to bother," says Kathy Strahs, who writes about back-of-the-package recipes on her blog, Cookingontheside.com.
Ms. Strahs says she prefers recipes that involve more effort than simply mixing three ingredients in a bowl. In that sense, sophisticated label recipes are a welcome change. But, she adds, simplicity is essential. One of her favorite recipes of late is for "Vanilla Glazed Baby Carrots" from the back of a Trader Joe's carrots bag.
Readers are "a lot of people like myself, mostly women, but people who are looking to cook—I don't want to say simple—but accessible, recipes," says Ms. Strahs, a 35-year-old in San Diego.
With that consumer in mind, Ms. Freiman and her team began the quest for label recipes last February. They winnowed down more than 50 options—some developed for the package and some for the Web site—to 10 finalists.
In early April, the recipe team joined condensed-soup brand managers for a tasting in the Campbell's test kitchen, a replica of a home kitchen housed inside its headquarters. The kitchen is really six kitchens in one, each set up with different appliances so recipes can be tested under varied conditions. It's decorated in red and white with cheerful Campbell's ads hanging on the walls and a large table with stools for group tastings.
The group was unsure about "Chicken With Sun-Dried Tomatoes"—boneless, skinless chicken breasts with a sauce of cream-of-mushroom-soup, basil, shallots, red-wine vinegar and sun-dried tomatoes and served atop egg noodles. Chicken is the most popular search term on CampbellsKitchen.com, but the group was divided on sun-dried tomatoes.
"Label recipes are weeknight meals," says Cathy Marschean Spivak, another Campbell's Kitchen group manager. "Most involve rice or pasta. The real estate is small, so there are few ingredients and few steps."
In May, Ms. Freiman and her team sent recipes to consumers to try at home, asking if they liked the taste, found the ingredients affordable, and whether they would make the dishes again.
Testers liked a fajita recipe but didn't think cheddar cheese soup was a necessary ingredient. Another recipe for beef short ribs—a cut that was popular with chefs and cooking magazines—called for braising liquid made with French-onion soup and beer.
"Beer in cooking was very trendy," Ms. Freiman says. "It looked like beer was the new wine, and it might be the right time for this recipe."
But testers said they had to make a special trip to buy beer. Short ribs were unfamiliar and some consumers thought they were too expensive.
few trends the team had identified did hold up in tests. Consumers liked the burger cooked in French onion soup, an idea that sprang from the current taste for gussied-up hamburgers. A beef-and-mushroom lasagna recipe that uses cream-of-mushroom soup instead of béchamel sauce was another winner. Another favorite was the chicken with sun-dried tomatoes.
"It's different, but not too different," says Vishal Shah, associate brand manager for condensed cooking soups. "It's not too expensive, and it uses chicken."
In the end, "Chicken With Sun-Dried Tomatoes" stood out because the gourmet twist was in the title and there were more ingredients—11 instead of the four to seven used in a typical recipe.
The recipe will appear on soup cans starting in August. Sales of cream-of-mushroom soup, which costs between $1.29 to $1.39, usually take off in September as cold weather approaches, and the company hopes to see growth in the business from the recipe promotion.
Even now, some at Campbell worry that putting a "trendy" recipe on the label of its top-selling brand will turn off home cooks. "With sun-dried tomatoes, we know it isn't something people stock in their pantries, but are they willing to go out and purchase it?" asks Randy Beck, a Campbell's Kitchen associate brand manager.
U.S. drinks business seen perking up in 2010
(Reuters) The North American beverage sector has started to see some weak trends reverse, but pricey drinks are not likely to see the lofty growth that they had before the recession, an analyst said on Wednesday. (Click HERE for full story.)
MillerCoors to Test a New Beer
(The Wall Street Journal) Brewing giant MillerCoors LLC plans to test-market a new beer called Batch 19, which is based on a pre-Prohibition recipe, as part of several initiatives aimed at rejuvenating sales in the sluggish U.S. market.
MillerCoors will start selling the new brew next month in draft in bars and restaurants in Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco and Washington, said Peter Swinburn, chief executive of Molson Coors Brewing Co., which co-owns MillerCoors.
Mr. Swinburn said in an interview that Batch 19—named for the year, 1919, before Prohibition began—is designed to attract consumers looking for "a true, authentic, original beer." He said Keith Villa, master brewer at MillerCoors, found a recipe in the archives of Coors Brewing Co. in Golden, Colo., that was used to make one of its beers before alcohol was banned in the U.S. for a 13-year period. "It's the beer that got beer banned," Mr. Swinburn joked.
MillerCoors, a joint venture of Molson Coors and London's SABMiller PLC that was formed in 2008, is rolling out new products and packaging styles amid one of the biggest slumps in demand the industry has faced in years.
Shipments of beer in the U.S. fell about 2% last year. Miller Lite's shipments fell 6.5% and Coors Light's rose 0.8%, according to Beer Marketer's Insights newsletter.
MillerCoors, the second-largest U.S. beer maker by sales after Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, said previously that it would expand to the whole country its $20, refrigerator-friendly draft-beer systems for Miller Lite and Coors Light. It also has said it plans this year to unveil a new type of bottle for Miller Lite that is designed with grooves inside the neck. The new bottle, when poured, will "actually increase the aroma" of the brew and "explode the flavor more," Mr. Swinburn said.
Coors Light has been a bright spot for MillerCoors, but it has struggled to find a way to revive Miller Lite, which has faced declining sales for much of the past decade. "It just takes time given where the brand was," Mr. Swinburn said. "Yes, we're committed to the brand. Yes, we think we'll get it right."
MillerCoors, based in Chicago, is trying to be innovative in a crowded market in which new products have shown a mixed track record. MillerCoors made a hit of MGD 64, a light beer with just 64 calories, and Anheuser did so with Bud Light Lime, a lime-infused version of the nation's top-selling brew. Some other beers, such as lime-and-salt-flavored Miller Chill, have done well initially but then foundered.
Molson Coors has a 42% stake in MillerCoors. Its other big markets are Canada and the U.K. In February, it said its fourth-quarter profit more than doubled to $222.1 million as net sales jumped 11% to $820.8 million. Sales volume in the U.S. and Canada has been down in recent months because of high unemployment and penny-pinching by consumers.
Mr. Swinburn said Molson Coors is seeing some encouraging signs for new products it recently rolled out in Canada, including a 67-calorie version of Molson Canadian, but "it's really, really early."
He also said the beer giant, which has dual headquarters in Montreal and Denver, would consider more acquisitions, but only if they meet stringent criteria, such as adding to Molson Coors's per-share earnings in the short-term.
Mr. Swinburn said the company was encouraged by the growth of Coors Light in China, and might look into buying a brewery in China or starting its own. Coors Light is currently brewed under contract in China by China Resources Snow Breweries, which is 49%-owned by SABMiller.
"We will look to, when the time is right, underpin that volume because it's getting to the stage now where the margin that we would enjoy from producing it ourselves would justify a certain level of capital investment," Mr. Swinburn said. "We've painstakingly built that market over eight years, city by city."
The company sells Coors Light in 42 cities in China and has about 400 employees in the country. Sales of the brand are growing about 30% each year, though off a small base.
Today's AM Edition
The new consumer frugality