There is money in food

The first book by Michael Pollan that I read was called the Food Rules and could be summarised in seven words: Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants. His latest book Cooked is a banquet of ideas with lavish digressions and an amazing cast of real life characters as he explores how people cook with fire, with water, with air and with earth.

“People call things cooking today that would roll their grandmother in her grave,” food industry market researcher Harry Balzer tells Pollan. “Like heating up a can of food or microwaving a frozen pizza.”

And this idea is why local shop owners find themselves in the food business.

Balzer goes on to say: “A hundred years ago chicken for dinner meant going out and catching, killing, plucking and gutting a chicken. Do you know anyone who still does that? It would be considered crazy! Well that’s exactly how cooking will seem to your grandchildren. Like sewing or darning socks-something people used to do when they had no other choice. Get over it!”

Balzer’s company now defines making a sandwich as cooking (it is the most popular meal in America) and washing a head of lettuce and pouring dressing on it as cooking. But not microwaving a pizza. Today Americans spend 27 minutes a day on food preparation and another four minutes cleaning up.

And this is why local shop owners find themselves in the food business.

Pollan is on a crusade. He observes that Americans have abandoned the kitchen “handing the preparation of most of our meals to the food industry” yet spend so much of their time watching people cook it on television.

“First we cooked our food and then our food cooked us,” he writes. “Corporations cook very differently from how people do. Industrial cooking has taken a substantial toll on our health and well-being.”

However Pollan uses this starting point to show how many people now cook because they want to. “My wager in Cooked is that the best way to recover the reality of food, to return it to a proper place in our lives, is by attempting to master the physical processes by which it has traditionally been made.”

Reading Cooked will help both types of retailers: the ones who want to know what type of processed foods to offer and the ones who want to provide shoppers with the ingredients they need to cook from scratch. Understanding how cooking works is to understand how people work.

In his chapter on fire he visits hog roasts around America and meets Ed Mitchell, a famous chef. How did Ed Mitchell get started? His parents ran a corner shop in Wilson, North Carolina and after his father died Ed drove his mother to the shop daily. Business was bad. One day she made $19, mainly from food stamps. To cheer her up he said he would come the next day and do a barbecue lunch.

“While we were enjoying our barbecue someone came into the grocery store wanting some hot dogs. But when the man saw the pail of barbecue he said ‘Mrs Mitchell y’all got barbecue too?’ Mother looked over at me. I had my mouth full so I couldn't speak but I nodded. I figured what she needed was to make some money so yeah sell the man some barbecue. She made the man a couple of sandwiches and he left.

“When I came back that evening to escort her home Mama was all bubbly. ‘I made some money today,’ she said. ‘I sold all that barbecue.’

“As we were locking up that night a stranger came to the front door. I thought maybe the man was here to rob us. [He asked if we had more barbecue.] ‘No we don’t have no more today but we’ll have some more tomorrow.’ And that is how Ed Mitchell got into the barbecue business.”

The money can be out there. Cooked may help you find it and you may find yourself in the food business.
For more go to www.betterretailing.com.

Digital disruption in the UK wholesale space

“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...

Five things to learn from Waitrose

Interim results from Waitrose this week confirm the industry figures that show the upmarket supermarkets and convenience stores are leading the market (albeit from a 4.2% share according to Kantar Worldpanel). Charlie Mayfield, the chairman, highlights many reasons for its success and here are five that local retailers should consider. Marketing works. Waitrose claims that more than 370,000 extra customer transactions resulted from its spring tie-up with Delia Smith and Heston Blumenthal in the first eight weeks. This autumn, it launches a cookery school. Engaged shoppers are more profitable shoppers! You need a value offering. 17 per cent of Waitrose sales are from its value range, called essentials. Momentum works. Its strategy is to bring Waitrose to more people in more places. It invested in 75,000 square feet of extra selling space in the first half of this year, including three convenience stores. In the second half of the year, it is adding eight convenience stores. Str...

The secrets of persuasion: No short cuts.

The best moment in my interview with Terri Sjodin, who teaches many of the world’s top corporations how to sell persuasively, is when she smiles at me and asks to hear my “elevator speech". My mind literally goes blank. The author of Small Message, Big Impact , her new book on how to craft powerful messages that persuade people to listen to you, has thrown the gauntlet at me. There was nowhere to hide. I had just told her how I had used her book to write out my three minute speech to open the Local Shop Summit. She listened patiently to my pitch, thought for a moment, and said: “I bet you had an illustration in your mind of an independent who really capitalised on your ideas and has taken them to the bank.” I could swear she was reading my mind. I blushed and nodded. “So you should open with this story,” she said. “Start out by saying: ‘Let me open the conference by telling you a great story with a happy ending.’ So the audience will say to themselves: ‘He is goi...

nickshanagher

Search This Blog