The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

That said, while companies aren’t great at living up to what they state – humans tend to be far better.

One of which has been our ability to find ways to make food last longer than intended.

Whether that’s been creating mustard to disguise the taste of potentially ‘off’ ingredients through to making stale bread into bread and butter pudding, we’ve always found ways to stretch things out.

Of course, the ultimate nation for food maximization is China.

Now, part of that is because during the Great Leap Forward, people were starved/starving and so were forced to eat anything they could to survive. However, while that time is well gone, the attitude of ‘waste not, want not’ has remained which is why there’s so many recipes across the region that utilize a nose to tail philosophy.

Literally.

I say this because I recently saw Marks & Spencer’s [M&S] in the UK be a bit smart with their sourdough bread.

It’s this.

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Good eh?

Rather than chuck the bread out as it starts to go stale … shove loads of garlic butter in them, place them in a fridge and flog them as mouthwatering garlic bread you just have to heat-up before shoving down your throat.

OK, they could have given it to the needy rather than find another way to take every last penny from their customers, but it’s still devastatingly simple. And smart.

They’ve also launched a range of ‘minimal ingredient’ food … which is clever for a whole host of reasons. The first being the increased awareness and desire for preservative free food. The second being it goes off faster, so there’s a good chance people will end up having to buy more when their best intentions to eat it gets scuppered with life etc. Given it is probably even more expensive than the preservative counterpart – I know, paying a premium for less, classic capitalism – and everyone can kinda win with this.

To be fair, I’ve always been quite impressed how supermarkets innovate – they’ve done far more and in more ways than most organisations – but while ‘pre-packaged’ garlic bread is not a new thing [though garlic sourdough loaves is a whole other level] … as is finding new ways to extend old/ugly food … it’s still a perfect example of creative thinking.

It’s also a lesson to the ad industry on how to sell creative thinking.

Because for all the systems, processes, charts and models we love to bang on about, the key seems to be much simpler.

Solve a real problem. [Opportunity]
Show why people will really pay for your solution. [Benefit]
Make it easy-as-fuck for them to buy [Action]
[including what they have to do at their end to make it happen]

I say this, but I bet there’s still strategists and agencies out there who would still write a 305 page deck to explain this idea …