Any marketer of a food ingredient product who isn’t thinking about recipes is ignoring a critical marketing tool. Every product you purchase of any complexity — your iPod, pda and cell phone — comes with an instruction manual. So why shouldn’t your carrots, your cooking oil and your can of tomatoes come with one, too?

Like technology, some food uses are intuitive, so you can get started easily enough. We can all peel a carrot and crunch it raw. But then what? Just as I want to learn to download podcasts, not just listen to music; or get e-mails wirelessly, not just have a pocket electronic calendar; I will enjoy my carrot more if I can cook it in other ways. We are so familiar with food that we forget that we need to promote usage with smart thinking. [more…]

Hurricane Katrina has taught me one important lesson: in an emergency, be prepared to go it alone. I’m not the only one to draw that conclusion. In the San Francisco Chronicle weekly poll published yesterday (Sept. 17), 79 percent had the same insight.

We are all vulnerable to natural disaster or terrorist attack. While there may be a ground zero that affects a central core, the reverberations of a disaster, natural or man-made, can have a wide-ranging and devastating ripple effect. [more…]

Everybody eats. But not everyone is a food marketing expert. Not by a long shot.

To recognize food trends, for example, experience and knowledge count. It’s hard to get a fix on what’s really happening in the food world if you’ve just stepped into it. Every aberrant behavioral blip screams “mega trend.” But most turn out to be short-term fads. It takes context and insight to separate the one from the other. [more…]