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Blue wine, banana pens and touch-screen plates

From the fun food facts files:

Did you know that the Dominos research center in Japan was trialling delivery by reindeer?  A statement from the company said that it was a difficult decision to abandon the trial and reindeers are very difficult to control.  Uh huh.  Also from Japan and the first of its kind: a pen that can be safely used to write messages on banana skin.  I never knew I needed one of those.

Did you know that cabin conditions affect the way we perceive taste and texture?
Strawberries: not so sweet at 30,000 feet.

 

From Britain comes research that explains why aeroplane food never tastes really good.  It isn’t just because it has to be pre-cooked and schlepped from kitchen to airport to thousands of feet in the sky and then reheated before you eat it, it is also due to the conditions inside a passenger plane which actually alter our perceptions of food.  Within the cabin the atmosphere is very dry and the air pressure is lower than usual.  This affects the way our tastebuds work.  Low humidity decreases our sensitivity to odours, which are in fact the main conveyors of flavour.  Oddly, the loud background noise also has an effect on how we perceive certain tastes, with salty and sweet tastes perceived less intensely.  Loud background noise also makes food sound crunchier, which can change the apparent texture of food.

iPads.  We love them.  But do we love them enough to eat off them?  Restaurants are serving food on the screens of ipads.  One establishment serves a dish of truffle croquettes on an iPad that shows video of dogs searching for truffles.  I wonder how they clean them afterwards?

Blue wine has label compliance experts scratching their heads in EU
Gik blue wine. Looks fabulous, but what does it taste like? Gik.

 

Blue wine.  It’s a thing.  It has a gorgeous neon hue achieved with natural additives.  But for Gik, the Basque company that makes blue wine, there are legal headaches on the horizon, as Spanish lawmakers grapple with the question of what can and cannot be called ‘wine’.  Last month, Gik was fined by Spanish regulators for breaching European wine laws, which do not allow wine makers to add colourants that are not specifically approved in the oenological regulations.  Unsurprisingly, blue colourants are not on the list. Gik is appealing the fine and has filed a petition.  In the meantime, they have re-labelled and re-formulated their blue beverage by adding 1% grape must so that the product no longer needs to meet the rules for ‘pure wine’.  It’s not available where I live, which is a shame because I would love to have a taste.

 

 

 

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Traceability myth #1: Consumers want transparency

Consumers want transparency.  It’s a phrase I hear all the time in supply chain and food safety circles.  Ask consumers if they want transparency and the answer is overwhelmingly ‘yes’.  It seems obvious; transparency equals knowledge, knowledge equals informed decisions, informed decisions result in good purchasing practices and good purchasing practices are a win for both consumers and suppliers.  But is that how food purchasing really works?

If consumers say they want transparency, and in a study by BBMG, GlobeScan and SustainAbility  a total 82% of consumers reported that “ingredient transparency is a very important or important factor” when shopping for food and beverages, why is it that ingredient transparency remains relatively unusual for most food products?

As a young food technologist working for a large snack food manufacturer, I learnt a valuable lesson in understanding consumer behaviour; those of us in marketing and product development jobs were very good at imagining the wants and preferences of our core consumers.  We were almost always wrong.  I was lucky enough to work for an organisation that was willing to spend money on focussed, in-depth and product-specific market research and we used that research to refine our product offerings and strengthen our brands.  What we learnt was that our own white-collar preferences were quite unlike the preferences of our core consumers and that self-reported attitudes to products almost never aligned with actual purchasing behaviour.  When it was time for consumers to select a bag of snacks from a retail store shelf, the qualities that we had been focussing on in our product development laboratory contributed very little to the decisions that were made.

I see the same thing in the current commentary of food safety and integrity professionals.  Traceability and transparency are important to food professionals and this is likely to be reflected in our food purchasing habits.    But for most people, food purchasing decisions are dominated by availability, cost, quality and sensory preferences.  Transparency is nice to have, but if it comes with a higher price tag it is unlikely to result in increased sales of a food product.  I don’t doubt that this is something most large food processors already understand.  We will continue to hear calls for supply chain transparency but we won’t be seeing it on an ordinary big-brand box of cookies any time soon.

Traceability myth #2; traceability is expensive

Traceability myth #3; traceability equals authenticity

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Food Fraud Advisors says hi

Food Fraud Advisors provides online consultancy, templates and training for food fraud prevention.

Authentic food is something that we all value, both as consumers and as members of the food industry.

At the moment there is growing awareness of problems with the authenticity of many food and beverages.  At the consumer level we see this awareness in investigative pieces on current affairs television shows, campaigns by consumer advocacy groups and on-line discussions on social media.  At the food business level food authenticity is becoming big news.

Right now there are big impacts for food manufacturers that are certified to GFSI-endorsed standards, since all the standards have been recently updated to include new requirements for food fraud prevention activities.

In the regulatory world food authenticity-related crimes are proving to be attractive to organized crime syndicates.  The cross-border and cross-disciplinary regulatory issues are a real challenge.

We are Food Fraud Advisors and we are here to help.