Category: Comment

There has been a lot of talk since the start of the craft beer boom of it being a mere ‘bubble’ – a short lived trend that will go the same way as the cupcake craze, but here at IWP, we’re not so sure. We think that the craft beer boom still has a long way to go, and will continue to gather pace for some time yet.

Fastest growing segment

Craft and locally produced beer is one of the fastest growing segments in the UK’s food and drink market with 361 new microbreweries opening in 2014/15 – that’s 25% more than the 291 new concerns in 2013/14 – a significant acceleration in growth.

So what’s driving this boom? Well, largely, it’s down to the growing consumer demand for quality, local beers with genuine provenance and the growing disillusionment with bland, mass-produced products from the global brewing conglomerates.

Counter-intuitively, it’s the recession that sparked this demand for something better. As Emma Cole who manages the new Craft Beer Co in Brighton says “People don’t have as much money so they go to the pub less, but when they do go out, they want something different and better than the usual. Our clientele is aged 25 to 45, settled down but with a bit of money to spend. They’re the kind of people who think about what they buy, especially when it comes to food and drink.”

Attractive profit margins

As a boutique and increasingly aspirational product, craft beer commands a higher price than the mass produced alternatives, allowing microbreweries to compete financially with the large conglomerates – and with a recent survey by Peach Reports showing a desire amongst consumers for an even greater range of products, there’s plenty of room for further growth in the sector.

Firmly established

The new wave of British beers is firmly established to such a point that craft beer is now included in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation and you’d have to go back more than 70 years to find as many breweries in the UK as we have now. The consumer preference for newer, more flavoursome beers is unlikely to subside any time soon and craft brewing ticks all the boxes of the foodie revolution of the past 20 years. As Bob Pease, chief of America’s Brewer’s Association says: “Are people going to go away from drinking good coffee, or better cheese or better bread?… in the US people aren’t going back to drinking freeze-dried coffee. We don’t think there is going to be a craft beer bubble bursting.” In fact, Bob thinks that craft beer could account for 20 to 30 per cent of the US market in time and we’ve no reason to think things will be any different in the UK.

Craft beer bubble due to burst? No chance!

 

We are big fans of the street food movement that’s been taking the UK by storm and changing the way we eat out over the past few years. One of the most well-known street food brands has been the hugely successful Street Feast set up by Jonathan Downey and Dominic Cools-Lartigue.

Jonathan is now embarking on a new venture, London Union, in partnership with Henry Dimbleby; the co-founder of healthy fast-food chain Leon, which aims to set up a number of pop up street food markets in London’s empty spaces and has the ambitious plan of creating the world’s greatest food market in a permanent location in central London. To help it achieve this, London Union has acquired the Street Feast brand and has garnered the backing of an impressive group of top chefs, restaurateurs and food writers, including some very well-known names.

We caught up with Jonathan to talk about his love for street food and his plans for London Union.

 

Hi Jonathan, how are you?

I’m good thanks, I’ve just had a very long lunch at the Clove Club in Shoreditch; it was fantastic. It’s a fantastic modern British restaurant set up by chef Isaac McHale and his two front-of-house friends. It got a Michelin Star the year it opened, in the national restaurant awards last year it was the second best restaurant in London and it got to number 55 in the World’s best restaurant’s 2015 list. It’s a really good place to eat and has a nice vibe.

It sounds great. We’ll have to visit it next time we are in London.

It’s worth it – it’s up there amongst the top restaurants in London.

So, what inspired you to set up Street Feast in the first place?

Actually, my friend Dom set it up and then he came to me after a few months to help him run the bars and help turn it into a proper business. He used to promote a club night at one of my venues in Shoreditch, a nightclub I had called Sosho, so I’d known him for about a decade.

We were both doing different street food things at the time, so we got together and it turned into a phenomenon in a very short space of time. I like the idea of helping new, small businesses get going. Rather than them having to spend a fortune on a bricks and mortar restaurant with all the hassles and aggravations that brings, it’s better if they can just set up a street food stall or a street food truck and get going. I really like the energy of it and enjoy supporting that sort of business.

 

So it’s all about supporting grass roots innovation in food and supporting people who are passionate about what they do?

Yes, and if they are good, they can become successful very quickly; you aren’t sat waiting for a restaurant reviewer to come and review you, criticise you or give you praise – it’s all about what the customers think.

How do these businesses scale up from there then?

I don’t think they need to; we’ve got three sites – Dalston, Shoreditch and Lewisham and four of our traders are at all three sites and they’re making much more money that way than if they had their own restaurants.

Some guys really want to go indoors and open their own places, but it will be a real shock for them with all the things you need to deal with and all the costs you have to incur when you run your own restaurant. Others are really happy just staying on the street. Opening a restaurant is a really good way to lose a lot of money and very few people really make it work.

Do you think that street food is the future of eating out then?

I think it’s one aspect – it’s better for some vendors than others. It’s good to have a bricks and mortar base somewhere but that doesn’t necessarily need to be a restaurant. In the end it depends on what food you are selling, what kind of lifestyle you want and what you are good at. If you are good at process and dealing with bureaucracy, maybe a restaurant is something that you can make work, but if you want a bit more fun out of life, I don’t think you need to go down that route.

So how did the idea for London Union come about?

We were doing all of these seasonal Street Feast events on Friday and Saturday nights; they were a temporary thing on a 2 or 3 year lease, but I really wanted to do something on a more permanent basis. If you go to the Boqueria in Barcelona, it’s a pretty spectacular market but London doesn’t have anything like that. It’s got Borough Market but it’s too busy and for me, there’s not a lot there that I am interested in. Our plan is to create the world’s greatest food market here in central London in a permanent location, and to be able to achieve that, we needed the support of our founder shareholders.

My business partner, Henry Dimbleby and I looked at who we knew in food writing and broadcasting and the chefs and restaurateurs we knew in London who we could join forces with. The idea was to create a powerful and influential group of individuals to give us the weight to push through our plan (backers include Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Yotam Ottolenghi, Tom Parker-Bowles and Giles Coren amongst others).

It’s certainly an impressive line-up!…

Yes, exactly – it’s great and it makes life a little easier having those guys on board.

So how is it all coming together?

We launched on May 1^st and London Union owns Street Feast, Dinerama and Model Market and we’ve got 3 more sites opening in the autumn. We are working on our mega market project and future smaller markets. All of our spaces are very individual and very different so they will all have their own individual brands to give them authenticity rather than being promoted under the London Union brand.

 

So how will you market to customers in the UK?

Whenever we open a new site, it will be like opening a new standalone restaurant rather than part of a chain, with local marketing, digital and social media. The whole business is built upon digital and social, particularly twitter and Instagram – that’s where our customers are.

Our audience is across a wide age range but our core audience is in the 20 – 35 age bracket, with definitely more women than men – women seem to be more switched on to what’s new and what’s next and there are more female foodies. I’d say that our audience is around 60% female.

As we’ve been talking about street food, what’s your favourite type of street food?

I’m a big fan of Breddos Tacos – they do fantastic flavours and some really innovative, non-authentic Mexican food – it’s evolved to be better than the original! I love Yum Bun. They do these Gua bao steamed buns with fantastic fillings, and I really enjoy Smokestak barbecue – they do fantastic beef brisket and ribs. Those guys are three of our best traders.

Do you have any advice for readers who might be thinking about developing a street food offering?

There’s definitely a lot more room for people to move into street food but there’s a tendency for everyone who’s new to it to try and do something that’s never been done before, but I don’t think it’s necessary to come up with something new and reinvent the wheel each time. There aren’t many great burgers on the street, there’s not enough seafood and there’s not enough steak – so anyone doing any of those well would really stand out at the moment. The key is to find something that you are really into and make it work. I’ve also noticed that customers like to graze rather than getting one massive meal from one trader so that’s something to think about, and ensuring quality and consistency is absolutely crucial if you want to succeed.

IWP would love to get involved with any projects that might be under consideration – no matter how early or how vague… Our ideas drawer is overflowing and our appetite for food and drink marketing is matched only by our enthusiasm for developing new, exciting and engaging opportunities in this fast growing sector.

You can find out more about London Union’s Street food markets at http://www.streetfeastlondon.com/ or by following @StreetfeastLDN on twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

It always surprises me whenever I’ve spent a few hours on the motorway, that more food and drink companies don’t make better use of the ad space afforded to them by their fleet of delivery lorries and vans.

In the case of an articulated lorry, you’ve got a difficult to ignore 48 or 96 sheet mobile poster space that provides a brilliant opportunity to provide essential brand exposure and communicate with a captive audience who have relatively few distractions – so it makes sense to use it wisely, with a creative solution that demonstrates the quality of the products or ingredients being transported and features delicious food shots and key brand messages.

 

Of course, some operators are doing a great job – in our opinion, the example for all food and drink companies to aspire to is that of Arla’s fleet of national distribution trailers for Lurpak featuring brand messages from the “Good food deserves…” campaign and truly mouth-watering images of the perfect bacon sandwich – a well-considered, wonderfully succinct and clever use of their existing transport assets and a highly memorable example.

 

Truck-side advertising can result in some of the longest dwell times and highest viewing statistics of any form of advertising – it can reach a new audience daily and get to places where there aren’t many posters – an opportunity more companies should be taking advantage of.

Now. Where can I get a bacon sandwich..?

 

 

Heard some wit say this the other day.

Have to say, it struck a chord.

Maybe it needs to be on the bottom of our emails…

 

 

OK. It’s 2nd of March and now officially spring. But looking out of our office window at the high winds and swirling snow this morning it felt light years away… In case anyone else needs a hint of something warmer here’s a street food shot Alex at Ten Eight did for us – sweet, spicy, smoky paella… All it needs is a glass of Rioja or chilled Estrella, a few friends and some loose talk…

And another 20 degrees on the thermometer…

 

We always like to keep abreast of the latest trends in food and drink, and ‘Street food’ – artisan food sold on the streets, or anywhere other than restaurants or cafés – has been one of the hottest trends over the last couple of years with between 600 and 700 new street food businesses signing up to the Nationwide Caterers Association in 2014 alone.

Of course, the concept comes from America, where the food truck craze has been steadily growing into a huge industry and many of the UK’s first street food traders were inspired by these food trucks for the food they serve, cooking methods, marketing (especially social media) and to a degree attitude. American street food carved out a reputation for           re-inventing the ‘classics’ by stripping down the dish to its core ingredients and then re-designing it, using improved cooking methods and ingredients.

Street food has always been about sharing, with traders helping each other out and lending equipment to their fellow traders to help them get their stalls set up. Recently however, sharing has become taking and “inspiration” has become plagiarism with some traders making off with other’s intellectual property – and passing off recipes, logos, menus and ideas as their own.

It’s starting to get nasty as Richard Johnson, founder of the British Street Food Awards and author of Street Food Revolution points out in this excellent blog post in The Guardian.

We’re all used to copycat disputes between brands and retailers with their ever-so-similar own label offerings (naming no names), but it’s one thing when big businesses are going head to head and another thing altogether when people’s “ideas, creativity, originality and livelihoods are being stolen by others who lack the imagination to do their own thing”. As Richard says, let’s hope that all the money flooding into the street food movement doesn’t mean that the lawyers end up take over, and more importantly, let’s hope that the industry manages to retain its authenticity and stay true to its roots.

At IWP, we have many years of food and drink industry expertise at local, national and international levels, understanding the ebb and flow of trends and the direct impact of poor design, marketing and advertising on brands.

We know what works.

And just as importantly, we know what doesn’t.

 

Ouch…

Here at IWP, we help companies in the food and drink industry to develop their brand identities and market themselves effectively to their consumer and trade audiences. We also like to share the insights of thought leaders in the field, so recently we spoke with Dave Ford, director of Field to Fork Solutions, an organisation that helps improve the profitability of companies operating in the food and drink hospitality industry.

We asked Dave for his tips on what suppliers and manufacturers can do to get a foot in the door with trade customers.

IWP: “Hi Dave, good to meet you, tell us a little about your background”

Dave: “I’ve been in the food and drink industry for about 27 years; I started off as an operator and for 14 or 15 years did the whole operations career pathway. I worked for companies like Whitbread, Pizzahut, Scottish and Newcastle and then ended up at Mitchells and Butlers or Bass as they were then. The position of head of food came up and I was given the opportunity to take it for about 18 months as a personal development break and I ended up doing it for about 10 years as during that time the whole industry moved to being food led.

I set up my own business about 4 years ago and since then I’ve been involved in contract catering and hotels, leisure, casinos; a whole massive remit of food related businesses. It’s been quite enlightening for me that whether it’s a big contract food service cafeteria, a coffee shop or a very busy restaurant, they all face the same problems. It’s about people, it’s about consistency and it’s about product.”

IWP: “How about the work you do with suppliers and manufacturers?”

Dave: “When I’m working with a manufacturer, it’s with a view of making them better equipped to approach the end user, whether that’s a buyer, restaurant or a company. It’s about me understanding their infrastructure in terms of whether they can cope with rapid turnaround of product development, whether they can do small product runs, all that stuff.”

IWP: “So when you work with suppliers and manufacturers, if they were looking for some advice on how to get on the radar of a new buyer, how would you work with them?

Dave: “The first thing I say is “I need to spend a couple of days with you” so I can get a very clear understanding of the company, its values and what they are trying to achieve. Then the second step is to try to understand what they offer so I can then benchmark them against other companies who do the same thing that I might be more familiar with. I’ll identify things that they need to do, and if they can convince me that they can do those things, I’ll speak to people who I know to see if they’ve heard of the company I’m working with, and whether there is a barrier to them spending 45 minutes with the company.

I make sure that the manufacturers or suppliers that I work with have a real purpose about what they are going to the meeting for. If that purpose is to show a product that everyone else is showing, I wouldn’t even waste anyone’s time. I have to know what makes them different; it could be a particular innovative product or the story behind the product, but there has to be a reason why the person they are going to meet is going to give up their time to meet with them. Some companies think that all they need to do is get in front of someone to get in the door, so I do an awful lot of explaining of what the other guy wants, why he may have never responded to their emails etc.

If it is a case that I think they have something different but they haven’t thought through things like pack size, costs, shelf life etc. I will fill them in and show them behind the scenes in some of the businesses they are targeting so they know what sort of kit they use and what the skill level in the kitchen is like. If the product is great but it takes 25 minutes to cook in an oven, you are out of the food service game unless you are talking top end fine dining.

These are some of the sorts of things that big companies who are perhaps strong in retail don’t understand about food service, and some of the smaller businesses don’t understand that to supply to a restaurant chain or pub group, you need to be incredibly flexible, you need to turn things around really quickly.”

IWP: “What do you think about the way suppliers and manufacturers go about marketing themselves?”

Dave: “Actually, I think that some of the big, established businesses are so behind in terms of what they are spending their marketing budgets on because they have lost track of what the end user, the chef wants.

One of the big food and logistical companies that I did some work with had the traditional 500 page brochure which was their only way of showcasing to the world what they did. Their sales reps would go out with this brochure and it was so user-unfriendly and the sales team were constantly being told that they needed something easier to use and a bit more useful for more than just buying a product; what we came up with was a very basic catalogue, aimed at the tenancy market outlining what the top 10 selling items were in the pub market and indicating, if you were a pub whose average meal price is £5, what pies, what chips you needed to buy, all the codes and the prices and photographs of what the dishes might look like. To the tenant who doesn’t know any of that, it added value in terms of what the end dish would look like and the indicative selling price and the margin. It’s about doing something a little bit cleverer and always thinking about the end user.”

IWP: “How do things differ with the bigger chains where you need to communicate with buyers as well as the chefs?”

Dave: “The buyer is a procurement person looking for benefits rather than just the taste of the product; if the product is as good as one they are already using but there are benefits somewhere else along the line, be that financial, speed of cooking, storage space etc. then they’ll take that into account. Buyers and chefs always want slightly different things.

The relationship with the buyer is important as they are the custodian of the budget and the decision maker on who can join the supply chain – but the relationship with the chef is crucial – there might be 6 suppliers who can offer similar things, but it’s the one with the relationship with the chef and the best track record who will be the preferred supplier.”

The big take home message from our chat with Dave is that you always need to be thinking about your customer’s customer. Even if you don’t sell directly to the end user of your product, the chef, you need to take their challenges into consideration and align your efforts appropriately: Something that we’d heartily agree with.

 

 

In just 4 months’ time on December 13th, a new EU law called the Food Information to Consumers Regulation (FIR) will come into force covering all food service establishments meaning that diners will be able to ask staff whether their meal contains any of the 14 key allergens, and the staff must be able to tell them.

Obviously this is going to be a big wake-up call for some.

According to celebrity chef Anthony Worrall Thompson, the new law is going to cause an “explosion” in a sector that is “notoriously lazy at coming to terms with new laws”.

Maybe he has a point; according to recent research by Unilever Food Solutions, nearly half of all food service operators (44%) are unaware of the new law and just over half (54%) said that they were unaware of the food allergens specified by the new law.

The hardest hit will probably be the independent establishments – chains have set recipes for the chefs to follow so changes will be relatively straight-forward to implement, but for busy independent restaurants, particularly those with several chefs working shifts, cross-contamination could easily occur, with potentially disastrous results.

The new law is going to impose many challenges but it will also offer a great many opportunities for food service suppliers and manufacturers – food service operators clearly need to get to grips with the new legislation and in a recent poll, over half of establishments say that they are going to turn to their suppliers for help with allergen information.

Some manufacturers and suppliers, such as Unilever Food Solutions http://www.unileverfoodsolutions.co.uk/our-services/your-menu/allergens and 3663 http://www.3663.co.uk/fir have already set about positioning themselves as food allergen experts by publishing useful free allergen guides and training materials for professional caterers.

And the opportunities aren’t just limited to information and training. Food service is already a high growth area for free-from foods, but the new law is expected to dramatically accentuate the trend in the coming years, something that food service suppliers and manufacturers should be tapping into now. Alex Smith, founder of Alara Wholefoods said recently:

“A growing number of restaurants and food service establishments are expected to develop gluten-free and lactose free lines…it’s easier for a restaurant chain to buy gluten-free buns rather than make them in-house.”

As Michelle Berriedale-Johnson, founder of the Free-from food awards and Free-from eating out awards pointed out:

“It’s a massive opportunity for suppliers to food service. Many chefs don’t know much about free-from food, so they will need educating and they will need products supplying to them…In a small, busy kitchen, it’s really difficult to avoid foods coming into contact with each other. This provides a huge opportunity for suppliers that can provide free-from food in single portions in attractive wrapped packaging that can stay wrapped.”

The new allergen regulations are going to offer a lot of growth opportunities for food service suppliers and manufacturers and in our opinion, companies should have plans already in place to take advantage of the changes ahead. How well prepared are you?

An occasional series in which we take a look at wholesaler’s shelves to find examples of design – good, bad and downright UGLY. This time round, we took a trip to our local Booker Cash & Carry.

It’s a fact of life that when you walk into a wholesaler, you’ll be confronted with shelf upon shelf of bland looking cardboard outers and in many cases, pack designs that look like they have ignored the basic rules of good design. It seems that whilst many manufacturers put an awful lot of time and effort into getting their retail pack design right, their trade brands are treated like a poor relation. Often there is little consistency between a company’s retail and food service offerings, leaving (increasingly design savvy) customers struggling to make a connection. It’s something that endlessly perplexes us.

There is another trick that many brands are missing out on too. Why stick with plain boring cardboard outers when you could be using that space  to catch the customer’s attention and win sales from impulse purchases? Any creative worth their salt can do this at the drop of their beanie hat. Some brands are taking this opportunity – but not enough in our opinion.

Here are some of the brands we think are doing a good job with their trade pack designs:

 

LICHFIELDS – Part of the Booker own label range, Lichfields features hospitality essentials such as tea and coffee, biscuits, yoghurt, individual jam portions,ketchup sachets and fresh juice. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into the pack design which we think does a great job of upselling against premium branded competitors. Compare the packaging and shelf presence of Lichfields’ luxury preserves with that of Robertson’s individual jam portions you can see what we mean:

The pack design for Lichfields’ teas stands good comparison with Twinings and we think that their chocolates compare well to the more upmarket Elizabeth Shaw product.

 

BLUE DRAGON ABF’s oriental food brand Blue Dragon have done a great job of insuring consistent with their retail brand, bringing their recognisable packaging through to their trade offering.

WHITWORTH FOR BAKING Napier Brown commissioned Leahy Brand Design to breathe fresh life into their Whitworth for Baking sugar brand in 2012 and they came up with a fresh, clean, user friendly design that responded directly to customer feedback about mess and storage problems. It’s satisfying to see that they’ve carried all of this good design and innovation through into their bulk packs for food service customers.

The supermarkets have learned their lesson well after poor consumer feedback – having redesigned their ‘value’ product ranges to look more aspirational… Maybe more brands could extend their premium delivery into this important sector?