Hey ma, what’s for dinner?

Have you ever asked Lay’s that?
Do other leading food brands want to be that?

Food and tastes are local, regional or culture specific.
But look at it - most of the food businesses are global.
We have learnt how cereals, grains, spices and condiments are adopted first by communities residing in areas where these are grown. It is true that some of the foods have traveled far and wide riding on good marketing and exotic taste viz. Burgers from Mc Donald’s, the Indian Curry Apple Pie etc.

Also, these seemingly global foods travel with a lot of tweaking. They are modified by the marketer (Mc Donald’s burgers in India) or by the marketer & the consumer both (Maggie noodles introduced Masala in order to suit the Indian taste buds and many Indians prepare their Maggie in many more ways - adding egg to it, putting cheese into it, turning it into vegetable Maggie, preparing it dry or making it more wet to get the curry feel in it etc.)
But it is important to note that most of these foods have not become staple diet in the new countries and cultures that they have entered. This is because many of these seemingly global foods are actually a great way to break the monotony of the regular local food that they have everyday. But in no way have these foreign foods become the norm.
Essentially a lot of what our taste buds are exposed to, is a result of nature (our place of origin) more than nurture (our exposure and experiences).
‘After all the ‘excursions’ we all finally come home to our own food!’

Despite all the population migration - regional, national & cultural culinary preferences still rule the globe. And this diversity of tastes is bound to be like this in the foreseeable future, at least as long as we do not see a new breed of global citizens dominating the globe.

‘Packaged food’ especially non-snack food is almost an oxymoron because food is synonymous with freshness, flavour and personal touch. This personal touch resides in the recipe, the feelings & all the emotions that go into making the preparation.

So how can we bring more of Mom into packaged and turn it ‘less packaged’ and ‘more food’?
In other words how can we bring the kitchen closer to the shopping aisle!

I guess there are two dynamic benchmarks to aim for
1) Your Mom
2) Chefs & Retail food services companies - both large transnational corporations and small local food outfits – restaurants etc.

The point that I am going to make might mean an entirely new way of looking at the logistics of food processing and food packaging. That notwithstanding, if it is done the right way it could have its own fruits in shape of better margins and greater volumes alike.

The opportunity lies in offering a new paradigm in packaged food marketing.
I call it the shopping aisle to kitchen shelf shift or the brand portfolio to menu card shift.
If packaged food marketers start looking at their product portfolios more like appetizing kitchen aroma being packed into hermetically sealed packs or start looking at their product lines like menu cards, where everything is modifiable and nothing is set in stone - it could open an entirely new world of opportunities.

Imagine walking to a shopping aisle and asking, “What’s there for dinner?”
Or if everything in a portfolio could be modified, new variants could be launched every year or every six months. Old ones could be phased out as fast as a stale dish leaves a customer table.
Packaged food marketers could gain a lot from this new way of approaching their business and customer their audience’s taste buds and ‘culinary emotions’.

Also, we need to try a lot many things, new recipes, new SKUs, new flavours etc. It is almost like making the transition from ready aim fire to fire-fire-fire! And while we do this we must know that many of these new experiments are bound to fail but that is the price we’d pay to get closer to what really makes our audience say “ Wow, I like that!”.

I confess that these frequent changes would surely take some (if not all) of the factor costs up, leading to perhaps more expensive packaged food but if the result is a product, I beg your pardon, ‘a dish’ that tastes better, then the customer would be more than happy to pay for it as well.


Kitchen shelf & Menu card mindset are not just white elephants – imagine the efficiencies that we could unlock by ceasing to spend disproportionately huge sums of money on dead and languishing brands and variants which just need to be preserved because they are a part of a sacrosanct portfolio.

Have you ever counted the number of taste buds on this planet or imagined what it would be like to have mom’s decide how to make packaged food for their kids!

The opportunity is to unlock the potential in the multiplicity of tastes, moods and culinary emotions and the way unsung experts like Mom’s and Popular Chefs in restaurants cater to them.
Food business is more about the range of tastes we know than range of food brands we have.