Thinking Truffle Advertising in 2012? I Bet 248 Million Turkeys You Won’t See Any.

Having just finished off more turkey-and-dressing leftovers, a look ahead to the hot food trends of 2012 is worth a post. Trendy foods that catch on may result in beyond-local marketing and advertising a year or two later.

Hmmm: how about the opinion of Loni Kay Stark from the West Coast? In ”The Hottest Food Trends for 2012,” she’s pointing to gourmet French fries and savory flavors; those’d be vegetable and bacon and lobster. Grilled cheese sandwiches are the new burgers. Hand-pulled noodles and vegetable desserts. Breakfast favorites re-purposed – consider savory-grilled waffle with artisanal cheese. And red hot chili peppers.

Writing for Forbes, Andrew Bender is betting on mead and charcuterie (artisan-cured meats); botanical ice pops and, yes, truffles. (I am not giving him any credit for Brussels Sprouts which ”have made it to the delicious list.” I think not!)

What’s attractive about these look-ahead, often-locavore kinds of food and drink, is that some will be taken up by major food producers or retailers and you’ll see ad campaigns to support them. Kraft Cracker Barrel’s already begun to push ”aged” cheeses into the big, broad middle market. Botanical ice pops are strictly local now – how long before one of the bigs picks up the idea for a ”healthy” treat line? Chaucer’s Mead from California is already available at 70-plus locations of Total Wine and More. Keep your eyes peeled for trendy food adverts in 2012.

On the other hand, I saw hardly any turkey ads around Thanksgiving. Maybe it’s because this time of year turkeys are...everywhere. If there’s any new trend in turkey, it’s the many fresh, even unusual ways the bird can be prepared for Thanksgiving.

Trend-wise, though, it’s a no-brainer: the number of turkeys expected by be raised in the US this year is 248 million. Hard to beat that with your hand-pulled noodles.

Ads themselves have been sparse. There was the Carl’s Jr, ”Turkeyburger” commercial – starring Miss Turkey! That was back in the Spring. Plus plenty of ”Go Vegan” messages this time of year…not really the same. Nope. Aside from grocery store supplements, most Thanksgiving turkey messages come from the cuisine and homemakers’ magazines.

In the midst of our holiday-induced turkey torpor, it doesn’t hurt to see what’s going to be hot, food-wise, in the coming year...at least in ”parts of the United States and Canada where cooking is treated quite seriously,” to follow an argument by novelist Neal Stephenson. He contrasts this with a ”midwestern/middle American phenomenon” of which traditional Thanksgiving is a part.

One thought more: trend-setting friends and colleagues, writing on Facebook the week leading up to Thanksgiving this year, unfailing mentioned...turkey as the key item of their feasts. Not tofu-turkey. Not gourmet boar meat or wild Alaska Chinook salmon. Turkey.

It goes so well with beer.

Baron Turkeys! A Powerful Thanksgiving Idea Whose Time Has Come.

Here’s a great big Happy Thanksgiving wish to all of you…and specially to Jim and Ann Baron of Thatched House Farm, Dutton, Warrington, Cheshire. Which is not around here but 4,705 miles across the sea…as the turkey flies, so to speak.

They produce Baron Turkeys, the kind of thing one discovers surfing the web, searching for this year’s Thanksgiving blog topic. I hope that the Barons of Cheshire don’t mind a modest invasion of their privacy. I think it’s in a good cause.

First, let me point out that the UK mainly doesn’t appear to do Thanksgiving. Turkeys are a Christmas item over there. Baron Turkeys “…specialise in supplying turkey growers to be reared on for Christmas.” That is (as I understand it), the Barons don’t actually sell you oven-ready turkeys, but ones that you can raise yourself to full-fledged…uh…turkeyness and then take care to prepare it – yourself, again – for your feast.

I found Baron Turkeys on the off-chance, Internet-wise. Theirs is a functional website with just four pages; straight enough. Oh – and just two photos of the poults – the young domestic turkeys they offer for raising. The human touch is provided by a single paragraph on the HOME page:

Our business was founded in the '60s by Ted Baron, an experienced poultry farmer and continues in the family today being run by Jim and Ann Baron. The main delivery driver Peter has worked here for 26 years.

I wish I had discovered these Barons earlier, so that I could invite them to join us here in Texas for our family Thanksgiving. The finishing touch: I could have had some Baron Liberator Doppelbock shipped down here from Seattle.

Perhaps if I let them know about this post, though, they’ll send a few snaps over for an American (me) who shares a name if not an actual as-it-were family relationship. Now Barbara Nytes-Baron and I hope the UK Barons will have a great Holiday season. As well as the American Barons, Slaviks, Murphys, Eisenbergs, Bonds, Sabels, Musils, Hoffmans, Nyteses, Kaplans and Yonkas; our friends and colleagues near and far. Starting today.

NOTE OF FOOT: I’m trusting that the roadview photo of Thatched House Farm, from Geolocation.ws, is correct. Wouldn’t I feel like Mr Turkey my own self if I’d got it wrong?

Nah, Crowdsourcing Is Old Hat – Pillsbury Has Been at It Since ’49.

Crowdsourcing is being tipped as one of the big things to watch out for in the coming years. In essence, Crowdsourcing websites harness the power of their community to achieve common goals quicker and more effectively. This is a pretty apt description from the Storecrowd blog.

The word itself was invented in 2006 by a Wired magazine editor, Jeff Howe, when he started a blog of that name, to portray work that large, distributed teams of amateurs do, aided by the interconnectivity of the Worldwide Web. His contention is that such involved works were formerly the exclusive domain of corporations or isolated experts.

In this sense, crowdsourcing does seem to be a genuine product of the Internet. I’d probably still be agreeing if I hadn’t spotted the Pillsbury® Create and Easy Wow!™ 2010 calendar that arrived in the mailbox today.

The recipe-filled piece is a timely (and humbling) reminder that advancing technology only makes an activity easier to accomplish while the activity itself has been there and done that.

The justly famous Pillsbury Bake-Off® is the involving national competition that began in 1949. For decades, it has pulled in cooks of all sizes, shapes and sexes from all over the US. They’ve baked, cooked, slaved in thousands of kitchens and shared the winning recipes for more than 60 years. And the company has rewarded home cooks for their efforts – the first winner collected $50,000. Whoever wins the 44th Bake-Off, going on right now, will take home a million. Bucks, not biscuits.

This is crowdsourcing the old-fashioned way; the 2010 calendar features recipes from 2008 (Toasted Tuscan Walnut Squares by Jennifer Harkleroad), 1992 (Lemon Truffle Pie, Patricia Kiewiet), all the way back to 1951 (Topsy-Turvy Apple Pie, Mrs Donald W Gaard).

A recent speaker at amobile marketing seminar reminded the audience that cell phones represent a new distribution mechanism – it doesn’t replace human effort needed to create messages or business opportunities or baked goods. Neither does crowdsourcing. But both make their activities faster and easier.

Maybe that’s why Pillsbury stresses the word “Easy” in this 2010 calendar edition. You can get a free copy – and a lesson in original crowdsourcing – right here. Bake yourself something tasty.

Oh Santa! Your Standards Have Fallen So Low. Or maybe it’s Wild West Products.

The company claims these are the Big Guy’s Christmas Eve yummies: Santa’s Favorite Cookies. A small box came under the Signalwriter™ eye from a remainder bin at Central Market because the box art is an imaginative mix of what looks like stock Santa illustrations.

Maybe that’s not a surprise. The maker, Wild West Products, claims this provenance:

Hello Fellow Cowboys and Cowgirls! Welcome to our little corner of cyber space. We know this is a fur-piece for you, but you’ll be glad you came. Let me tell you our story…It began with Tina. You see, Tina was a big City Slicker living in New York City. She was a graphic designer and did great work, but she was destined to move to the quiet life of San Antonio. Looking for something to do, she baked up a batch of Cow shaped cookies and sold them at the San Antonio rodeo.

The website is actually kinda fun; the opening Flash animation is an nice use of “oater footage” – clips from old cowboy movies. I think you’d enjoy seeing what this Yankee designer has created in terms of food brands and imaginative packing, especially (for example) the Rancher’s Trail Mix varieties. The web marketing concept is deep enough to please.

On the other hand, Santa’s Favorite Cookies, described as “low fat chocolate chip,” are very bad indeed. They cost a remaindered 50¢ but still, here’s a product that doesn’t live up to its on-line brag:

Wild West Products makes some of the greatest tastes in the West (and east)…the best of the American spirit – the spirit of the Old West – a spirit of fun and adventure in the pursuit of fresh ideas and fresh products with great taste at a great price.

Maybe it’s because WWP didn’t actually bake these low-fat disks, only “distributed” them. Maybe Tina didn’t taste them before they ended up at Central Market.

Either way, the Carrollton, TX-based company ought to be more careful about its hype. When Santa finds out what it’s claiming about his taste in cookies, Wild West Products is going to get a big cease-and-desist from Claus’s lawyers. Happy New Year!

Save the Wild Rice – for Thanksgiving 2009 at the Martins’ House.

Happy Thanksgiving. This year, we’ve accepted an invitation to spend the day with David and MaryJo Martin. While planning for this, it struck me that we never see much in the way of advertising for wild rice.

First of all, I suppose, is because it’s…wild. Second, it’s been a cottage industry. Ricing was a two-people-per-boat proposition – poler and knocker. The poler moved the canoe through the rice bed. The knocker bent the stems over and struck ‘em together, so the rice fell into the bottom of the canoe. Some kernels fell into the water to re-seed the rice beds.

That’s the way wild rice is still harvested on certain American Indian reservations – by hand, in boats. In 2001, Winona LaDuke of the White Earth Land Recovery Project wrote:

Wild rice or zizania palustris is actually a grass, sharing only some genetic strains with other rice crops internationally. That special nature is part of what drives its niche market and the millions of dollars now behind the industry. Over the past thirty years what the Creator gave to the Anishinaabeg has become a profit making enterprise for many others.

The $21 million wild rice business is largely dominated by just a few paddy rice firms. Their interest in genetic work on wild rice stems largely from their own economic interests, not environmental, humanitarian, or tribal interests.

Wild rice is Minnesota’s official state grain, with 4-6 million pounds produced annually. Minnesota is one of the world’s largest cultivated wild rice-growing states. But California is now tops in wild rice production. And there is marketing for wild rice: A California Wild Rice Advisory Board; a Minnesota Cultivated Wild Rice Council too. Together, they support the International Wild Rice Association. Visit the IWRA website and you’ll find some mighty nice recipes.

Today you won’t have click through. Barbara’s got her pretty-darn-famous wild rice dish ready to take to the Martins’ house for dinner – we’re looking forward to the get-together. The Barbara Nytes-Baron Genuine Minnesota Wild Rice Casserole recipe goes like this.

First, get some wild rice – we’d be glad if you purchased it from one of the tribal stores up north like the White Lake Ojibwe or Red Lake Nation. (“Cultivated wild rice” is an oxymoron.)

INGREDIENTS
1 cup wild rice
1 can chicken stock
½ cup dried fruit, hydrated in wine
¼ cup dried mushrooms, hydrated in wine
¼ cup chopped onions
¼ cup chopped black olives
¼ cup chopped celery
¼ cup chopped nuts
Butter or olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

PREPARATIONS
Soak fruit and mushrooms
Sauté the onions, olives, celery and nuts in the butter or oil
Mix all in a 1-quart casserole
Bake with the turkey for 1 to 2 hours (usually at 325°F)
Stir during second hour, cover with foil

Rice should be cooked and liquid evaporated – add more liquid (wine, stock) if the rice needs to cook more. Serve hot. May your 2009 Thanksgiving holiday be blessed.