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Provenance Vs Price: The Future of British Food by Vickie Rogerson

The discounters are still the darlings of the retail sector and can seemingly do no wrong. Their rapid rise in popularity is continuing to hit the big four’s sales particularly at Asda which is suffering an identity crisis with how it appeals to shoppers since it lost its Low Prices crown.

It’s therefore interesting that both Aldi and Lidl have has come out with marketing campaigns focusing not on price, but on their responsible sourcing credentials.

Aldi’s ‘Everyday Amazing’ TV ad still stays true to Aldi’s cheeky personality with skydiving grannies but highlights that it sells 22,000 British free range chickens every week and all its Specially Selected Scottish Salmon is RSPCA assured.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z0i-CpEYeQ

This follows Lidl’s ‘Lidl Surprises’ campaign which challenges customer’s misconceptions about its food sourcing by taking them to meet the farmers and producers. The series of ads tells its home-grown story using hero products such as its Deluxe Scotch Assured Beef and Scottish MSC-approved Rope Grown Mussels.

This goes to show that provenance is just as important as price to British shoppers. The narrative about low prices at any cost is well and truly behind us. With Brexit looming large there is lots of discussion about whether leaving the EU will offer an opportunity to British farmers and producers as imported food like cheese, wine and fruit and vegetables become more expensive. Or, is there a risk that we will lose our farming heritage as EU agricultural subsidies are removed?

It’s certainly an interesting time for British food. Lucre is going to explore these issues in more detail with a roundtable event Provenance Vs Price: The Future of British Food at NABIM (National Association of British and Irish Millers) on 6th October from 3pm-6pm. We’ll have supermarket food trends expert Margaret McSorley Walker talking through some of the unlikely heroes of British food and Bryan Roberts, Global Insights Director at tcc Global looking at what British means to shoppers and retailers.

If you’d like to come, please email vickie@lucre.co.uk.

Provenance Vs Price Invite 5th October 2016

The road to Rio – the impact of the 2016 Olympic Games

Rio-Olympics

Recently the Lucre Group hosted its first ever Rich Ideas and Insights (I&I) event, entitled The Impact of Rio, an examination of how the Rio Olympics will impact the Home & Lifestyle, Travel and Food & Drink sectors.

As the latest addition to the Lucre family, I&I is about keeping our thinking fresh, making sure we’re sharing the latest insights and delivering campaigns with real impact.

Ideas and Insight

As part of this, our regular I&I events will feature expert panels discussing the issues which will affect consumer behaviour, create trends and be written about by media, making sure we stay ahead of the pack.

The Rio Olympics 2016 was the subject of our first event, held at Brazilian bar Floripa in Shoreditch. Including brand and marketing managers, designers, journalists and writers, our 12 experts brought experience and expertise from across home and lifestyle, food and drink, travel and creative thinking.

Influencing everything from colour palettes to fast food

Capture

Discussions ranged from how the Olympic Games will influence our paint choices to what will be the next fast food trend to hit the high street (office delivery of real coconut water, anyone?). It was a glimpse of how w,e as consumers, want to be communicated with and how brands can (and will) explore that.

Capture

We’ve put together a short film of the event to give you an idea of what happened and some of our predicted insights can be found in more depth here.

If you are interested in hearing more about I&I or would like to take part in a future event, please email katie@lucre.co.uk or call 0113 243 1117 to be added to our mailing list.

So Macho….

tofu

Apparently, the number of vegans is growing.  According to new research by Ipsos Mori, commissioned by the Vegan Society, there are 542,000 vegans in Britain – the previous estimate, from 2006, was just 150,000.  And an estimated 500,000 vegetarians are thinking about going vegan too, so there could be more than a million British vegans before long.  Which means a whole new set of opportunities opening up for businesses not just in the food sector but in fitness, active wear, beauty and sports.

This is no fad, either.  Google searches for “vegan” have doubled since 2011, while the market in animal-free food and drink is growing too.  Mintel reports that the number of products launched in the UK marked “suitable for vegans” grew by 134% between 2012 and 2015.

Vegan dishes used to be restricted to wholefood cafes, but now Wetherspoon pubs – yep, you read that correctly – have launched a vegan menu, and Pret a Manger has seen sales of its vegetarian options soar, and is introducing two new vegan specials every month over the summer.

So next time you mash that avocado on your granary toast and prepare to poach an egg to go on top of it – don’t.  All the cool people eat only plant-derived foods. Will you join them?

I’ll have a can of chilled rosé wine, please

the_drop

 

You know how lots of British blokes like to drink rosé wine but won’t admit it? Well across the pond there’s no such reticence. In 2013, Union Wine’s Underwood cans were launched, and this is year there’s a new offering from The Drop, a California Dry rosé sold in four-packs of 250ml cans and marketed to – no surprises here – millennials – for activities that are traditionally restricted to beer (any ideas what they are, other than watching the football and, er…..?)  Don’t get excited though, it’s only going to be sold in the New York metropolitan area and the Hamptons. Boo. Perhaps their millennials are different from our millennials?

Actually, someone thought of wine-in-a-can quite a long time ago. Francis Ford Coppola’s “Sofia” wine cans caused a minor stir in 2004 and – who else – a winery in Australia was perhaps the first to do so back in the ’90s.

Will it take off? Here at Lucre Towers we love a glass or four of rosé so we’re hopeful.  Apparently rosé accounts for just over one in 10 of the wines we buy, but that figure is likely to increase when men finally admit they like a glass of the pink stuff and don’t care who knows it. Last year the Daily Telegraph suggested that rosé was the “beer of wine” and Instagram going mad for the hashtag #brose (geddit).

brose

The summer’s coming, folks. Get ready to #brose.

 

The Great Sport Relief Bake Off – episode 2

 

bake off

For a variety of reasons we  missed the first episode of the Great Sport Relief Bake Off.  Nothing, however, was going to stop us from watching this episode, mainly because of our giant girl-crushes on Victoria Coren-Mitchell (VCM) and Kimberley Walsh. We love Kimberley, and still feel aggrieved on her behalf for being ROBBED of the Strictly trophy two years ago.  ROBBED.

Anyhoo, moving on. Signature challenge? Bake 24 muffins which must be identical.  Jennifer Saunders was very keen that the bakers understood this.  We’d have preferred Jen to appear as AbFab’s Edina, but you can’t have everything.

Blokes were Chris Camara (sports commentator, apparently) and Ed Balls (#edballs). Chris was making sultana (bleurgh) and banana muffins, with a touch of cinnamon. Ed  was making the same, but his had yoghurt in it. Kimberley made strawberry cheesecake muffins because she is a goddess, and VCM made Bloody Mary muffins, involving celery (meh) and vodka (get in). VCM is ace, and should be our best friend and teach us how to play poker.

VCM spent a great deal of time staring worriedly into her oven. Perhaps she should have ditched the muffins altogether offered Paul and Bezza several shots of vodka instead? Everyone knows Bezza likes a drop of the hard stuff.

Judging time. “The muffins should be well-risen, beautifully flavoured, and neither tough nor soggy,” intoned Jen. Chris presented his muffins (no innuendo). Paul looked unimpressed. “They taste like paint.”   Ed’s were more successful. “A pretty good muffin.” Meanwhile, Kimbers’ efforts had sunk, but nil desperandum. “The flavour is FANTASTIC,” Paul announced, ignoring the muffin and looking adoringly at Kimberley’s false eyelashes.  VCM was told her muffins did, actually, taste like a Bloody Mary.

The technical challenge was football pies.  Er, football who the what now? Double crust, filled with mincemeat, onions and peas, with a football “design” on the top, apparently.  Everyone looked taken aback, but carried on gamely whilst Bezza and Paul discussed supporting Liverpool (Paul) and Everton (Bezza).  Nobody had any idea how to make pastry well, apart from Ed, who looked smug. Kimbers read out the instructions.  “Add two egg yolks, and small splash of water.” This didn’t help Chris, however.  “How much is small splash?” Which, when you think about it, is a perfectly reasonable question.

VCM said her eyes watered when she chopped onions, so she put on a huge pair of sunglasses, looking like Roy Orbison in a blonde wig.  Ed pratted about with hexagon-shaped bits of pastry that looked like flowers, not footballs, but we like Ed so we’ll say no more. VCM’s pies looked as pale as a Jane Austen heroine with consumption, because she’d forgotten to glaze them. Chris’s pies looked like roadkill, several days after a rogue Ford Fiesta had flattened the carcass.

Kimberley’s pies had what she described as a “sort of” football on the top, with nice and thin pastry, Chris’s effort was under-seasoned, VCM’s were described as “a nice bake” and poor old Ed’s were under-baked, collapsed, and lacked seasoning. He looked as disappointed as the other Ed just after David Dimbleby announced the winner of the General Election.  Still, a man who gives rise to his own annual hashtag (#edballs) doesn’t care about that kind of footling detail.

He came fourth, Chris third, Kimberley second and VCM in first place. Who would win the whole thing overall?  It was all down to the show-stopper, a three-layered cake representing an extreme sport.  Chris started making an “extreme bodyboarding” cake, becauase riding shallow waves is the most extreme of all the water-based sports. His boarder looked like a corpse on a banana and caused Bezza to giggle uncontrollably.  Kimberley recreated Mount Kilimanjaro in cake form, in memory of her Sport Relief climb a few years ago. It looked sensational.  Ed made a complicated ski jump cake, complete with a fondant Eddie The Eagle and VCM went for a “round the world sailing” cake with, she explained, “the taste of the sea”.  This turned out to be nothing more sophisticated than insane quantities of salt in a blue mess.  “I’ve done a slightly rubbish cake,” she said, ruefully. Stick to vodka and cards, Vic.  That’s a winning combination in anyone’s book.

Lovely Mary was on hand with a smile and just the right amount of praise. “All of them have been baked beautifully.”  In the end, Kimberley won and everyone applauded heartily.  You know why Bake Off is such a success? Because nobody is mean, or needlessly cruel.  Everyone has a laugh, helps each other, and treats it as the good fun it is.  We love it.