Why food trends are hard to digest

The first week of January wouldn’t be complete without considering the predictions of what we’ll be eating and where we’ll be dining over the next 12 months.

Passions for food, and an appetite for new experiences, reached new levels in 2011 with the arrival of dozens of pop-up ventures, new restaurants and destinations, so how can trends keep emerging in a market where now almost anything goes as long as it tastes good? Ironically, it could be argued that the predictions drive the trends rather than the other way round. Take for instance the predicted trend for pickling. Would we really be rushing out to buy herring and vinegar, or vats of pickled walnuts at the farmers market, if we hadn’t been told that we would? It will inevitably become a trend, big or small, if the media says it will. 

Had Noma not been named World’s Best Restaurant – originally a successful marketing initiative from Restaurant Magazine - two years running, it is unlikely the media would have paid any attention to Scandinavian cuisine. However, a 12-page feature on Nordic cuisine in this month’s Delicious magazine shows there’s no doubt the media believe in this trend. 

Take sustainability in 2011 as the prime example. Hugh brought us the second instalment of Fish Fight on Channel 4 and we showed concern about the fish we were eating. But are consumers still concerned now or was it simply a trend that came and went alongside the media coverage? 

We may well see a rise in demand in 2012 for salt beef, English veal meatballs and salted caramel but who’s to say it’ll consumer demand rather than the presence in the media?

Posted by Liz Lock

Rioja – getting behind the bottle

Rioja is one of the most loved and best known wine regions amongst UK wine drinkers but how many of them know what goes on behind the scenes at every winery to achieve Rioja’s trademark integration of fruit and oak?

 I’ve been lucky enough to get to know Spain’s most famous wine region on four press trips this year. Seeing the landscapes and soil, and getting first-hand accounts from the people on the ground in the vineyards and wineries gives you a real appreciation of the painstaking work that goes into producing each bottle that ends up on UK shelves and wine lists. At any given time around 1.2m barrels of wine – one of the highest concentrations in the world - are carefully ageing in oak before being stored in bottles at the winery until they are released to the market ready to drink. The sheer volume of wine is striking – from underground labyrinths of tunnels lined with bottles under the town of Haro to the world’s largest barrel room at Campo Viejo, millions of litres of wine are stored across Rioja.

Whether the winery philosophy is traditional and steeped in history, such as Muga, which to this day employs an in-house cooper to make the barrels, or ultra-modern, such as Baigorri, an extraordinary construction reaching seven storeys underground to ensure that every step of the winemaking process can take place using gravity, with no need for pumps, no expense is spared in ensuring that optimum quality is preserved from the vineyard right through to the bottle that ends up on the wine merchant shelf or restaurant wine list here in the UK.

Posted by Lottie West

Supermarket price wars and the big picture

We Brits have always had a schizophrenic relationship with food and today is a prime example of that dichotomy. On the same day the FT, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent and the Daily Mail report on the UK’s frankly shameful £12bn food waste, the BBC (video) reports on the ‘austerity sandwich’ - two slices of bread with another slice of bread in-between. Surely £12bn could buy a slightly more exciting filling. Meanwhile the supermarket price war is being cited as a reason for falling inflation figures, which in this economic climate must be a good thing.

What the headlines don’t tell you is that neither the food waste nor the retailers’ discounting is sustainable. Food has been (too) cheap and plentiful for many of us for a long time. We need to remember that the global population is growing at such a rate that traditional farming can’t quite keep up. International grain prices have gone through the roof and combined with droughts, floods and now global warming we’re seeing falling agricultural yields just when they need to rise. It can’t be a coincidence that there have been food riots in more than 30 countries. Food security is becoming a concern for everyone. All of a sudden throwing out perfectly okay food is not just a problem for individual households in the UK. 

Posted by Toby Schuster

A different perspective on Britain's drinking culture

After all the sensationalist media reports about Britain’s binge drinking culture, here’s a refreshing perspective on the problem. Social anthropologist Kate Fox claims that it’s not the alcohol itself that’s the issue; it’s the fact that it’s socially acceptable in the UK for alcohol to be used as an excuse for antisocial behaviour. How many times have you heard people (and I’m not claiming that I haven’t been guilty myself) boasting of their drinking escapades? It’s not an exclusively British problem but seems to be the preserve of those nations with what Kate calls ‘ambivalent’ drinking cultures.

Her views seem to correlate with cultures that are famed for repressing their emotions to some extent. A Phipps team member who lived in Japan for a year often relates a tale of a staff party which ended with one of her co-workers setting fire to his own pubic hair! However, alcohol induced fights seem rare in Japan, as they do in Spain, a country where I have spent a lot of time. That’s not to say that the Spanish don’t drink a lot – I’ve been to fiestas in small towns where the drinking started at 11am and continued until 5am the next day. But perhaps drunken aggressive behaviour is less of an issue because the Spanish express themselves on a daily basis – shouting, arguing and hugging their friends – and don’t use alcohol as an emotional crutch in the way that the British do. Maybe we need to look at the social ills that lead to young people in Britain feeling the need to drown their sorrows in alcohol rather than using alcohol as a scapegoat?

Posted by Anna Harris-Noble

The Great British Beer Blog

British ale has undergone somewhat of a renaissance of late. Bottled ales are cropping up on supermarket shelves and, assisted by a generous duty relief for producers of less than 3,000 barrels a year, microbreweries are cropping up all over the place. The big trend for provenance and authenticity are being cited as main reasons and industry experts are predicting a further 50 new small breweries opening around the country this year. 

Conversely, the UK beer market has shrank by 7% last year and we're losing 25 pubs a week. On the other hand, Phipps client Sainsbury’s, has seen a 7% year-on-year growth in bottled beers this year. Capitalising on a renewed consumer appetite for real ales, Sainsbury’s earlier this year also launched a nationwide competition to find Britain’s best independently produced beer. ‘The Great British Beer Hunt’ drew entries from all over the country by brewers experimenting with new styles and reviving old ones all eager to get their beers out to a wider market.

Phipps is of course well known for its work in the wine industry but on working with Sainsbury’s on the Great British Beer Hunt we’ve discovered that beer is every bit as complex as wine and the wide array of media that have covered the event seem to agree.

Posted by Becky Erwood

Pens At The Ready...Food Writers Discuss Supermarkets

We were under no illusions…putting together a panel of distinguished food writers with food retailers, and asking them to debate the power of the supermarkets was always going to be an evening of conflicting views. And sure enough the event, hosted by the Guild of Food Writers delivered. Kicking off by highlighting a trend we discussed a few weeks ago Alex Renton claimed that food has become “too cheap” while Guardian writer Zoe Williams cited feminism as an influence on the way we eat, using “supermarket meal solutions” as an example of how the modern working woman doesn’t have time to shop around. Meanwhile, former ad-man turned food writer Tim Hayward argued that advertising has created perceived problems for which, in return, brands and supermarkets provide profitable solutions (a tactic he claimed perfectioned by the beauty industry). In defence of the retail sector Andrew Opie was calling for more fact checking in the media, and used BOGOFs as an example of skewing public perception, insisting the deals are not always funded by suppliers. Thankfully, Sophie of fresh produce supplier Barfoots bridged the gap between the two sides saying that whilst supermarkets have undeniable power it is up to suppliers to be smarter in the way they run their businesses. Not surprisingly for a group of foodies, the general consensus was that it was important for the people in the room to encourage their readers to shop at places other than supermarkets and show how that can be made easy. Then again, we couldn't help but think that this is really a middle classes debate, with the majority of the general public not having the time, money or interest to look beyond the supermarkets when it comes to shopping for food. Discuss. 

Posted by Becky Erwood

What Circulation Figures Say About Us

When The Guardian published the latest list of the Top 100 paid-for magazines we at Phipps couldn’t help drawing some conclusions on how these figures reflect the social trends of the year and consumers and their buying habits.

Forget House Beautiful, think House Maintenance

The rise in the circulation of Good Housekeeping (up 1.9%) and BBC Gardeners World (up 3.3%) suggests we’re keeping our houses clean and fingers green. The recession and stamp duty has forced home owners to stay put, and invest in their current home rather than putting the For Sale sign up. We’re less concerned with making our house look ready for buyers and more concerned with house maintenance and adding actual value to our homes while riding out the economic storm.

Nation of Economists

We know that in a recession the public pays more attention to the economy. This is certainly supported by The Economist’s circulation figure (up 6.4%) and The Week (up 3.2%), satisfying our need to understand what’s going on around us and making us better informed. It also explains why trashy celeb mags are on their way out. Heat magazine’s circulation figure is down a whopping 21.8% and while we could argue that the typical Heat reader has grown out of the mag, we also think that the fall in circulation figures of other celeb based weeklies such as New, Closer and Star show we’re less bothered about reaching into our recession-battled pockets to splash out on the latest z-list gossip.

TV event of the decade

The Kate Middleton wedding (who cared what Prince William was wearing?) led to a huge 26.8% increase in Hello!’s circulation. Having been the biggest TV event in history it’s not totally surprising that TV guides are on their way up. TV Choice topped the Top 100 list with a circulation of just under 1.5 million (up 3.5% year on year). What’s on TV follows as a close second, with an even higher year-on-year increase of circulation at 5.4% and Total TV Guide has a rise in circ of 7.7%. With less disposable income, this year was definitely the year for TV and we wonder if the Royal Wedding has catapulted us into a nation of couch potatoes.

Posted by Rachael Everitt