Lets tell it like it is

“We pressed 9 Apples, we mashed 2 Bananas, we crushed 50 Raspberries, we squeezed 2 Oranges, we squashed 247 Cranberries”

That’s the ingredient list on the back of a very successful UK brand of Fruit Juices and Smoothies. Innocent (do have a look at their web site too, http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/) have broken the mold of their market with their innocent approach.

Given the growing mistrust that consumers have about too much of the food industry, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all be like Innocent. But, I hear many of you saying, “It’s easy for them. I have an ambient long life product which needs its preservatives, colorings and flavors…..”

Maybe …. or maybe like a friend of mine in the industry, you might find that changing as many as you can from artificial to natural gets you a better taste, a cleaner ingredient list and surprisingly even a lower cost.

And why stop there? Aren’t many food factories really just giant kitchens?

In kitchens, we have recipes not ingredient lists, we use natural products, we’re careful about the ingredients we buy, we check the quality of meat, vegetables and grains and reject any that aren’t good enough for our family.

In kitchens we keep things clean and if we’re really good we keep washing our hands and making sure that we don’t drop hair or our watches into what we’re cooking.In kitchens we keep our raw meat away from our cooked foods.

In kitchens we’re proud to say “I cooked that”

In kitchens we are almost as good as the food industry is in factories.So how about we start talking about our industry a little differently.

Let’s be proud of our great big kitchens, our obsession with hygiene, our rigid buying standards.

Let’s tell our family consumers how we’re not so different from them.

Let’s tell them who was the cook on the shift that made this product.

Let’s even let them look into the kitchen. Whenever they want. After all a web cam is pretty easy and we’ve nothing to hide – have we?