Marketing at its brightest – the winter warmer edition

Ah, what a wonderful thing is Twitter. It is actually, but that’s for another time.

Last week, yet another in the regular stream of promoted tweets landed in my account, from Innocent (of smoothies fame) and advertising their veg pots.

According to the tweet, these are “anti-winter food” and all you need to do is: “1. Buy veg pot. 2. Heat up as per instructions. 3. Put in face. 4. Beat winter.”

No food in the history of humankind has ever ‘beaten’ winter like these pots – which have the added benefit of offering to supply you with three portions of your recommended daily fruit and veg intake.

Obviously prices will vary slightly, but at present, Ocado has them at £3.90 a pot or £6 for two.

They vary in weight between 380 and 390g per pot.

Looking at one of those that is advertised in the tweet, the Mexican sweet potato chilli veg pot (390g) contains:

Cooked Brown Rice (17%)[Water, Brown Rice], Tomatoes, Water, Carrot, Pinto Beans, Red Kidney Beans, Sweet Potato (5)%, Onion, Potato, Red Peppers, Red Onion, Sweetcorn, Spinach, Vegetable Oil, Marinated Jalapeno Peppers (0.8%) [Jalapeno Peppers, Water, Vinegar, Salt, Sugar, Spices], Cornflour, Coconut Sugar, Lime Juice, Garlic, Cajun Seasoning [Spices, Herbs, Mustard Seed, Salt, Sugar], Sea Salt, Smoked Paprika (0.2%), Coriander, Green Chilli, Black Pepper.

Now even a fairly cursory glance at this list will shows that it’s not exactly chock full of junk and additives – that’s not an issue, although pre-processed vegetables do lose nutrients the longer they wait between prep and consumption.

The question that’s worth looking at, though, is the cost, so let’s look at that in some detail.

Next – water. Well, I’m not going to calculate that, for fairly obvious reasons.

Felicity Cloake, in her ‘how to’ series in the Guardian, suggests using 450g of basmati for four people – 112g per person – and this seems to tally with a variety of other sources.

Let’s take Waitrose’s ‘easy cook’ wholegrain rice essential, which is £1.79 for 1 kilo (18p per 100g).

So our 17% of 390g is 66.3g is just under 10p – and remember that the ingredients list states honestly that that rice also includes the water that will have swelled it during cooking.

Next up, tomatoes. If we’re going for convenience, then let’s have another tin – Waitrose ‘essential’ chopped tomatoes in juice – 400g for 55p (100g = 14p).

It’s more difficult to calculate since we don’t know what percentage of the ingredients it represents, but it’s less than 17% and more than 5%, given it’s position between the ingredients for which a specific percentage is listed.

This is, incidentally, also a good illustration of why ingredients lists are not necessarily as easy to read as you might expect.

So on those tomatoes, let’s pretend it’s 10% – we can, as you’ll see, afford to err on the side of generosity. That would be about 39g of tomatoes, rolling in at around 5.46p.

So, after the main two ingredients, we’re on just under 15.46p.

We’ve calculated for just 27% of the contents.

The only other individual percentages given add up to just 1%.

Let’s allow another 2% for everything else – all the seasonings and the vegetable oil – and we have a new total of 29%. In which case, let’s make things easy and pretend it’s 30%.

We need to find 70% of that 390g from the remaining vegetables and pulses.

Let’s say 10% for carrots – 10.4p.

10% for each lot of beans – 0.09p and 0.078p. We’re up to 60% now and a staggering 26.028p.

Thankfully, we know that sweet potato constitutes 5% and, at an Ocado price of £2.52 per kilo, for 19.5g, that would cost a whopping 50p (rounded up).

So that’s 65% and 26.52p.

Vegetables. Chopping board. Knife. Not rocket science

Let’s call the onion and potato 10% each. Then the red peppers, red onion and sweetcorn all 5% each.

More Ocado prices: onion (80p per kilo), potato (90p per kilo), red peppers (£9.94 per kilo), red onion (£1 per kilo), sweetcorn (17p per 100g).

Onion = 8p. Potato = 9p. Red pepper = 50p (rounded up). Red onion = 5p and sweetcorn = 0.008p.

So, we’ve made up 390g – and it’s cost us just 98.528p.

For the sake of this very rapid experiment, both the red pepper and sweet potato prices are probably higher than you’d need to pay because I had to look at bags in order to get a weight.

I haven’t even attempted to calculate the cost for spices and seasonings, because these are the things that we have in our cupboards and use over varying lengths of time – but certainly not just for one quite small lunch.

The point is that an Innocent veg pot doesn’t cost anything like £3.90 (or even £3 in a special offer) to produce.

Of course, you’re also paying for the container, for the wrapper, for the advertising and other marketing (including someone promoting tweets about it); for the wages of those who manufacture it and the profits for the manufacturer and the retailer and any transport company in between (and there’s nothing inherently wrong with profit).

You’re paying for the development of the product, for design and for the upkeep of the machinery that makes it.

On the other hand, you could just throw together some veg and some herbs and spices, cook and then divvy out into a microwavable container. Take it to work and shove in the office microwave (if you have one). Then “put in face”.

The calculations above make me almost dizzy – but that’s what the marketing people want. Then you won't think what you're paying for.

It’ll be far, far cheaper – you can even use the container again and again too, so it’s more environmentally friendly as well.

It’ll be every bit as healthy and it’ll keep you just as warm against any winter chills as a pot of processed vegetables.

The marketing of this product relies on the consumer believing that £3.90 – or £3 – is actually cheap for the convenience; and not remembering that it takes next to no time to chop some vegetables, cook them, add some seasoning and herbs, and then pop them in a container.

And you really don’t need to give in to Coca-Cola (which owns 90% of Innocent Drinks) in order to enjoy a warming lunch this winter.

Breakfast club, redux

The Great Breakfast Conundrum hoved into view again this month, with the Lesser Spotted Lunch Teaser following hot on its heels.

For all my whinges on the former – and some of you may remember this post from spring about the dire state of breakfasts in general and mine specifically – when we arrived back from holiday at the beginning of the month, the likelihood was a reversion to a continuation of previous practise after a few weeks of French respite on that front as well as many others.

And the same applied to lunch.

There was no particular decision; no eureka moment. But the change started when I thought I'd try, once more, to make lunch to take to work.

There’s been no shortage of encouragement before – George sent me two books of packed lunch suggestions – but they fell by the wayside.

What I found myself doing this time around was simple enough: for instance, mixing up a little couscous with some softened sultanas, a bit of sliced chilli, a few olives and other bits and pieces.

It worked fine, it was easy and quick, and I enjoyed eating it.

And then one morning, when I was up really early, I decided to have breakfast at home. Beans on toast, as it happened. Hardly something that takes long to fling together. And it cooked while I was doing other things.

A couple of days later, I did it again.

And then, one morning, I had a couple of soft boiled eggs instead. Lovely.

It was only when I was on the bus that I realised that the lunch I’d packed that morning didn’t include any starchy carbs – no couscous that day or rice or pasta or bread.

It was cheese, with some olives, some pickled beetroot and some pear, and a drizzle of Balsamico.

‘Blimey,’ I thought, ‘I’m going to be starving by this evening.’

But surprise, surprise: that wasn’t the case at all. I was comfortable throughout the day.

So for the next few days, I did something similar, saving my starch for the evening meal.

At the same time, something else struck me. For some years, off and on, I’ve been aware of getting a very faintly rumbling stomach – usually in the afternoon, after lunch.

Nothing particularly drastic, though, at its worst, I’d find myself waddling quickly to the loo.

I did try some of those probiotic yogurt drinks. But that had little or no discernible impact.

And so I simply drifted.

Well, things are changing and what started out simply as a way of controlling my food for the sake of taste and a lack of boredom is becoming a different sort of experiment.

We eat, as a nation, vast amounts of bread – and most of it is made by the Chorleywood process, which involves (apart from anything else) ramming it full of extra yeast to cut the time that it takes to make a loaf.

A week or two ago, I remembered a relative telling me that they and their mother had a slight gluten intolerances.

I began to wonder if I was in a similar situation – or put slightly differently, had a very small intolerance to Chorleywood. With no bread products at breakfast and no bread products at lunch, the rumbling stomach seems to have disappeared – at least at present.

In the mornings in particular, I’m also feeling lighter. Breakfast has become a couple of eggs, whether soft boiled or as an omelette, with a banana and a glass of fruit juice.

Back in March, I’d asserted that, getting up at 6.30am, I wasn’t ready to eat.

Well, I’ve sorted this out by rising at around 6am instead.

Now, I sit down to eat properly, and I’m actually enjoying it. Really good eggs are worth paying a bit more for. Really good eggs are gorgeous.

The lunches have been varied, but it remains the same basic idea of a couple of portions of fruit or veg, plus a source of protein. And easy and quick to put together in a morning.

I haven’t checked out the respective costs, but I suspect that, by and large, I’m spending less too – particularly if you factor in the waste that used to occur with food that was bland and boring and generally uninspiring.

And after three full, uninterrupted weeks of packed lunches, plus almost three weeks (barring a couple of days in the first week) of breakfasts at home, hopefully that’s a habit well on the way to being established.

As a special treat (I hope) this weekend, tomorrow's breakfast will involve something I haven't eaten in decades – a kipper.

Breakfast is on the way to becoming the feast that it should be.

Lunch just got a lot better

It’s become a regular occurrence to find myself complaining about the state of lunches on a work day.

It wasn’t so much the case that there was no variety available as the quality – and cost. Pret a Manger might have been decent (apart from an obsession with rocket), but it was costly.

The in-house ‘deli bar’ was poor and my own occasional efforts were variable, revealing a distinct lack of creativity on the packed lunch front.

Two things may have changed all that.

One of those has been the move to the new offices, with the company running the catering facilities determined that it should be their flagship contract.

Breakfast is considerably better. Lunch is better too – they have a proper kitchen now to start with.

But the other factor was the arrival of a slender tome from my friend George, which was in direct response to the most recent complaints in these columns.

The book in question is The Packed Lunch, a collection of recipes from Australian Women’s Weekly.

It’s a bit of a revelation – not just because there are some good recipes in there, but also because it offers some very good general tips.

For instance, in many cases, it’s best not to dress a salad the night before: carry the dressing to work in a different container and only decant it when you’re about to eat.

Now why hadn’t I thought of that before? It’s obvious when I consider a few of my previous attempts to prepare something for myself and have made exactly that mistake. You can end up with leaves, for instance, that are simply a mess and utterly unappetising after sitting for hours in a dressing.

As it happened, the first recipe that I tried could be dressed as soon as it was ready to go in the box.

Simply cook some lentils gently in a little water, then drain and cool. The recipe called for this to be added to “canned” beetroot. Now I assume that this is an Australian thing, because I’ve never seen such over here, but unlike the reviewer on Amazon, I didn’t get all negative, but simply halved some baby pickled beets (which I love) instead, and then dressed, as per instructions, with a little Balsamico.

When I sat down to eat, I added some soft cheese that’d I’d diced and then packed into a separate, small container. And very nice it was too, without requiring any great effort.

The following day, I took in two quarters of a frittata that I’d made with a wide array of ingredients – the idea of the frittata came from the book (I wouldn't have thought of it as a packed lunch item), the ingredients from the combination of my imagination, fridge and cupboard.

Again, a success – and the remainder kept well enough to be enjoyed for the following day.

On day four (the last at work before the Easter break), I ate in the deli. Much better than I had expected.

But on Monday evening, the eve of our first day back after the break, I’d sliced red onion, roasted red pepper and celery. And this time, I took the dressing to the office in a little jar, together with another little pot of diced goat’s cheese.

The salad was another of mine ideas, based on what I had in. The dressing was straight from the book: a teaspoon of tomato pesto, a teaspoon of white wine vinegar and two teaspoons of olive oil, shaken but not stirred.

And again, this was very good. The salad kept well and still had loads of crunch; the cheese hadn’t been discoloured by sitting with everything else overnight and the dressing was a success.

Today, it was another frittata – softened onion and three different cheeses this time.

But something else is making a difference too.

In the past, I’d invariably sit at my desk, working while eating breakfast and lunch. Cloud Nine was great as a bar, for drinking and socialising, but it wasn’t somewhere that I ever wanted to sit down in to eat.

The new canteen, with tables and chairs extending into the atrium, is a pleasure to spend time in.

So I’ve been taking my food down there to eat. It’s an enormous lifestyle change – and a very positive one.

I’m currently trying to do some research on ‘the French paradox’ – the question of why the French can consume such amounts of fatty foods (including such delights as cheese and butter and paté and foie gras) without the heart disease that would be considered over here as an inevitable consequence of such a diet. The French also do not have the same levels of obesity – in spite of their incredibly rich diet, that's high in fat and so many of the things that we have demonised.

One of the things that I’m already coming across repeatedly is that the French don’t sit in front of the TV for dinner or at their office desk for lunch.

They pay attention to their food and take their time to eat it – it helps, of course, that it's usually worth paying attention to.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have even shown that French people in a McDonalds take longer over a meal there than Americans in the same restaurant.

Now clearly this is not the sum total of what causes ‘the French paradox’, but it is quite revealing.

At present, sitting down properly to eat my lunch in pleasant surroundings instead of at a desk, I don’t rush – and yes, I have actually been appreciating what I’m eating. Sometimes there’s even company and conversation.

Even setting aside the question of whether it’s good for my health, it’s so much more pleasant.

And a big thank you to George for the book.


• The French paradox (2004 article).