Can you imagine? 20000 new food products!

Green and purple ketchup, mayonnaise from a squeezable bottle, soup you can eat while driving your car. New food products like these aren’t just flights of fancy.

Of each year’s new products, Lord said, only one-third will be considered successful in two years.

“This is called ‘product churn,'” he said. “The industry puts a lot of products out there and waits to see which ones stick.”

And we feel bad or good for Maggi ban 😀 😀. It was actually a right move to ban one brand so that industry can come up with few more improved brands 😀.

And during this sick churning, you and me, the supermarket consumers, become victim of churning.

Through the way we live, work and play, we don’t really choose our food – our food chooses us. And that is sad reality of so called modern life. By TV, by ads, by peer pressure, we are forced to useless food. Processed food. And pay hefty for nearly free-of-cost nature’s gift.

Unless we get rid of GDP obsession, situation will remain same. There will be group of decision maker who will control our food habits and by that control all of us. This is not freedom. Is it?

– Buy from the source (Farmers) by bypassing entire sick food chain discussed above
– Cook/Prepare for self/Family/Friends – that is really an ideal processed food. Processed by love and nurtured by care 🙂
– Live in community of like-minded so you don’t have to follow social dharma and attend parties and gathering where slave-food (processed food) is served often 🙂

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Research

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New food products lifeblood of industry

http://apps.caes.uga.edu/gafaces/index.cfm?public=viewStory&pk_id=1682

Green and purple ketchup, mayonnaise from a squeezable bottle, soup you can eat while driving your car. New food products like these aren’t just flights of fancy.

“Food product development is critical to the survival and growth of the companies within our vast and vigorously competitive, $800 billion American food industry,” said Aaron Brody. “Probably a quarter of a million different food products are available, with 15,000 to 20,000 or so new items introduced annually into the crowded mix to try to satisfy consumer desires.”

“In the past, and to a degree, even today, to develop new food products, we went to the kitchen or laboratory or pilot plant and whipped up a recipe, which was sent to marketing to sell,” Brody said. “Or we assembled a group of creative people to brainstorm ideas that were sent to the lab. Or we waited for farmers to grow a new crop.”

Today’s food industry leaders have to know the consumers’ wants, create the right packaging and generate a profit, he said.

John Lord, a food product development and marketing researcher from St. Joseph’s University and member of the FOODPI&C program, said the high number of new products announced each year is actually much smaller than it seems.

“There may be 20,000 new UPC codes … each year, but a very, very small number of these are really new to the world,” he said. “Many are just new adaptations of existing products or temporary or seasonal products like Oreos with a different color icing.”