I’m delighted to have been asked to return to speak again for ASAIM SE Asia and The US Grains Council at the 8th SE Asia Soy Food Seminar.

I was with them last year at the 2012 event at The Hyatt in Singapore. This year I’m really excited for 2 reasons – I’ve got a great new story to share on Soy Branding and the venue is the Westin Nusa Dua Resort in Bali, Indonesia!

I’ll be talking about selecting the right “Innovation Space” for your product launch and the rules of the game that must be respected. I’m also looking forward to catching up with my Soy Industry friends. Who knows, we may even find the pool?

I’ll be arriving a day early on 20th May and will be running a FourFactors Marketing Masterclass on Tuesday 21 May. Do let me know if you’d like to join!

I just got back from Dublin where I was speaking at the World Food Technology & Innovation Forum and wanted to share this inspiring new packaging idea with you. As I finished my presentation I was approached by a familiar face – Helen Cooper – another ex-Boots The Chemist marketer who showed me her exciting entrepreneurial idea for on-the-go packaging…

Inspired by IKEA and a bendy straw. Yes that’s what it took to come up with this moment of genius that you’ll going to start seeing a lot more of in the years ahead.

The “Hopper Pot” as it’s called is ‘pocket sized and perfect’. When you are on the move and space is at a premium, trying to fit a pot of portable food into your bag is at best awkward and at worst dangerous!

Enter the Hopper Pot(TM) – the new way to “flat pack” your food. Both squash proof and space efficient it’s small when you need to take it with you and expands to size when you want to use it to eat your food from. It’s perfect for putting into rucksacks or commuter bags.

And it’s already been winning awards: Gold at the Lunch 2012 exhibition in London as well as being shortlisted at the UK Packaging Awards 2012.

Find out more here: http://www.grasshopper-foods.com/hopper-pot/

For more information you can contact the Grasshopper Team at: http://www.grasshopper-foods.com/contact-us/

I just received an update from a friend (Thanks Maya!) who’d spotted me in a tweet from SWA the leading business media publication in Indonesia.

Following my talk in Jakarta on 11 October for my good friends at the Dwi Sapta Integrated Marketing Agency, I did an interview with Denoan Rinaldi from SWA magazine.

If you speak Bahasa Indonesian you can read the full article here. If you can’t, my main points are:

1) How Indonesia is fast becoming the benchmark for many other emerging markets.

2) Burgeoning Middle Classes are developing an ever increasing appetite for healthier and more functional benefit led products [..]

Harvard social psychologist, Amy Cuddy with her acclaimed TED talk on “How Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.”

A thoughtful, insightful, instructive and, at times, moving 20 minutes introduction to the proven benefits of “Power Posing”.

You’ll learn that, “Non verbals actually govern how we think and feel about ourselves”. Now that is a critical learning. It means you can ‘act’ and ‘be’ your way to performance and achieving better results than today, even future greatness.

You see, according to Cuddy et al, feelings and behaviour go both ways. So you can pretend and feel it. We know that our minds change our bodies. But it’s also true that our bodies can change our minds. It works with smiling and happiness. It can also work with power posing and power.

Find out the full detail in the academic paper from Cuddy et al here.

Jeffrey Hyman - Founder of the Food & Drink Innovation Network

“Co-Creation” is something of a buzz in the world of NPD right now. But what is it all about? And how can you make sure you are maximising its benefits while avoiding its less well publicised pitfalls? My friend Jeffrey Hyman, is helping us to find out…

Join the interactive Co-Creation Experiment here.

One way to find out is to get involved with a neat free experiment set up by The Food & Drink Innovation Network (FDIN). The FDIN is the UK’s Best Practice Club for Food & Beverage NPD; a place where those from all areas of the industry can meet, talk, share and learn.

The way the FDIN works is [..]