Food marketing is close to my heart. As a Food Marketing Consultant I see new trends / fads / ideas every week. It’s my job to look at these trends they way analysts look at the market. I take this stuff seriously.

Mostly I’m pretty unimpressed. Often there’s a weak attempt to re-package and re-message something we’ve seen before or something the World could certainly manage without.

But some trends linger and even become embedded. Some, like the Mediterranean Diet, even become a way of life. And with good reason. This is a diet which has been shown to convey long-term health benefits. That’s right. By simply substituting some of your current food ingredients for those eaten as part of the traditional Mediterranean Diet, you too can improve your health and, quite likely, extend your life.

In my previous post on the Mediterranean Diet I mentioned the excellent free ebook by Dr Simon Poole. You can download the entire ebook “The Taste of The Mediterranean” – a simple guide to benefiting from the so-called “Med Diet” approach by clicking here.

But Dr. Simon Poole wasn’t the only fascinating person I met while speaking at the FDIN Med Diet Seminar (27 June 2012). Any one interested in Food Marketing will be interested to know Sara Baer-Sinnott, President of Oldways. You see while the populations around the Mediterranean have been following their diet for millennia, this way of eating has only been recognised as a “diet” since 1992.

Sara was at that first conference where the term was coined. She has seen the entire movement –  way of eating and way of life – develop. Sara has been an instrumental figure at Oldways since its early days, joining the staff in 1992 to work on one of the first overseas Symposiums (Food, Culture and Discovery in Spain) and the first Mediterranean Diet Conference.

That’s all interesting history, but what Oldways is really famous for, is for creating and popularising the “Mediterranean Diet Pyramid” – a contemporary approach to delicious, healthy eating.

The Oldways Mediterranean Diet Pyramid

On his website, Dr. Simon Poole explains the power of the Oldways Mediterranean Diet Pyramid:

“To achieve a beautifully balanced and complete diet which combines the best types of proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and micronutrients, use the pyramid. Reproduced by kind permission from Olways. A laminated copy on your fridge is a great idea!

This simple illustration shows how to combine foods in quantities which have been shown to most closely represent the Mediterranean diet – the healthiest food combination in the World.

Creating a healthy week is easy using these ideas.”

You can find out more about Oldways at their website here.

Find out about other seminars and UK  based food marketing and food innovation networking events with the Food & Drink Innovation Network FDIN here.

Ever since I was invited to speak the FDIN’s Mediterranean Diet Seminar in 2012, I’ve been slightly obsessed with the simple power of eating the mediterranean diet.

Not only is the food utterly delicious, it goes a long way towards extending your life. To my thinking, that’s pretty special. All you need to do is to substitute what you may have eaten for what they’d be eating in traditional Greece, Italy, Spain, etc. and you can do wonders for your health.

Interested? I thoughts so. So Dr Simon Poole – who chaired the seminar back in June 2012 has made his (rather fabulous) introductory ebook freely available online. All you need to do is download, read, and enjoy. … But you’ll get more health benefits if you begin eating the diet.

Sample the sections here, or click this link to download the whole ebook to enjoy your your mobile device…

Introduction

1. A Mediterranean Weekly Shopping List
2. Bringing Colour To Your Table
3. Health Giving Oils
4. Bowled Over By Fruit
5. Fabulous Fast Foods
6. Healing Herbs, Glorious Garlic And Luscious Lemons
7. Seeds Of Life
8. Wonderful Wine (Tea And Coffee)
9. A Secret Chapter For Chocolate Lovers
10. Exercise For Energy

ConclusionAppendices

You can even access Dr Simon Poole’s Keynote Presentation from the FDIN seminar here.

I spoke on how to commercialise the mediterranean diet. How companies can benefit from the consumer trend for this ever more popular way of eating. You can find my slides here.

Find out more about UK Food Marketing & Food Innovation via the UK’s leading best practice club, The Food & Drink Innovation Network FDIN here.

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 [..]

HMT Senior Partner, Sam Waterfall at Tetra Pak's vast Anuga Exhibition Display in Cologne Germany in March 2012

From 27 – 29 March I was at Anuga Food Tec 2012 together with the great and the good of the Food Production Industry.

If you’ve never been to Anuga it is the International Trade Fair for Food & Drink Technology. What does that mean? Well, in simple language, it’s the machines that make, chop, blend, ferment, process and pack the foods and beverages that you and I consume everyday.

The Healthy Marketing Team were fully involved. I arrived on the [..]

Starbucks Logo History - courtesy of www.retailbiz.com.au

I’ve been a fan of Starbucks since 1996 – when a friend of mine returned from Vancouver, raving about the wonders of coffee in a way that had never been heard of previously the UK. Add to that my love for the passion in Howard Shultz’s Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time
(to this day one of the best business books I’ve ever read) and you could say I’m a long-term follower of the Starbucks evolution.

The Trend for Logo Simplification

Changing your logo when you are a major brand is a big deal. Companies invest hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars with branding and identity agencies to get it right. In recent years many of the major players have been removing the words from their logo. Nike is now just the swoosh. MTV finally removed ‘Music Television’ (let’s face it, it’s not been that for years). And more recently (January 5, 2011) The Starbucks Coffee Co. removed all of its words to become simply the Twin-Tailed Siren. [..]