Food trend watcher inspires Europatat TRADE AND MARKETING in a restaurant before, anywhere in the world: Are you hungry? Subsequently serving a beautiful vase containing inedible twigs of a very special Danish plant with a bit of reindeer moss around it as an entrée. ‘Bon appétit’, they said with a smile. It’s part of the story, Everything that’s served here is especially fresh and comes from this region”, was the message.’ ‘The guiding principles for the Willem & Drees concept are: seasonal, better quality, fresh, shorter travel distances so respect for the environment, transparent, honest, which means the person behind the product is clearly visible.’ opened the first “no hamburger, only salads” restaurant in Paris. But will they keep the chips!? Raw is hip It can go even further, the trend watcher tells his Audience. That trend is called Raw Food. ‘Uncooked food, as raw as possible and heated to a maximum of 30 degrees Celsius, which is no good for the potato. It doesn’t use any milk or meat products at all. What’s dished up there is pure vegetarian food. What started as a small movement of a group of hippies in the United States is now hip all over the world. However, you don’t find any flower-power in the modern Raw Food restaurants. They are stylish, austere and modern. What you eat here are vitamins, minerals and fibres, that’s what it radiates. It goes very well with the potato, by the way.’ Do the match And then there are the trends that demand a halt, such as obesity, Steenbergen shows on the screen. The trend that emerges from that is “Do the match”, tackle the battle (with obesity). ‘Do the match is currently synonymous in the US for a complete meal containing less than 500 kilo calories. In this market, you communicate entirely in figures that are below the mentioned maximum. Communication in the world of top restaurant chefs is again completely different’, the trend watcher tells his Audience. Present-day chefs are currently following the trend of edible flowers on the plates. Dining with a laugh, frivolous surprises with a story for customers with a fat purse who want to relax in a congenial atmosphere. ‘Restaurant “Oud Sluis” run by top chef Sergio Herman in the Netherlands is one of them. An extreme example can be found in restaurant Noma in Copenhagen. Around 30,000 people are continuously on the waiting list, while they only have forty places. The minimum price for a dinner is 400 euros. But you do get food with a story. Here they asked me something I have never been asked Floss works A word-wide trend in which these “ingredients” are also to be found is called Floss. This term stands for fresh organic seasonable sustainable food. Steenbergen: ‘A wonderful example of this is found in the Netherlands. It’s called Willem & Drees. Two young entrepreneurs, Willem Treep and Drees Peter van den Bosch, who both formerly worked in the world of Unilever, wanted food to return from “old and far” to “fresh and near”. They developed a concept to get current supermarkets to sell potatoes, vegetables and fruit from the region around their shops, not further away than 40 kilometres. The guiding principles are: seasonal, better quality, fresh, shorter travel distances so respect for the environment, transparent, honest, which means the person behind the product is clearly visible.’ It works because there are already scores of growers and hundreds of supermarket branches that embrace the Willem & Drees concept. Be there What Steenbergen wants to show his Audience with all these examples is that the potato can be fitted into every trend and concept, the only thing is that you need to be there. A popular snack bar in Gent (Belgium) called Vincent sells chips in beautiful, pointed paper bags with an extensive wine and beer menu. There are hundreds, thousands of opportunities you can think of to communicate the potato to the consumer in a different, an unusual way. ● Leo Hanse and Jaap Delleman FAVOURABLE FOOTPRINT In his innovative talk, Hans Steenbergen pointed to the value that consumers give to healthy and honest food. Healthy food that is also sustainably grown, in which case the favourable footprint of the potato crop is definitely an extra advertising argument. Professor Anton Haverkort, who works at Plant Research International (PRI), has a few figures available for the Europatat congress. His colleague, the British researcher Dr John Hillier, developed a calculation tool a few years ago to calculate the footprint of products. Haverkort has made this calculation tool available for the cultivation of potatoes. He has made a distinction between the various growing methods. It was shown that the footprint of the potato was indeed favourable in Haverkort’s calculation. ‘A footprint indicates how many grams of CO2 are emitted for a quantity of 1,000 kilograms of potatoes from their growth in the field until they are put on the shelves. For an end product such as crisps and chips, the footprint is about 120 grams of CO2. Approximately two-thirds of this is used in transport and processing and one-third, 40 grams, in cultivation. Potato World 2012 • number 3 7 Pagina 6
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