Tilt

What is a Brand? from Tilt Studio Inc on Vimeo.

How to create Brands and what they are. Brands are beyond advertising and marketing… they tell a story.

This great video is worth the 5 minutes. It will change your entire view about the retail and loyalty consumer market; providing you with key insights to how the story has been crafted for us and made us believe in a brand. The video with the boat is breathtaking. This was shared with us by Anthony Garguilo from Compass’ Retail Brand Innovations Team at the Environments Summit last week.

Happy Halloween! Today is the day of ghouls and goblins,  a notorious treat-filled holiday. Kids come out for a night to seek sweets and sugary snacks and the house with the best and most tasty ones wins the ‘coolest’ award. It is excepted, supported and honored throughout the American past-time. This holiday represents the pinnacle of what we have come to know as Generation Snack and things are starting to a get a little tricky…

At an average of 540 additional calories we receive in snack food a day and about 24lbs worth of candy a year, we are an overfed and over sugared bunch. It is not just Halloween which ‘takes the cake’ in terms of calories, and we need to change the way we live. To us, eliminating the need for snacks is not the solution, since we now can’t live any other way with our busy lives, but there might be other solutions. What about increasing the need and actually consuming healthier snacks all day instead? We need to look forward to the future and think about what is up next.

We are already eating on the go… what if we just eliminated the need for eating a full meal and moved our area of interest to consuming lots of snacks throughout the day? If we played our cards right, we might be less hungry all around, have a more consistent blood sugar level, and absolutely 100% be able to maintain a conscious amount of required daily nutrients. There would be a lot of opportunity to be creative with meal times and to spend less time over all sitting and consuming.

This might not be the answer, but it is an idea to create change. Being open  to new ideas is what we should be focused on.

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HAVE FUN WITH HEALTHY SNACKS THIS HALLOWEEN

Using healthy, plant-based foods, you can spice up any Halloween party or snack. Check out the Almond and Apple Teeth or the Olive Eye and Guacamole Deviled Eggs or a Carrot and Almond White Mashed Potato Dip. Just be creative and think beyond the typical snack pack or candy bar.

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WHAT IS TILT DOING?

Tomorrow we are hosting a Webinar on the Snackpart. Our mission is to create change in the world using healthy, fresh and affordable food. We believe fully in altering and adjusting our mindset around snacks instead of just going back in time to the meal. Here is our future-style of eating. Small meals,every day, all day.

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Our Halloween Lunner is currently lacking photography to tell the story, but we will get them up shortly.

Set on the fabulous rooftop of our good friend and supporter Monica Björklund in West London, we had a great Sunday afternoon meal. We call this Lunner which is the time between Lunch and Dinner. In the States, depending on what we ate, we would still call this Brunch, but in the UK we had to come up with another word that would be appreciated by the patrons of the event.

Themed pumpkin style, we would call this a super sustainable meal – since some of the dishes played off the same ingredients and we removed waste from the pumpkin and made it into soup! We had a delicious pumpkin soup made from the inside of the pumpkins we carved and tiny orange pancakes made from a portion of the juice from baking the pumpkins.

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ON THE MENU (all recipes are always available, so send an email if you want one!)

We always try to incorporate a diverse menu of offerings and it is typically vegetarian at least since the majority of our friends & family try to eat a relatively healthy and animal-free diet.

• Apps – Fresh Salsa and Hummus with Crudites & Corn Chips: 1/2 R, V, GF, DF, WF, SF
• Main – Pumpkin & Root Veggie Soup (with Toasted Pumpkin Seeds and Kale Chips on Top): V, GF, DF, WF, SF, CF
• Main – Baby Orange Pancakes: R, V, GF, LDF, WF, SF, CF, SGF
• Main – Fresh Apple Salad with a Balsamic Dressing: R, V, GF, DF, WF, SF, CF, SGF
• Main – Freshly Baked Rosemary, Olive, Sun Dried Tomatoes and Feta Whole Wheat Bread: VEG, SF, CF, SGF
• Drinks – Green Tea Sparkling Tea: V, GF, DF, WF, SF, CF, SGF
• Drinks – Virgin Mulled Apple Cider: V, GF, DF, WF, SF, CF, SGF
• Dessert – Apple Cobbler: VEG, GF, LDF, WF, SF, CF, SGF
• After Dessert Drink – Local English Rose: V, GF, DF, WF, SF, CF, SGF

Key – R: Raw, V: Vegan (overrides VEG), VEG: Vegetarian, GF: Gluten Free, DF: Dairy Free, LDF: Lactose Dairy Free (only cheese, milk, butter products), WF: Wheat Free, SF: Soya Free, SGF: Sugar Free, CF: Corn Free

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The TILT group of friends in London is strong and it was hard to keep this to a small group (knowing that not everyone could fit on the roof!). Oddly enough, we just had two English folk join us. We represented the world – America (of course), India, Denmark, Sweden, Egypt, Russia and Israel.

We had a great time snacking and talking and then moved in for dinner and pumpkin carving later on in the evening. There were talks of yoga and definitely some acupressure was involved at one point.

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EPILEPSY AT FRIENDS & FAMILY

One of our good friends who came to visit had a minor seizure right after dinner. An avid athlete who does triathlons on a regular basis, bikes everywhere he goes, rarely drinks and eats as healthy as he can, this is a recent issue that he had been having. Just 6 weeks strong, this was the 4th episode and it was a minor one at that. He came to us not feeling very well to start and it turns out dinner might have been something to put him over the edge and trigger an episode.

After doing a few hours of research into this, we had to admit we were really disappointed with the information found online in terms of how diet and exercise could help. It looks like the less you do the better… so we are going to do a little trial on our own. Here is the recommended diet called Ketogenic which I completely disagree with, although there were positive results with Epileptic seizures, it looks like the repercussions were not any better.

This was interesting… perhaps he could be eating something causing the seizures? Maybe a food allergy?  The first step is going to be testing. What is interesting is it happened right after we gave him soup and because  sodium intake was one of the named catalysts. In our soup while we used an organic Bouillon, it is obviously high in sodium, even though its the good kind. We are going to also monitor his wheat, dairy, corn and soy intake. Those are four main causes of triggers and on Sunday we thought back to what he had eaten and it was a ton of wheat (in the bread), corn chips and then the soup which was probably very dehydrating.

This is another interesting article about coeliac and epilepsy. (The researcher is a veterinarian, but she does research on kids).

For reference, if you have a friend who goes through this in front of you, there are ways that you can help… with a little prep work. WATCH THIS

Stay tuned on this…

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Food Day was a success yesterday in Times Square in NYC. Mario Batali and friends had a massive table in the heart of the city with friends, family and industry members… all sharing in the magic of food.
©2011 PHILIP GREENBERG

Click here to go to foodday.org!

For media contact talk to Jeff Cronin

The past few weeks have been busy for us here at TILT in London. We have been visiting various trade shows looking at new ideas as well meeting new and current clients. It’s been a time of learning, researching and engaging which has been both inspiring and uplifting.

At the Packaging Innovations  London 2011 Trade Show, I attended a seminar by Chris Baker, General Manager of TerraCycle entitled “Eliminating the Idea of Packaging Waste.” We are currently in the process of designing our own TILT packaged food range and I wanted to know what other companies are doing to tackle the issue of food packaging waste.

Chris started off by stating, “There is no waste in nature,” everything is reused or has a natural second life and it was with this focus that TerraCycle was created. How could this be recreated in our commercialized consumer world?

TerraCycle was founded in 2001 by a student who produced his own organic fertilizer. But the difference was he packaged it in used soda bottles. Recycling not only the output from the worms he used to create the fertilizer but also reusing packaging for a delivery system. Today TerraCycle works to create a different option for used materials diverting them from landfills and incinerators. The company works mainly with new waste streams i.e working to recycle or upcycle waste that was previously seen as non recyclable.  In this way they exist in harmony with local councils and governments existing recycling schemes rather than in competition with.

TerraCycle’s products range from new products created from recycling plastics and turning them into waste bins (Waste to waste!!) to products such as baby bibs made from old packaging from baby wipes.  Major companies collaborate with the company promoting the benefits of recycling and sending in their own waste streams. Upscaled products were also sold for a limited time in Walmart.

Communities can engage with TerraCycle by collecting waste and sending it in. This also raises money for charities and spreads the reusing waste message. The company website states that over £77,000 has been raised for charity already and has collected 7,205,133 units of waste in the UK alone. In the States this figure is a whopping $2,993,998 for charity and 2,113,708,673 units of waste.

I must admit I had previously thought that TerraCycle merely created recycled packaging but I can see they do so much more. They really get involved in the local and global communities and provide one answer to the issue of eliminating waste. Food and packaging waste is a global concern and one all companies and consumers must work together to face.  TerraCycle is a company offering a viable alternative to landfills and incinerators definitely worth checking out.

Our Top 5 Trends for 2012 are:

1. THE SAVE ME ECONOMY: Backed into a corner by tight credit, weak job prospects, unstable home values and troubled national economies, consumers push themselves to develop a new, more sophisticated approach to saving.
2. THE FUTURE OF SHOPPING: Shaken into action by a recession and enabled by a flock of nascent technologies, savvy and empowered consumers are pushing the purchase path evolution with their expectations for seamless and individualized experiences.
3. HEALTH LIABILITY: The way consumers think about their health and medical care is shifting: from reactive, immediate decision to preventive, long-term plan and from isolated and private health-maintenance efforts to — like it or not — a communal, collaborative responsibility.
4. PEOPLE POWER: True empowerment is a force to be reckoned with, as growing numbers of people across the globe raise their voices to be heard. Empowered consumers in still-strong economies like India and China are speaking with their wallets as well, making choices and demanding changes that shake the status quo.
5. RIGHT NOW GENERATION: Driven by confidence and a rising passion to create their own benchmarks for success and morality, a Right Now Generation of youth is coalescing in emerging nations across the globe.

Innovation is defined by the popular writer Scott Berkun as ‘significant positive change’ a concept  which I’m sure you would all agree is becoming increasingly important in today’s society which is plagued with financial, economic, societal and environmental challenges. As a brief glance at the world’s media will highlight food, and food access is at the heart of some of these issues and so there is perhaps no place where innovation is needed more than within the food sector and specifically within convenience stores.

Roger von Oech remarks that it is strange that the light bulb – a 125 year old and now inefficient product – is still widely used as the symbol for innovation and this is something which could also be said for the concept of the convenience store which was once an innovative concept aimed at responding to the problems posed by our ever globalising sense of community and an increasingly warped time-space compression (Massey), but is now an ambiguous concept which is often applied to stores which do not deserve the title of ‘convenient’. As Alan Warde (1999) expresses, “Convenience food is required because people are too often in the wrong place.” However the essence of what is ‘convenient’ in today’s society allows room for positive thinkers to lead influential change within the sector and change the way in which we shop. This has resulted in leading Retail Analyst, Paco Underhill theorising that the convenience store sector is on the verge of a ‘major revolution’.

The convenience industry is growing faster than ever, as people lead busier and busier lifestyles. Within the sector there are many innovative and in some cases ‘whacky’ ideas being thrown around demonstrating how being creative can help increase market share, improve environmental credentials, and better serve the end consumer – be it through new retail technologies, environmental initiatives, staff training, customer service initiatives, marketing strategies or range development. In the USA there are over 145,000 stores with an annual turnover of $511bn USD, however despite the global supermarket and grocery industry being worth over $2.7 trillion USD annually only 10% of sales in USA convenience stores are groceries. No doubt this is something which will change in future years, however the manner in which this change is created may have a big impact on the future of convenience, so being innovative, creative and sustainable is crucial to the future of food. As this article will explore there are already many innovative ideas already being enacted in the convenience sector around the world, some original some ‘out there’ but all experimenting with ideas which may address some of the problems which are prevalent in today’s food industry.

1. One quirky strategy –and without doubt an entirely unique concept which seeks to make shopping more enjoyable is shown in this video in which shoppers are whizzed around the store on a slow-speed roller coaster and whilst this store has gone to some lengths to change the shopping experience there is room to make small adjustments and be innovative to maximize profit, as demonstrated by the Whole Foods retailer ‘Trader Joes’ who stock only 4000 different items as opposed to the average 50,000 which enables them to provide a more efficient service and in turn a more enjoyable shopping experience.
2. We have all heard the popular environmental mantra ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ but how about adding a fourth ‘R’? Well one London based enterprise has done just that by REMOVING all packaging from its store. Be-unpackaged has been shortlisted by the Observers Ethical Award in 2008 and is one of the world’s first zero-packaging convenience store in which customers come to the store prepared with their own packaging be it a cereal box or an old water bottle.
3. Korean brand ‘Home Plus’ – a Tesco subsidiary has been leading the way in mobile shopping through the use of QR codes. Already a regular feature in the media throughout Japan, China and Korea, QR (Quick Read) codes are no doubt set to become a major part of the convenience store experience as shoppers demand more and more convenient ways of shopping. The Home Plus system works by having a ‘virtual’ convenience store on the subway in which users scan the QR codes into their phone and then check out, by the time they get home their food is waiting from them. Through use of this concept Home Plus boosted online sales by a staggering 130% with over 10,000 customers using the system.
4. A technology which has appeared in London over the last few years is the use of the Oyster Card as a means of buying small items in convenience store, slashing time spent queuing and paying and steam-lining the c-store experience, this has been taken to another level in Green Hills in New York which uses finger print identity to purchase goods at the store, further speeding up the shopping experience and allowing retailers to build up a complex buying pattern to offer the customers personalized deals.
5. One of the major problems facing many of the western cultures today is the food deserts which have struck both urban and rural areas preventing citizens being able to get access to fresh, healthy and affordable food, one solution to this can be seen in the revolutionary ‘Fresh Moves Bus’ which tours its local neighborhood as a convenience store on wheels.
6. The average transaction time at a USA convenience store is between three and four minutes (NACS) however there is a growing evidence base to suggest that this traditional system of profit maximization is no longer the only driving force in the business. UK based company ‘Sourced’ captivate their consumers with their ‘market style’ approach which draws in commuters at a rate of around 10,000 per week, with an average stay time far greater than that of its conventional competition.

There is no doubt. Convenience is changing, be it through home delivery schemes or QR code readers on our phones, and convenience stores have to move with the time and adapt to include these new technologies and survive in the fast changing life of modern society.

Like many of you, Michelle Obama recognizes the important role which food plays in our day to day lives. Obama is by no means the first to draw links between issues of child hunger and child obesity, but she goes further than most to state that these issues threaten the very essence of American life as they “rob our children of the energy, the strength and the stamina they need to succeed in school and in life. And that in turn robs our country of so much of their promise.” She continues this theme saying that not only does obesity-related disease cost the USA $147bn a year but “This epidemic also impacts the nation’s security, as obesity is now one of the most common disqualifiers for military service.”

Mrs Obama rightly points out that “Our kids didn’t do this to themselves” highlighting how the decisions which can impact much of their lives lie often in the hands of government and corporate giants and that therefore the Government and corporations must act to avert the ensuing epidemic. This is where the First Lady’s ‘Youth Health Requirements’ come in, with a substantial 400 million USD to tackle the following four issues:

1. Healthy Choices: essentially making manufacturers display better nutrition labelling, designing a new food pyramid and giving regular monitoring of children’s BMI
2. Healthier Schools: involves reauthorizing the Child Nutrition Act for improved school lunches and introducing the Healthier Schools Challenge
3. Physical Activity: increase the participation in the Presidents Physical Fitness Challenge and use professional athletes to encourage children to engage in 60mins of physical activity every day.
4. Access to affordable and healthy food: address the food deserts and make affordable and nutritious food more available to the 23.5 million Americans who live further than 1mile away from a major supermarket.

Already key retail and convenience chains including major household names have responded to Obamas call for action. McDonalds has expanded on its already greening agenda ‘road to sustainability’ to include fruit in its happy meals which Obama notes is a “positive step to solving childhood obesity” in addition McDonalds has pledged to reduce sugars, saturated fats, sodium and calories in its menu by 2020 due to consumer demand. However as one commentator noted whether the children will have space for their healthy food after they have finished their burgers and fries remains to be seen.

Another American favorite which already supplies over 25% of American groceries has shown its hand. Walmart is set to open 1500 new stores over the next five years in areas with little access to fresh produce, these will reach over 9.5million people and provide healthier, more affordable, and more identifiable healthy foods to the American public. Michelle Obama states that “it’s a victory for parents. It’s a victory for families, but most importantly of all, it’s a victory for our children.” However this is not a view shared by all, Stacy Mitchell writes that “not allowing Walmart to expand further would be one of the best things we could do for the future of food” under the new plans announced by James Gavin (President of the Partnership for a Healthier America) Walmarts stake in the US grocery market would reach a staggering and unsustainable 50%, which when only 15cents of every dollar spent in Walmart stays in the local community, is a very scary figure.  Furthermore as Joseph Hansen notes “when a Walmart opens in a community, it regularly displaces existing jobs with poverty-level jobs”. And so here is where the role of the convenience store comes in.

Independent grocery stores – of which 1400 opened in the USA since 2002 – create and drive a local economic ecosystem which returns wealth into their surrounding areas and in turn create a multiplier effect at 3 times the rate of their corporate giants. It is undoubtedly these smaller and independent grocers which will be key in driving home the messages of Obamas campaign long after the corporate giants have been and gone, but what will convenience look like in these areas under the changes wrought about by Obama?

1. Firstly Convenience will have to become more locally orientated and respond more quickly to consumer demands – see the M&S local store concept in the UK
2. Secondly Convenience will have to respond to the pressures of a globalised society and find a way of returning greater profit to their localities.
3. They will have to provide affordable, healthy food to as many people as possible and provide clearer labelling of healthy products.
4. Finally independent grocers need to start leading the necessary changes and use their size to their advantage, instantly reaping the benefits of ingenuity and creativity. 

The carrot played an important role in western history and during WWII it was falsely claimed that the carrot was the reason for the Allies new found ability to shoot down enemy aircraft at night, the disinformation was so persuasive that the English public took to eating carrots to help them find their way during the blackouts and despite the myth since being proved false the British love of carrots has continued. More recently the carrots appearance alongside Bugs Bunny has defined a  generation of perfectly shaped, orange carrots, modified from a single original design which has now conquered the ‘carrot world’. Hence what we know about our food is essentially what has been selectively bred over the last few centuries and genetically modified over the last few decades. There are now many young adults reaching their early 30’s, who are so far removed from food production that they may not have ever seen what a real carrot is supposed to look like.

This modified carrot is still healthy for you, but it doesn’t have the same levels of beta carotene that it did back in the day. The carrots you see in the store are often already stripped and processed, leaving little of the nutrients you used to get. Is this what is happening to all our food? Are we losing the benefits of enjoying a healthy vegetable? Our packaging still reflects that perfect carrot from the past, the one from the ground, telling us that it is a healthy product to eat, but what is the reality?

Of the 33.582 millions of tonnes of carrots and turnips (FAO 2009) produced worldwide in 2009 just under half were exported from China, which means that many of the benefits of fresh produce are lost and exchanged instead for thousands of food miles, an increased environmental foot print and a lower quality produce. The question however is can these differences be tasted? In order to test this TILT Studio Inc. conducted a small survey on 20 individuals aged 18-30. The carrot testers were asked to sample each carrot in a blind taste test and name their favourite carrot, the results of which are shown below.

So there is clear evidence that organic tastes better, however it is still tainted by the selective breeding of carrots over the last 300 years, to the extent that it is indistinguishable from its non-organic/non-natural counterparts. Indeed some leading academics in the fields of nature and horticulture are now claiming there is no longer such thing as ‘true’ or ‘wild’ nature as everything has felt the touch of humanity at some point. The carrot in all its orange splendour is an apt representation of this concept as rarely – if ever, are breeds other than the orange carrot seen on our supermarket, and convenience store shelves, and what was once a vegetable of diverse colourings, sizing’s and varied flavours is now bland and indistinct from its other supermarket variations.