Miracle Whip Is the New Black!

“We are Miracle Whip. And we will not tone it down” is the defiant tagline for a new ad campaign for Miracle Whip, which was once known as simply “the Kraft bread spread.” The new Gen-Y focused TV ad first caught my eye a couple weeks ago. While I haven’t rushed out and bought a jar (or a one-gallon vat, which is apparently one of the options), if my Gen-Y daughters request it, we may give it a try.

I found the really cool ad, which you can see here (http://tiny.cc/sAC1w) quite remarkable. For one, it took me back to childhood: ours was a mayonnaise family, and one of my best friends lived in a Miracle Whip household. I should mention that I was somewhat more aware of this kind of stuff than most kids, because my dad worked for General Mills. Though “Big G,” as we called it, was not in the sandwich spread business, (Kraft makes Miracle Whip and appears to be the leader in mayo) I was probably more aware of food and foodlike substances than most kids my age, because where there were choices, we were pretty much limited to General Mills products. Because breakfast cereals were hugely important to Big G and a significant part of my diet, I was keenly aware of foods I ate at friends’ houses that were unavailable at home. So for some reason, the allure of Miracle Whip, which I only experienced elsewhere, was conflated with the frankly superior hedonics of cereals like Cap’n Crunch and Super Sugar Crisp. So all of that is to say that I’ve always been aware that Miracle Whip and mayonnaise are two different things.

The other reason I found the ad remarkable can be summed up with the word “Huh?” I suppose it’s possible that the flavor of Miracle Whip – with is “zing” (more on that word later) and sort of assertive, weird sweet-but-tangy quality – could appeal to the Gen-Y taste buds, which are known to favor extreme (XTreme) flavors. I’ve long suspected that Miracle Whip was invented when someone at Kraft was testing the shelf life of mayonnaise and discovered that just before it’s foul enough to actually sicken someone, mayo takes on a pleasing-to-some tanginess. The food scientist involved no doubt reported this to the product management and marketing people, who rather than thinking of the words “food safety” thought of the words “line extension” or “new product opportunity.”

“It’s a Miracle,” said the product manager.

“I’ll Whip up a deck,” responded the marketer, “and start socializing it with leadership.” And a product was born.

Given the resources that Kraft has, why wouldn’t they just develop a new condiment? In a world where “Baconnaise” becomes news, wouldn’t it make more sense to get something new out there, to try to really create some buzz? I’m sure Kraft looked into this, and perhaps concluded that they were better off spending their money on marketing. And really, given all that’s going on “in the social networking space,” why not skip the headache of product development and just change the way they talk about the product? So in addition to the hip TV ads, they’ve also developed “Zingr.” (Apparently Gen-Y consumers don’t like spelling the whole word if they can avoid it. LOL.) Zingr is “the newest way to add your own flavor to the web. Zing anything you deem worthy of your wit.” You can download Zingr and use it on Facebook to “zing” your friends by adding your own witty remarks, validated by Miracle Whip’s ever-so-right now graphic motif. So we must conclude that Kraft’s research showed that Gen-Y consumers are most interested in products that somehow create synergy between social networking and sandwiches. I can only imagine the marketers at Heinz and French’s scrambling to counteract Zingr: “I know, how about ‘Splat?’” It’d be awesome to splat someone when they write on your wall…we could totally make it look like yellow graffiti…”

In an interview with Media Post, a Kraft spokesperson said, “Many people enjoyed Miracle Whip in the past, but with so many flavor options today, many of them -- especially younger consumers -- have lost sight of this tangy original dressing.” So they’ve ended up in Shredded Wheat territory, which has a campaign going now that boldly states “Progress is overrated” and “We put the no in innovation.” (The Shredded Wheat campaign has a fun series of episodic ads available for viewing at http://thepalaceoflight.com/.) Fair enough – a TV ad that looks like MTV combined with a social networking add-on might do the trick.

But the Kraft spokesperson goes on to say, “We have reinvented Miracle Whip, and we want to bring its one-of-a-kind flavor back in front of younger consumers who might not be thinking about it." Hmmm. Two things:

• You are wrong on the first point. You have not reinvented it. The whole point is that you haven’t changed it. (“And we will not tone it down.”)
• You are correct on the second point. Younger consumers are not thinking about Miracle Whip

Zing!

Disclaimers and clarifications:

• Some of you have noticed that I recently became a fan of Miracle Whip. This is Facebook fandom ONLY, and is for research purposes only. I am a mayo man, though for sandwich-based applications, especially if roast beef is involved, I’ll go with mayo on one slice and horseradish on the other. That’s some real zing.
• For the record, mayonnaise predates Miracle Whip by about 180 years. Mayo was invented in France in 1756, but didn’t debut in the US till 1905. Miracle Whip came along in 1933.
• Miracle Whip tastes the way it does because it has a whole lot of sugars in it as well as what I’m sure is a secret blend of spices.

People You Should Know About: An Occasional Series

Volume I: Introductory Remarks

When I was in about third grade my parents gave me a book called “The Golden Book of Quotations.” I still have that book, and still remember a lot of the quotations in it. One of them, attributed to Alexander Dumas, I have found both funny and true since the first time I read it. (“All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.”) I have always enjoyed having little aphorisms like this at my disposal, so I look for them, and I usually remember who said it and where I read it. So I guess I’ve always been curious not just about information, but its source as well. I cannot imagine, for example, loving a book, telling someone about it, and then not knowing the author’s name. In fact, I’m more likely to correctly remember an author’s name than a book’s title.

Now, as a curious adult who has both the time to be curious and easy internet access, I am able to dig a bit deeper when I read a pithy statement or hear an interesting idea, and often I’ll try to learn something about the sources of things I find intriguing. I don’t dig as often as I should, arrogantly assuming that my not having heard of someone is a reflection of their lack of fame or their unwillingness to retain a proper PR firm. Other times, my curiosity gets the best of me and I dig; what I find out is always rewarding.

So that brings me to People You Should Know About (PYSKA). In the coming weeks, prepare to meet some interesting people here at Sodcutter. The folks I plan to write about came to my attention in a variety of ways – including what appeared to be junk mail in one case. I make no claim to have discovered these people, and they have no need of the meager “publicity” an appearance in this blog will provide. So this is really about appreciating the special, unique intelligence that is all around us. I learned about these folks only because I took the time to respond to one tiny jolt of curiosity, and then found that my appreciation of their work grew as a result of knowing a bit more about them. I think the same will be true for you, and I hope over time you’ll share some of you discoveries with me.

Project Cluck / Part One: Commitment

“I’ve already decided, but it takes Tim a little longer to get committed,” I heard my wife say on the phone to a friend this morning. Whether the central assertion of her statement is true or not is a question for the ages; my immediate need was to figure out exactly what I would eventually be committing to. “The coop tour was great,” she said next, “it was so fun seeing all the different kinds of chickens. It’s going to be really hard to decide which kind to get.” So I guess we’re getting some chickens.

A couple of Saturdays ago we spent about half a day visiting chicken coops, as part of a tour sponsored by Seattle Tilth (www.seattletilth.org). It actually was terrific fun, meeting proud chicken owners and seeing their gardens, coops and chickens…and dogs, cats, goats, etc. The appeal of the whole thing is undeniable. There’s something transfixing about watching hens scuttle about the yard, making funny little sounds; they appear quite self-actualized, especially when, based on how tiny their heads are, it’s not likely there’s a lot going on inside them.

In Seattle, you can have up to three hens (no roosters), plus one additional hen per thousand square feet of land. Because lots of people ask, yes, hens will lay eggs even if there is no rooster about, but said eggs contain no chicks. And –OK, this is odd – you can tell what color eggs a hen will lay based on the color of the feathers on their earlobes. There are a lot of things about the anatomy of the hen I’d rather not know, but it honestly never occurred to me that they have earlobes, let alone that the feathers on them mean anything. Also, other than color, there is no difference between eggs of different shades.

Chickens in America lay about 75 billion eggs a year, about ten per cent of the global total, and we consume over 99% of them here in the US. So each year, American hens (that is, hens living in America) produce roughly 250 eggs per person. Yikes. About sixty per cent of these eggs are used by consumers; the rest are used in processed foods (~30%) and the foodservice industry (~10%). Chinese chickens lay 390 billion eggs a year – about 293 per person. (I’ve heard but have not verified that General Tso’s chicken in particular lays very tasty eggs.) China’s chickens lead the world; I’m not sure if that’s on a per-hen basis or if they just have more chickens. My guess: American hens are the best educated, most productive ones on the planet.

(Click on this link to learn more about chickens and eggs: http://tiny.cc/iShDA. Two caveats: First, the videos are a bit disturbing – not in a PETA sort of way, so no worries there. There’s just something alarmingly earnest (Midwestern?) about the two laptop-toting “students” who guide us through Egg Facts 101, but the Introduction is a “must see.” Second, the American Egg Board, to whose site this link takes you, is not so concerned with the whole “which came first?” part of the conversation, so don’t go looking for that level of discourse on their site. The AEB are the people who bring you the “incredible edible egg” campaign. And we won’t be joining, unless we start buying up the whole neighborhood and tearing down houses – you need 75,000 layers to join. (Our little rambler sits on a 5,980 square foot lot; if we can only have one extra hen per 1,000 feet, we’d need another 15,000 lots at 5,000 square feet each – about 1,722 acres.)

But here’s the thing: based on what I’ve learned thus far about how many eggs a hen can lay in a year, there’s pretty much one hen out there for each of us. And so if there’s a chicken out there laying eggs for me, why shouldn’t it live in my backyard? Perhaps this is part of the appeal of the whole thing – talking to chicken owners; you get an overwhelming sense that having hens is just really satisfying. I wonder if it’s not partly because there’s this happy symbiosis between households and hens? It’s pretty cool, really. And that’s before you start thinking about the living conditions many hens endure, carbon footprint, and all the other stuff we’ve become conditioned to consider as consumers.

I’ll keep you posted on our progress.

The Espresso Dilemma (Solved!!)

It’s now been five months since my unplanned departure from Starbucks. Of the many adjustments I’ve had to make, several concern coffee acquisition and consumption. Specifically, what products are out there that I’ll like, and how much should I expect to pay for them?

I really like coffee, and I have a bit of a caffeine dependency. I’m not one of those people who drink coffee all day long. I drink more coffee than the average person, but no more than the average coffee drinker. Chances are, if you drink coffee, you drink about 3 cups a day. There is obviously a sense in which caffeine is addictive, but unless you consider crankiness antisocial behavior or believe people resort to crime to feed their habit, it’s hard to make the case that caffeine is addictive in the same way other drugs are. Of course people in the coffee business discuss this whole topic only reluctantly and always euphemistically. “Habituating mood-enhancer,” a phrase I heard from someone at one of Starbucks’s many ad agencies over the years, is perhaps my favorite way to express our reliance on coffee. (Rule of thumb: if you work for Starbucks, you never use an apostrophe with Starbucks, in any situation, for any reason; once you’ve left, you’re on your own to run with this as far as your apostrophal comfort will take you.)

But aside from dependency, for which a wicked, debilitating headache is pretty much the worst-case outcome, the whole matter of paying for coffee is something I’ve had to confront. As a Starbucks employee, one of my benefits was a free pound of coffee every week. In addition to that, I was entitled to a 30% discount in Starbucks stores and could drink all the coffee I wanted at the office, including espresso beverages.

This brings up the whole question of value, which is one of the big business challenges facing Starbucks right now. When coffee is free or deeply discounted, it’s easy to forget what customers pay for it. Over the years, as Starbucks added dozens and dozens of flavors, new drink “platforms” and expanded nationally, it was really easy to have essentially no idea what customers were paying. Prices differed from market to market, but not always in ways you might assume – an area where costs might be higher may also have more competition, which would put downward pressure on prices. Areas with little competition created different issues: in some respects, Starbucks was basically able to establish the value of specialty coffee products in such markets. This opened the door to less sophisticated startups, who could simply match Starbucks pricing, getting premiums they had not earned, and to others who saw the opportunity to undercut the out-of-towners.

One of the first times I really had to think about this question of value was in my early years at Starbucks, when Howard Behar, one of the legendary leaders of the company, wanted to change one feature of the discount policy. In those days, employees were entitled to free beverages, anytime, in any store, whether you were working or not. Howard felt it was important, for a variety of reasons, that we pay at least a discounted price for drinks when we weren’t working. It was pretty controversial – by definition, it seemed to be a “takeaway” – always unpopular. I recall debating this with a colleague who worked in restaurant sales, which meant he spent a lot of time on the road and that he would potentially be affected more than most people. In the end, his admission that it would no longer be worthwhile for him to pull off the freeway for a cup of coffee if it cost him a dollar pretty much proved Howard’s point to me.

So while I always appreciated the value and quality of Starbucks coffee, over the course of almost 22 years, I got used to paying $X for coffee. So now it’s difficult for me to see anything but those discounted prices as the appropriate cost of the product. And the overwhelming majority of the coffee I drank – all that I drank at the office and what I made at home with my free pound – were essentially free. And as the years went by, like a lot of Starbucks customers, I pretty much quit making coffee at home except for on weekends.

My new lifestyle calls for coffee just about every morning at home. I generally make caffe lattes – one with two shots of espresso for my wife and a second for myself, with four shots. (Rule of Thumb: A single shot of espresso has about 75 milligrams of caffeine, about double the amount in a can of Cola. Most things I’ve read suggest limiting daily caffeine intake to 600 milligrams. Check out http://tiny.cc/19gqL to learn more, including how many Kit Kat bars or cans of Red Bull it’d take to kill you.)

My weekly demand for coffee at home is about 294 grams (6 shots x 7 grams x 7 days.) At $10 a pound, (at the low end of regular pricing for good coffee,) that’s about $6.50 a week for coffee beans, and coincidentally about what it would cost for the drinks each day at Starbucks and its competitors. Which reminds me of the first moment during my time at Starbucks when I could see that the business was changing before our eyes. I was managing the store at University Village in Seattle, which was then (and remains) one of the highest volume stores in the portfolio. It was around 1989 or 90, during a time when we sold 1,000-1,400 pounds of coffee by the pound each week. On a Saturday morning, one of the busiest times of the week, a couple came in and ordered a half-pound of Espresso Roast, ground for their home espresso machine, and two double-tall lattes to drink while they shopped at the nearby grocery store. Their purchase totaled $8.20 -- $4.10 for the two drinks and $4.10 for the half pound of coffee. It struck me at that moment that people were happy to spend as much for something that would be gone before they got home as they were for something that would likely be fueling a week’s worth of early mornings. Today’s Starbucks store at University Village is about four times the size it was when I managed it, does probably three times the business, but sells a fraction as much coffee by the pound.

Coffee was only a small part of my life when I joined Starbucks. My wife and I moved to Seattle in 1985. Coffee was already a bigger deal in Seattle than it had been in Phoenix, but nothing like it would eventually become. We had acquired a small espresso machine for home use and frequented the espresso cart at Nordstrom. Up to the time I joined Starbucks, I probably would not have self-identified as a coffee drinker. I liked it alright, but even then I could tell a lot of it wasn’t any good. When I joined Starbucks and began learning about coffee, the taste and style of Starbucks became the lens through which I saw all coffee. That I had the opportunity over the years to really get to know coffee and learn about from the inside, from industry pioneers and in a really fun environment meant only solidified the notion that Starbucks = Coffee. Of course I knew there were other good coffees out there – few at first, then arguably fewer – but now, it seems safe to say there is more good coffee available in the US than any time in the last quarter century, if not longer.

Which brings me to the Espresso Dilemma. Starbucks Espresso Roast is a really terrific blend of coffee, and its taste is so imprinted in my brain and on my tongue that it’s hard to embrace much else. But I have to pay for it now – I bought a pound yesterday, for $10.45. That’s about 97 cents a day for our lattes at home, which is hard not to see as a bargain. Yet – when you’re used to free and you’re unemployed, $10.45 seems like a lot. And frankly, there is part of me that would like to see less of my money go to Starbucks right now. I loved my time there; it was terrific fun most of the time, and Starbucks gave me a chance to see huge chunks of the world and meet famous people. Even so, it’s fun to explore other coffees, and given all that has changed at Starbucks and the rest of the coffee world, saying Starbucks = Coffee no longer works for me.

And so I’ve been trying different coffees at home to make our daily lattes. I’ve acquired coffee in a number of different ways, and for lack of a better way to summarize my findings; I’ll group them by method of acquisition, which essentially revolves around price.

Free. When it comes to free, economists and marketers agree: price matters, and free is a price most people can live with. I count myself among those happy with free. So on a couple of occasions when former Starbucks colleagues have offered me a pound of coffee, I’ve chosen Espresso Roast and found myself in possession of one of my favorite things at one of my favorite prices.

One rainy spring morning, a friend and I headed out on a little tour of Seattle coffeehouses. We visited Café Vita on Capitol Hill here in Seattle and had a lovely time. One of the employees noticed us looking carefully at things, including bags of coffee stored in the retail area and he offered us a tour of the roastery and warehouse, both of which are located behind the café. It was terrific fun and he gave us each a bag of a new blend they’d just come out with, a sort of joint venture they have going with Theo Chocolates. It was a nice gesture and the blend worked nicely for my lattes at home. Theo is an interesting Seattle company, and their partnership with Café Vita is a perfect fit. You can read a bit more at http://tiny.cc/f0xDt.

Shortly after the coffeehouse tour, I was having coffee with another former colleague, Joe Fugere, owner of Tutta Bella Pizza in Seattle (and now Issaquah.) (www.tuttabella.com) Like both Joe and everything on the menu, the coffee at Tutta Bella is authentically Italian. (Joe is actually not Italian, but he is very authentic; based on the respect he enjoys from the Italian barista in the Columbia City restaurant and the surprising number of Italians coming in for coffee, he might as well be.) Joe uses Attibassi Espresso from Italy, which he and his team selected after trying just about every coffee around. Read a bit about the coffee here: http://tiny.cc/g8IiT. For a person of my background, using this coffee at home was nothing short of scandalous. Like most Italian espresso blends, this coffee includes some robusta beans. (Rule of Thumb: Over 70% of the coffee in the world is arabica, the generally-regarded-as-superior of the two commercially important species of coffee. But there’s plenty of bad arabica out there, and most lousy coffee in the US is lousy not because of robusta, but because of stale, cheap, crappy versions of the good stuff.)

I had a cappuccino at Tutta Bella, and it was carefully prepared, beautiful to look at, and very tasty. It was easy to tell that there was some robusta in the blend, but the claim that these beans add body and aid the formation of a lovely crema on top of the espresso clearly seems to be true. Both these things, along with Joe’s graciousness and the barista’s skill, made it easy to say yes when Joe offered me a bag of the coffee to use at home.

To be frank, I struggled with the coffee when I used it at home. The home machine I have, like all home machines, is no match for a great commercial unit like they have at Tutta Bella. (My home model is a fairly new machine Starbucks sold, the name of which I can’t even begin to conjure up…I do remember there was a big marketing push behind it and that some of the design work was apparently done by BMW.) It’s a decent and reliable machine, and the espresso shots made from the Attibassi beans looked beautiful. The taste, however, was a bit disconcerting to me. The flavor of the robusta beans is just plain foreign to me and I couldn’t get past it. My wife had no trouble with it, I should say, and that means quite a lot in that she takes her latte at more “normal” strength and is a pretty observant drinker. (In fact, her strongest negative reaction to date has been the morning I opened a fresh bag of Starbucks – she found it harsh compared to whatever we’d drunk the prior day.)

To this point, the answer to the price/value question is a resounding “Duh”: Free coffee is good, at least when you know the people I do. There are no doubt gifts of coffee out there so heinous that I would not drink them; however, I believe that receiving a gift graciously is a mark of maturity, as is knowing what to do with gifts others may make better use of.

Not free. After carefully researching the matter, I’ve come to the conclusion that all coffee is either free or it’s not free. The price of free coffee seems to be fixed at $0.00. (I wonder if we need the government to investigate this. Collusion?) There is WAY more price variability in coffee that is not free, largely due to the ongoing practice of price discounting in grocery stores.

I’m fond of grocery shopping, all things considered. I rarely go more than a few days without at least a quick trip to the store—I prefer to buy produce no more than a day or two before its intended use, and when I’m cooking dinner, I don’t generally plan the meal several days in advance. (You never know what you’re going to be in the mood for, and when you have the luxury of time, it makes sense to use it.) So now that I have to buy most of my coffee, I’ve gotten in the habit of checking coffee prices regularly.

There is pretty much always something on sale, either in the bulk bins or within the packaged coffee selections. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s just too much risk involved in buying coffee from the bins in grocery stores – the risk of stale coffee just seems too great. Not only is it impossible to know how long the coffee has been in the bins, it’s unclear to me how fresh the coffee they use to refill the bins really is. And even good coffee tastes lousy when it’s stale.

Most of the pre-packaged coffee in grocery stores is sold in 12-ounce bags. I know that a one pound bag (16 ounces / 454 grams) of Starbucks Espresso Roast costs $10.45 at a Starbucks store. That’s just sixty-five cents an ounce, so unless I am getting something really good or paying a very low price, the one-pounder at Starbucks is my default. The coffees I like – such as Peet’s, (Major Dickason’s Blend, sold for $13.95/lb at Peet’s stores; www.peets.com) some of Café Vita’s blends (especially Café Luna, sold for $13.50/lb in their café; www.cafevita.com) and a few others, are usually $9.99-11.99 for the 12-ounce bag. This translates to $13.32 to $15.98 per pound. So basically, the threat of a crushing caffeine withdrawal-induced headache is the only rational reason for me to pay for coffee if it’s not “on deal,” as they say in the grocery trade.

If I can buy coffee I know I like for sixty-five cents an ounce, I shouldn’t pay more than $7.80 for a 12-ounce bag. Given how grocers price things, $7.99 is the price I’m usually looking for. So any price that is >0 and <$8.00 will usually entice me to buy multiple units of a coffee I know I like. It’s obviously possible to spend much more or much less on coffee than sixty-five cents an ounce. Do either at your own peril, however.

Finally, having worked through this exercise, I realize that I know longer have a dilemma. I know what I like, how much I need, and what I’m comfortable paying for it. I shall now apply these same principles to our health care dilemma. Don’t hold your breath.