I watched this programme on Tuesday night and thought it was worth sharing. It is part of a new BBC2 series on every Tuesday at 9am, which tells the story of how big businesses transform simple commodities into everyday necessities and highly profitable brands.

This episode talks about how cereal brands, such as Kellogg’s, have transformed the way we eat and the way we live (the original processed, convenience food). Cereals are cheap and abundant but the really interesting bit lies in the processing, advertising and marketing that goes into creating well-known cereal brands.

For example, unlike other categories where own label has taken a 50% share; branded products still have an 80% share of the cereal market. It shows the power of the brands and their advertising. We all grew up with brands such as Frosties, Coco Pops and Corn Flakes; they have such strong nostalgic value and provide a level of reassuring consistency that we are reluctant to let go of.

The programme carries the notion that the cereal business has helped shape the modern world of business and advertising we know today. Definitely worth a watch!

Category growth is the holy grail! It’s an incredibly difficult thing to do and most categories in FMCG stay the same year in year out. However, we’ve identified 5 ways it can be done using recent examples from the UK grocery sector….

1. RE-POSITIONING THE CATEGORY
The Cider category in UK has grown by 12.7% value in 2009. This has been driven by Magners, who have successfully re-positioned cider from a “tramps’ drink” to an aspirational drink served over ice!

2. INNOVATION
The Wet Baby Foods category in UK has grown by 10.2% value in 2009. Ella Kitchen’s savoury pouches were responsible for driving growth. The success of this brand indicates how important health and convenience are to mums.

3. MACRO TRENDS
The Liquid Soaps category in UK has grown by 11.5% value in 2009. This has been driven by the swine flu outbreak. The Rice category in UK has grown by 17.3% value in 2009. This has been driven by the recession and consumers seeking familiar, cheap and versatile products.

4. HEAVY PROMOTIONS
The Pasta Sauces category in UK has grown by 11.5% value in 2009. This has been driven by heavy in-store promotions between Dolmio, Lloyd Grossman and own labels.

5. COMMODITY PRICE INFLATION
The Tea category in UK has grown by 5.7% value in 2009. This is due to the price of tea being at an all time high.

There’s nothing revelatory about the idea that ethnic foods are becoming more popular with mainstream consumers, or that consumers are seeking out more exotic flavours in food and drink. Witness Mintel’s flavour predictions for 2010, which touted traditionally ethnic ingredients such as cardamom, hibiscus, cupuaçu and rose water as emerging flavours of choice for US consumers.

Now, McDonald’s has taken ethnic marketing one step further, using African Americans, Hispanics and Asians to shape products and communications that the company then rolls out to its white, middle-class audiences.

According to McDonald’s US CMO, Neil Golden: “The ethnic consumer tends to set trends…So they help set the tone for how we enter the marketplace”.

While the fast food giant still uses specialist agencies to create communications tailored to minority ethnic audiences – particularly African Americans - it then increasingly puts mass-market spend behind them. A recent article in Business Week examines what it calls McDonald’s ’minority-shapes-majority’ strategy in more detail, and is well worth a read.

McDonald's recruitment ad targets African-American communities

The traditional model of marketing to minority ethnic communities has revolved around one of two things. In one, a mainstream company tailors its communications – and in rare cases, its product – to so-called niche audience using the services of a specialist agency. In the other, a specialist manufacturer finds their success in appealing to minority markets can translate to the mainstream, and adopts their communications accordingly.

McDonald’s decision to reverse the dynamic of ethnic marketing may not seem like a great leap forward at first sight, but it’s a strategy that could have a dramatic impact on FMCG markets in both the US and the UK.

Inevitably, success will see imitators riding the wake of the Golden Arches in the US. But with changing tastes, social trends and culture over the past decades showing that the ‘salad bowl’ analogy is becoming as ripe for the UK as the US, there’s an opportunity for the real fast movers to remove the ‘niche’ from ethnic marketing – and potentially find themselves ahead of the trend.

For those interested, the Business Week article can be found here – and is well worth a read.

An interesting debate raged on Today Radio 4 yesterday regarding the decline of France‘s culinary expertise. Author of new book “Au Revoir To All That” by Michael Steinberger and French cultural commentator Agnes Poirier discussed whether the withering of the small town bistro mirrors a decline in the culinary standing of the country.

Some compelling facts came out; in 1960 France had 200,000 cafés, by 2008 it was down to 40,000. Traditional cheeses are being lost, as no one wishes to continue making them and even Camembert, is now threatened. Thousands of wine producers are also facing financial ruin, turning to violence against supermarkets to draw attention to the problem. The French are also cooking less than ever at home and the average meal in France is now 38 minutes long, down from 88 minutes 25 years before. Instead McDonald’s is now the country’s largest private sector employer. In 2007 it had more than 1,000 restaurants in France and was McDonald’s second most profitable market in the world.

In 1997, The New Yorker published an article by Adam Gopnik asking, “Is There a Crisis in French Cooking?”. Gopnik suggested that French cuisine had become ‘rigid, sentimental, impossibly expensive, and dull’. The “muse of cooking”, as he put it, had moved on, to New York, San Francisco, Sydney, London. In these cities, the restaurants exuded a dynamism that was now increasingly hard to find in Paris.

Steinberger thought this demise was premature in ’97, you could find bad food in France if you went looking for it but France was still “the first nation of food and anyone suggesting otherwise either was being wilfully contrarian or was eating in the wrong places.”

But in 2003, The New York Times Magazine published a cover story trumpeting that Spain had supplanted France in the culinary world. The article discussed the arrival of la nueva cocina, that was reinventing Spanish cuisine with El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià, the highest profile of these new wave chefs. The article made the point that Spain’s gastronomic vitality contrasted with France‘s food scene, which was described by the NY Times as ‘ossified and rudderless’. “French innovation”, he wrote, “has congealed into complacency”. The Spanish food critic Rafael García Santos said: “It’s a great shame what has happened in France, because we love the French people and we learnt there. Twenty years ago, everybody went to France. Today they go there to learn what not to do.”

All very ironic considering that only in July 2005 Jacques Chirac, in a meeting with Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schröder, allegedly said of Britain “One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad.”