Beldin

Originally, Heinz developed ketchup as a real timesaver for mom. General Mills, with its baking guru Betty Crocker as a guide, produced Hamburger Helper and easy baking mixes to make entrees and desserts a cinch. And, even more recently, Oscar Mayer hit pay dirt with Lunchables, the ultimate easy-to-pack lunch for kids. Well, the evolution toward ease continues. Convenience foods created to save women the hassles of prepared-from-scratch cooking are now not convenient enough. Foods once billed as "Fast and Easy" today are being reformulated and repositioned as, "Now even easier!" Both with product innovation and marketing efforts, the food industry is scrambling to offer simple solutions for today's fast-paced consumers, most of whom won't even take the time to boil water.

Lipton's Cold Brew, a new iced tea bag developed to infuse in cold tap water in just five minutes, is a perfect example of the trend toward making things even easier. Research had shown that the 35-40 minutes it takes to boil water for regular tea bags and wait for it to cool down was a real barrier for potential iced tea bag consumers, who could--and did--much more easily pop open a ready-to-drink Snapple. So Lipton developed the Cold Brew tea bags to eliminate what it called the "hassle factor." No longer would consumers have to boil water to enjoy real brewed tea from a tea bag. To get that message across clearly to consumers, ads show a family, pre-Cold Brew, haggardly waiting for water to boil and for traditional tea bags to brew and then, post-Cold Brew, out enjoying themselves in the yard sipping the refreshing beverage. Tag, "Real tea, real fast," drives the point home.

Other introductions this past year similarly aim to appeal to consumers' interest in ease. In an effort to offer moms the ease and portability for snack time that Lunchables offers for lunch, Kraft Foods decided to extend its already handy Handi-Snacks with the introduction of Handi-Snacks SnackBoxes, which include a Capri Sun and pudding along with traditional Handi-Snacks cracker or breadstick offerings for an all-in-one snack. Along the same lines, Campbell Soup is trying to contemporize its own offerings beyond the once-simple canned soups that in today's world require a few steps too many by introducing new Soup to Go Lunch Packs that combine its newly reformulated microwaveable soups with packages of Pepperidge Farm Goldfish and cookies. Even Frito-Lay, whose signature hand-to-mouth chips seem to have had ease in snacking all locked up--just tear open a bag and chew--is aiming to offer its own more modern snacking solutions. Frito will go beyond the recipes offered at POP in recent years for various me als and snacks involving its products to test new Chili & Scoops Kits featuring Frito-branded chips and chili in a microwavable pan. And, as if frozen waffles weren't easy enough, Kellogg is innovating with a new line of Eggo Toaster Muffins that, because they require no messy syrup or topping, are being billed as a portable, easy breakfast alternative with the theme, "Toast 'n Go!"

Other examples include flavor-infused rices from Mars' Uncle Ben's that require "no messy seasoning packet"; the extension of flavored broths from Campbell Soup that eliminate having to add fresh onions or garlic to get the flavor of such ingredients; Best Foods' individually wrapped Hellmann's Salad Dressings to Go!; and General Mills' launch of a 12-SKU line of Betty Crocker pastas and rices that move beyond Helpers' helping hand to actually include all the ingredients for on-trend meals and side dishes.

In addition to the preparation-easing innovations food marketers are developing, advertising, too, is being used to convince even the most convenienceminded that existing products can be employed for time-crunch meal prep. Chef America has significantly increased ad spending to position new and existing varieties of its Hot Pocket and Lean Pocket frozen stuffed sandwiches as "Real food for a busy life."

Kikkoman has also hit the airwaves with a new Kikko-Man spokesperson who humorously depicts the one-step dinners created with Kikkoman Teriyaki, a sauce billed as a meal solution in a bottle. The ads, a result of research that found Teriyaki purchasers were uninvolved cooks who cook from scratch less than twice a week, end with the tag, "Kikkoman Teriyaki: it only tastes complicated."

And, Bestfoods is newly positioning its Knorr mixes as Recipe Classics in a first-time $20 million TV campaign featuring a chef who proposes to a family that they use the mixes as a solution to the "what's for dinner" question, touting the quick, flavorful sauces with the tag, "It's about taste. And it's about time."

Helping consumers find the easy route is also the basis of the functional foods phenomenon that has major food manufacturers, as well as pharmaceutical companies, scrambling to develop nutritionally enhanced and disease preventative foods that offer baby boomers a quick and easy road to health with little sacrifice, a business that will potentially reach $13 billion by next year.

After finally gaining approval from the Food & Drug Administration, McNeil Consumer Products and Unilever's Lipton unit both this month launched cholesterol-lowering product lines. McNeil's Benecol margarine and salad dressings, made from a pine oil-based dietary ingredient called stanol ester, is being supported with $100 million in consumer media as well as promotions geared to educate doctors and pharmacists about the product. Lipton's Promise Take Control spreads, which feature a natural soybean extract called plant sterols, will also be supported heavily with media and doctor brochures that claim, "when taken a minimum of two times a day, Take Control can lower cholesterol in the body by 10-12%." Certainly an easier road than the traditional cholesterol-lowering route of cutting out the foods you love.

But while efforts to develop and market functional foods are certainly a priority for many companies, the road to success has yet to be forged.

Most recently, Kellogg's long-awaited family of psyllium-based cholesterol-lowering foods across multiple categories, dubbed Ensemble, was pulled out of stores in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Left only in a small test market in Grand Rapids, Mich., where Kellogg could tweak it to spark more than the initial interest among consumers, the fate of the line of frozen entrees, bread, dry pasta, ready-to-eat cereal, baked potato crisps, frozen breakfast and dessert mini loaves and cookies is still undetermined. Although Kellogg is still vowing its commitment to functional foods, and some retailers say the time has come for such products, mainstream consumers have yet to prove it with their purchase patterns. Part of the problem has been merchandising because, as luck would have it, these products are not easy enough to find.

COPYRIGHT 1999 BPI Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group