Mt. Maculot summit

Mt. Maculot summit sunset

Sometimes the most refreshing and delicious situations in life is finding something unexpected and savoring it. Often, it’s as simple as freshly grated Halo-Halo on top of a mountain summit.

Photos are properties of Foodie Business

Mass (Picture from farm4.static.flickr.com)

This has nothing to do with food. But I had a realization when it comes to forms of worship, especially for the Catholic church. It occurred to me that an hour of mass or even 15-minutes for the daily rosary turns into a ritualistic tradition that gets boring. It was a Purple Cow after revising the age-old Latin procedure, but now – it’s so ordinary, so predictable. If the Church wants to grab the attention of its future consumers, the youth, it needs to reinvent itself.

Have you ever wondered why after watching a very good movie for 2 hours, it doesn’t bother you? Same with eating with friends in a great restaurant with delicious food for 3-5 hours. Or even playing video games for 24 hours straight.

Why can’t our minds stay still in mass for an hour, participate, and go out and buzzing about it after?

If the Church wants to motivate people, especially the kids (not just with the kid’s parents forcing it on them), they need to deliver something different. A great sermon perhaps? A visiting artist singing opera? A change with the mass practice? El Shaddai is doing it. Some Christian chuch groups are doing it. Kids nowadays have less time on their hands and providing the same old-show they already know on an annual scale provides the same old response – boredom and apathy.

I’m into this new craze that I have to try and my friends and office colleagues all know what it is (me as a nuisance of course). For the next couple of weeks, I would be show-casing (if I do get my camera this month), a couple of recipes that I created that would fall into this theme.

The Thesis: Deconstruction

According to foodnetwork.com, “Deconstruction,” a term coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, refers to a style of literary analysis where text is analyzed closely and dismantled into independent parts that, though they work in the context of, say, a paragraph, may contradict each other in and of themselves. Essentially, it’s a way at looking at the individual parts of a commonly-accepted whole, and how they interact with each other outside that whole.

Deconstruction can also fall into food, by dissecting the sum of parts of a particular recipe, whether it is roast beef, a martini, or even gaspacho. This technique is a booming development in the chef world and I can’t say I blame them. Deconstruction emphasizes each ingredient making sure they are at their best and ripest and ensuring a symphony of all components when the diner feast on their creation.

Wish me luck! Any ideas would be much appreciated.

After some debate on the flavor in line with the packaging and overall product positioning of our upcoming variant – we say NO to chocolate and diet.

How come?

It wasn’t as if it tasted bad. Actually it was the best flavor combination as of yet. The problem was the formulation of our variant was actually complicated in explaining how it made you slim. Also, we know chocolate and diet don’t usually go together. In result, if we placed Chocolate and Diet together, I would be having a problem promoting (a) chocolate and diet together, and (b) the complicated active ingredients.

Consumers can only get ONE SIMPLE idea from you. Having a complicated packaging explaining the tirade of chocolate and diet (or anything else, for that matter) and the active ingredients – consumers will just get the not-so original competitor and get on with their lives. And if your product is remarkable – they want to share your invention to their friends and family. If the product is too complicated with mixed messages, they’re going to have a more difficult time explaining it than you had promoting it.

Simple is the way to go. Thanks for people who emailed me about this.
P.S. I had a similar experience with a product I was helping to sell in college. We did so much time explaining to the consumers what our product was all about. In the end, not that much recall and not that much buzz.

I am a big fan of SMEs and joined in a radical consumer goods group myself. But there has to be a difference between college-looking business projects and the real thing. Here’s an example of a school-looking real business project selling Slimming Water enriched with an active mineral called Hydroxylase.

See their video.

Thus I wrote to the owners and gave my 25 cents:

Dear Owners,

I think your product is innovative and could prove feasible with Filipinos looking for weight losing alternatives in the market. But here’s a few suggestions:

a. Change your packaging. Placing it in a bottle that looks like packaging for some poisonous solvent isn’t going to help your image and it was so last 80s.

b. Why not place testimonials or a BFAD certification to prove your credibility or if your manufacturing area is sanitary and Wow-able and why not show that as well?

c. Go into retail. Deliveries can only generate a small amount sales and if you are looking for a distributor – have a decent website. Having a flickr account and a Youtube account is too measly. Have a website that ties both together and more.

d. What is Hydroxydase? Placing an active ingredient that nobody knows about and sees your print ad is going to have trouble believing your claims.

e. Change your layouts. Get a professional graphic designing team to do your videos, ads, packaging and website. Mediocre design = mediocre sales. Saving money? If you are going to promote your product, invest and provide excellent output OR don’t do anything at all.

f. For God’s sake – change your video NOW! Use voice over for instance.

g. What the heck is Hydoxydase as a brand name – I know and you know – you could do better than that.

Thank you for taking my recommendations and hope it would do your business well.

Yours truly,

Jared

This is a new restaurant idea: Pay-as-you-wish restaurants.

How does it work? Well, a certain restaurant serves a couple of meals and YOU decide how much you are willing to pay or willing to afford. Savvy.

You do get regular customers who pay a mere sum for the full course meal they ate, but some fair diners actually pay for those customers who couldn’t afford it. The question lies if the diner’s guilty conscience is able to take whether to attack a “goodie-goodie” restaurant for meal or not.

In Manila, fast-food restaurants experience profit drought when they let the customers decide, even for bottomless drinks (remember Burger King refillable days). But I’m not saying you couldn’t and it wouldn’t click- just don’t hope for ROI anytime soon.

Reference: Springwise

Tie-ing up these two ideas together in a single packaging that, in the end, complement. That’s this week’s challenge.

Got any ideas?