shopping

Online Wine Shopping: Let the Algorithm Do the Picking

Janice | May 3, 2013 - 6:10 pm

image by Jomphong via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Would you trust a computer to choose your wine?
There’s a new generation of wine sellers counting on it.

Wine has been a tough sale online.
Wine shopping is daunting even in a traditional, bricks and mortar wine shop, where most customers wander the aisles a while and then end up grabbing an old favorite, an eye-catching label, or whatever’s on sale, with finger’s crossed that it won’t disappoint. It can be even more overwhelming online where the selection is inexhaustible and you don’t have store displays to cue you. Add to that a regulatory maze of interstate shipping laws, and by 2007, online sales were a piddling 3% of retail wine sales.

In the last few years, the internet has blossomed into a virtual vineyard.
Wine has benefited enormously from the rise of social media. There are thousands of online wine groups sharing tasting notes, alerting members to flash sale sites like Lot 18, and holding virtual wine tastings where on the count of three everybody uncorks and sips the same bottle. You can order wine for your Facebook friends through that site’s birthday reminders, and even Amazon, twice burned by failed wine-selling ventures, has jumped back in.

To succeed online, wine sites have to be more than just digital catalogs. Wine is consumed experientially, and in that sense its purchase has more in common with music or movies than with, say, a pair of shoes. That’s why the new generation of wine sellers looked not to Zappo’s but to Netflix for their sales model. And the secret sauce of the wildly successful video service is in the predictive algorithms that fuel their recommendations.

Online shopping has always run on recommendation engines.
The innovation was pioneered by Amazon, where now you’ll find them integrated into every inch of the shopping experience. From the home page through to the last click at checkout, Amazon beseeches you to consider ‘Frequently Bought Together’ items, ‘Customers Who Bought this Item Also Bought,’ and the less persuasive ‘Customers Who Viewed this Item Also Viewed,’ as well as ‘Sponsored Links,’ ‘Product Ads from External Websites,’ and a sidebar of ’More Buying Choices.’ Amazon’s algorithms skew toward building recommendation lists from items ordered by similar customer profiles. All the come-ons feel a bit like a traveling salesman with a foot stuck in your front door telling you about the vacuum cleaner your neighbor just bought.

Wine, like DVDs, requires more finesse.
Using its peer-to-peer comparative algorithms, Amazon derives a reported 10% of its book sales through recommendations on the site, while at Netflix recommendations drive 75% of the video viewing. Netflix accomplishes this through its algorithms, which turn an infinite buffet of data into a highly personalized, user-friendly experience. Instead of comparative recommendations, it builds individual profiles based on each customer’s individual preferences. It’s constantly throwing DVD titles at you, always asking your opinion about what you watch both on the service and elsewhere. Like Netflix, the new wine recommendation engines run on ratings. They build taste a profile based on what you’ve enjoyed in the past, and continually tinker with the profile as you rate your new wine purchases. And unlike Netflix, where the queue can get clogged with the entire Toy Story oeuvre, you don’t have to share this with your kids.

I’ll have what the MacBook Pro is having.
Try one of the new digital sommeliers:

Wine start-up Taste Factor, which compares the complexity of its recommendation engine to NASA, is like a custom wine-of-the-month club. Sign up for the subscription service and you get a starter pack of wine to rate. Your feedback establishes a tasting baseline, which is refined after subsequent monthly shipments, each of which is uniquely chosen for you.

Instead of NASA, Club W feels more like an online dating service. You start with a questionnaire—not about wine but lifestyle questions and details like how you take your coffee. The screen fills with potential matches, and you choose the ones that look good to you.

WineSimple also starts with a quiz to build each individual consumer taste profile. The geo-servicing phone app doesn’t sell wine, but it lets you know when you’re in a shop or restaurant that carries one of your recommended bottles.

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Where’s the Line Between Free Samples and Shoplifting?

Janice | April 19, 2013 - 1:36 pm

image via Colors Magazine

Spear one cheese cube with a toothpick and you’re sampling. Are you pilfering if you snare a dozen? Is it shoplifting if you dump the plateful in a produce bag for later?
How much is too much? Exactly what constitutes a free sample?
These are the questions at the heart of a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court.

The plaintiff, 68 year-old Erwin Lingitz, went into the Cub Goods supermarket in White Bear Township, Minnesota to pick up a prescription. He helped himself at two un-hosted displays offering free samples of lunch meat, and then packed some up for his wife who was waiting outside in the car. He was arrested by store security as he exited the store.

An attorney for the supermarket chain itemized his haul: ”Plaintiff had approximately 14-16 packets of soy sauce along with one plastic produce bag containing 0.61 pounds for [sic] summer sausage and another plastic produce bag containing 0.85 pounds of beef stick in his pockets,” She also claims that the store’s manager had spotted Mr. Lingitz on previous occasions filling plastic produce bags “with 10-20 cookies from the kids’ cookie club tray, which specifically limits the offer to one free cookie per child.”

The supermarket calls it theft, arguing that “The plaintiff violated societal norms and common customer understanding regarding free sample practices.” In an interview with the Twin Cities’ Pioneer Press, Lingitz’s wife, Frankie defends her husband with the statement: “Something is either free or it isn’t. You can’t arrest somebody for thievery if it is free.”

Mr. Lingitz is hardly standing alone on that slippery slope between sampling and stealing.
There’s the Definitive Guide for Food Grazing (for free) at Costco, and another site that shows you how to save $2,000 a year in grocery bills and grow your net worth by eating free samples. And of course who among us has never popped a grape in their mouth in the produce aisle?

Mr. Lingitz is suing for $375,000 in damages claiming that the arrest was a violation of his civil liberties and that he sustained injuries during it. His case hinges on whether it was a lawful arrest, which will depend on whether or not the judge considers it a crime to take too many free samples. It’s potentially a landmark case for retailers since there is currently no legal definition for free samples.

The store’s defense is that free samples are governed by “a common-sense rule.”
A few try-before-you-buy grapes is on one side of it, while stuffing a T-bone inside your raincoat is clearly on the other side. The question is, where does 1.46 pounds of ‘free’ lunch meat fall on the side of common sense?

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The Expired Foods Supermarket

Janice | March 13, 2013 - 2:08 pm

Here’s a pair of statistics that don’t make sense:
One in five Americans suffers from food insecurity, which means they don’t have consistent access to enough nutritious food.
Every year American supermarkets and grocery stores throw out 10 billion pounds of food, most of which is just fine to eat.

Doug Rauch, the former president of Trader Joe’s, wants to reclaim that discarded food. He plans to open grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods that sell perishable foods that are at or near their expiration dates.

At first the concept has an elitist ‘Let them eat cake!’ ring to it.
It’s not good enough for us, so let’s pawn it off on them.
But the idea is not without merit. And precedent. Think of Goodwill stores that rack up a few billion dollars in annual sales of discarded clothing and household items, and do so in a perfectly respectable and respectful manner.

Americans waste a lot of food—more than 40% of all we produce.
Behind the scenes and after hours, your local supermarket is still buzzing with activity. Employees strip the shelves of brown bananas and misshapen potatoes that customers pass over. The out-of-date yogurt cartons, dented cans, and damaged packaging can go right in the dumpster. They also remove packaged foods approaching their expiration dates—still perfectly good, but who’s going to buy a 5-pound block of cheese with 3 days left?

Expiration dating gives the consumer a sense of a security, but it’s not usually tied to spoilage.
Most expiration dates refer to the point when a product’s taste, texture, color, or nutritional benefits start to deteriorate rather than the point when you need to worry about the product’s safety. Except for infant formula and certain baby foods freshness dating isn’t required by law, and federal watchdog agencies like the FDA and USDA stay out of it. Some states require dating for dairy products, but there is no agreement or uniformity for freshness standards. For all other foods, labeling is voluntary. Producers can choose to slap on expiration dates that are pretty much of their choosing, and except for dairy products and formula, the retailers are free to keep the expired products on their store shelves.

Mr. Rauch is funding the not-for-profit project with much of his own money. He has started hiring for the first store set to open in Dorchester, Massachusetts. The store’s kitchen will create healthy prepared takeout foods that are price-competitive with fast food meals, and there will also be an in-store kitchen offering low-fat cooking classes and workshops. That’s because food insecurity in America is not about empty stomachs but empty calories.

Learn more about why we create so much food waste and why it matters at the Wasted Food website.

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Mother Nature for Rent

Janice | February 12, 2013 - 1:55 pm

It starts with a weekly visit to the farmers market.
It’s all fresh, in season, and you see who’s growing your food.

Then you join a CSA.
The food is more abundant, the commitment to sustainable agriculture is greater. Your weekly farm share has you eating with the growing season, and with your pre-paid subscription you’re contributing to the stability of a small and local producer.

What’s next?
Dirt under the fingernails and you’re own diesel rototiller?

Rent Mother Nature takes you to the next level of connectedness while keeping your fingernails clean. Similar to but more direct than a CSA, RMN inserts you into the growing cycle by leasing you your own little corner of the farm. You’ll lay claim to a beehive in the Catskills, an oyster bed on the Puget Sound, or a pistachio tree in the Arizona desert, and for one season the harvest is yours.

Massachusetts-based Rent Mother Nature was started in 1979 as a way of helping small-scale New England farmers improve their pre-harvest cash flow. The company now works with farms across the country and even a few from other parts of the world, so you can lease an organic date palm tree in California, a wild rice bed on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Minnesota, or a cocoa tree in the rainforest of Costa Rica.

Rent Mother Nature sends out periodic progress reports during the growing season, and many of the farmers welcome personal visits from lease-holders. There is a minimum guaranteed bounty, and a roll-over to the next season if it’s not met. If it’s a bumper crop, you’ll get first dibs on the larder.

Rent Mother Nature partners with artisanal producers and farmers practicing natural and organic agriculture, and engages in fair-trade in foreign countries. When you lease a dairy cow you’ll get wheels of brie or cheddar from an animal you’re on a first-name basis with. The sap of your leased sugar maple tree is boiled into syrup in a traditional wood-fired sugarhouse in the Adirondacks. The wheat from your leased acre of land is sent to a Rhode Island mill that’s been operating since 1711, and the great-great-grandchildren of the Massachusetts textile mill’s original owner are still shearing the wool and custom-weaving the blanket from your leased sheep.

On the Rent Mother Nature website you’ll find nearly two dozen 2013-2014 leases available for crops and products including prolifically-producing Florida citrus or Georgia peach trees that can be leased in their entirety or by the branch, lobster trap leases that land you the yield from a ten-day fishing trip in Maine, and hive leases for jars of raw, unfiltered honey produced by a single, flower-specific beehive.

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Whole Foods: They Have You at the Front Door.

Janice | January 28, 2013 - 4:50 pm

wholefoodsrainbow

They’ve got you the minute you cross the Whole Foods threshold.
That whooshing sound you hear is not the gentle glide of the automatic doors. It’s the sound of reason and willpower flying out of your head.

You’re immediately sucked into a sensory-rich shopping experience. It’s a high-quality, all-natural supermarket Shangri-La, and every element is designed to influence your subconscious mind. The first impressions prime you for the kind of shopping that earned the stores their Whole Paycheck reputation.

Go get your shopping cart.
It’s not your imagination; it really is bigger than last time. Whole Foods has repeatedly enlarged its carts and baskets, nearly doubling their size since 2010.

There are the café tables.
It would probably be more comfortable for in-store diners if the tables were in a quieter, less-exposed location toward the back, but of course this way you get to see them. And doesn’t it all look tasty?

Freshness comes first.
Conventional grocers stack promotional goods just inside the front door— 12-packs of soda and pyramids of half-priced canned pineapple rings. Produce is always the first merchandise you see at Whole Foods.

The colors pop.
Vegetables are artfully arranged by hue. Fixtures are faced in black for even greater contrast.

And it’s not just about aesthetics. Produce departments use Pantone color matching—just like the color selector cards in a paint store—so that fruit can be displayed at the exact shade that suggests the ideal ripening, freshness, and wholesomeness. Bananas, for example, should be Pantone color 12-0752; a somewhat muted shade known as Buttercup.

Like it just fell off the turnip truck.
The supermarket’s farm stand aesthetic tells its own tale of freshness. Produce signs appear to be hand-written on chalkboards as if the prices change with the weather. The tomatoes are still in wooden boxes suggesting that a local farmer pulled out back with his flatbed truck and hauled the crates straight to the selling floor. Look closely and you’ll see that signage lettering is painted on with a chalk look-alike and and the faux fruit crates and other displays are factory-made. After all, those tomatoes were shipped in days ago and prices are mostly set at Whole Foods’ corporate offices.

It’s all about messaging.
Plenty of stores stores try, but few succeed like Whole Foods. The gleaming fruits and fish, the grainy breads and artisan cheeses project freshness, quality, and wholesome abundance; the organic pedigrees and rustic fixtures contain environmental and nutritional pieties. The totality of the shopping experience envelops you the moment you step inside, and by the time you reach the register, you’re gladly handing over your whole paycheck.

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The $450 Starbucks Card Is Here

Janice | December 10, 2012 - 1:40 pm

Last week Starbucks rolled out the Starbucks Metal Card. For the low, low price of $450 the card gets you $400 worth of coffee.
That’s not a typo. $450 gets you a card preloaded with $400 in store credit. Oh, and you also get a gold-level Starbucks card membership, a frequent buyer perk that gets you some freebies like drink refills and a birthday frappuccino, but that’s already free to regular customers.

Forgetting what they say about one born every minute, Starbucks announced a limited initial run of 5,000 cards and offered them for sale on the luxury goods website Gilt. The cards sold out in less than a minute and you can now find them on sites like eBay and Craigslist where they’re being resold for for more than $1,000.

Clearly this about more than just coffee. But what?

Starbucks gave up its aura of exclusivity the minute it opened its first shop outside of the Seattle city limits. You can’t be an insider to something that you can buy on every street corner, turnpike rest stop, and hospital cafeteria. And the now mass market coffee brand doesn’t speak of any particular connoisseurship. The true coffee snobs left the building long ago. But since the next guy in line won’t have the Metal Card in his wallet, merely possessing the card confers a conspicuous kind of status in and of itself. And the Starbucks Metal Card, which really is made of metal, is truly conspicuous. Watching someone pay for coffee with a slab of etched stainless steel is a little like seeing Fred Flintstone buying his brontosaurus burgers with a stone credit card issued by the Bank of Bedrock.

Starbucks understands that status signaling is a game of ever-higher stakes.
Look what happened with credit cards: the fading luster of the American Express Gold Card led to the AmEx Platinum, only to be topped by the company’s black titanium Centurion Card, distinguished less by the superiority of its member benefits than by its $5,000 initiation and $2,500 annual fee. Then there’s the I Am Rich mobile app: when iPhones first became widely available and lost their must-have status, a $999.99 application was sold through the App Store that was virtually featureless save for a large glowing red screen icon and the mantra “I am rich. I deserve it. I am good, healthy & successful.” Eight were sold before Apple removed it from the store.

While it’s intended to be seen, status is really in the eye of the beholder.
“This is a card for the 1%,” cultural anthropologist Robbie Blinkoff told USA Today. “It’s all about status, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I’d want to be seen with one of these.”

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Your Shopper Loyalty Card Data: Oh, the places it’ll go.

Janice | October 30, 2012 - 3:11 pm

image via the American Library Association

Could your shopping list be used against you?
Think about all the information that can be gleaned from the loyalty card you use at the supermarket. Your purchases reveal the usual demographics like age, income, and how many children and pets you live with. Marketers factor in your likes and dislikes to build profiles that they name things like Winner’s Circle, Kids & Cul-de-Sacs, and Big City Blend, and use the profiles to figure product pitches and advertising, and maybe do a little tinkering with the prices you see at the register. You know it’s invasive, the profiling might rub you the wrong way, but you figure that’s the price you pay for the card discounts.

It doesn’t stop there.
Privacy advocates and consumer groups are concerned about third-party sharing of loyalty card data. The number of incidents is small but disconcerting, and the potential for abuse is deeply troubling.

The DEA has subpoenaed data from customer databases to discover whether individuals were buying large quantities of plastic baggies that could be used for drug transactions.
A supermarket sought to use a customer’s history of alcohol purchases to evade a ‘slip-and-fall’ injury settlement.
Grocery lists with the combination of bleach, charcoal, and the Middle Eastern treat of hummus can trigger an FBI algorithm that turns shoppers into suspected terrorists.

Supermarkets have also been known to issue cards embedded undisclosed RFID remote tracking chips, and a number of stores have subcontracted out the data entry function to firms that employ prisoners, giving convicted rapists and burglars access to your personal information. The push toward the use of mobile devices as ‘digital wallets’ and apps that consolidate all your loyalty cards into one big heap of accessible data will only increase the exposure.

Paranoid much?
Think of the implications. Your junk food purchases could become evidence of poor parenting in a child custody battle or your health insurance premiums could rise because you buy too much butter. Purchases that speak to religion and ethnicity, medical conditions and sexual activity—the diet pills, gefilte fish, Twinkies, condoms, and hemorrhoid cream—it’s all on a card.

How many loyalty card tags are dangling from your keyring?

Posted in Science/Technology, shopping | 2 Comments

Wine and Liquor Prices Are Falling, But Not On Menus

Janice | September 18, 2012 - 2:52 pm

A restaurant wine list honestly translated via Twentytwowords.com

$1 out of every $100 of American consumer spending goes to alcohol.
That number has held steady for decades.
What’s changed is where we spend it.

We’re spending less at wine shops and liquor stores but more in bars and restaurants. And it’s not that we’re going out so much more. Adjusted for inflation, the retail price of alcohol in stores has actually been dropping—by 39% since 1982—while bar and restaurant prices for wine and cocktails have risen by 79% during that same period. In 1982, less than one-quarter of our spending on alcohol was in bars and restaurants; today it’s closing in on one-half. (Inflation-adjusted beer prices and spending patterns have remained virtually unchanged since 1982, with spending equally divided between consumption at home and away).

To understand these two trends, we need to look at what happened during those years in the two sectors: bars and restaurants; and wine and liquor retailers.

Upward pricing pressure on bars and restaurants
Liquor prices have dropped but nearly everything else has gone up, like labor costs, real estate and rent, and liquor licensing. Bars and restaurants typically operate on very slim profit margins, and since there’s a limit to the number of tables that can be squeezed into a dining room, and bartenders can’t really mix drinks any faster, bar and restaurant owners have had little choice but to raise prices.

America’s increased interest in wine and high-end spirits helped pave the way for higher prices. In 1982 there were few sommeliers in American restaurants. More recently they’ve been instrumental in building pricier wine lists and selling costly bottles to a more knowledgeable base of customers. And restaurateurs know that there is little price resistance at the upper end of a wine list, where deep-pocketed customers are less likely to blink at the higher mark up added to special bottles. Contemporary cocktail culture mirrors wine with its emphasis on connoisseurship and rare, small-production labels, and has similarly pushed up prices for mixed drinks.

Downward pressure on retail prices
Robert Parker of the Wine Advocate calls this the ‘Age of the Buyer.’ There are favorable fundamentals: the recession and its lower disposable incomes for many has encouraged American producers of wine and spirits to keep a lid on prices. Then the Eurozone mess resulted in more favorable exchange rates, driving down the price of European imports and creating even more pricing competition. And in the 30 years since 1982, the federal excise tax on alcohol has only been increased once, effectively shrinking it by more than 80% in current dollars.

And the biggest squeeze of all has come from the internet.
The proliferation of online retailers has turned us into savvy shoppers, comparing prices across hundreds of sites and hunting down deep discounts through flash sales. Access to high-quality vintages and single barrel single malts used to require a personal relationship and an invitation to the back room; now it’s a wholly democratized affair, and nobody needs to pay the sticker price.

Restaurants and bars continue to treat us like a captive audience. Price markups haven’t wavered from a standard three times wholesale for a bottle of wine (more for a single glass) and five times the wholesale price of ingredients for cocktails. But all that will change as more of us walk in armed with a bargain-hunter’s mentality and mobile apps for cocktail and wine lists.

Posted in beer + wine + spirits, restaurants, shopping | Leave a comment

The Rise of Subscription Commerce

Janice | September 11, 2012 - 1:44 pm

Just like the flash sales and daily deal sites that clog your inbox, monthly subscription services want to fill your mailbox.

Here’s how they work:
The subscriber pays a monthly fee, usually around $10 or $20, to receive some type of box each month. The box can be filled with samples or full-size products, household names or new product introductions—you don’t know just what’s inside until you open it. Each service targets a narrowly defined customer niche, and products are carefully selected by authorities in the category. Some of the more successful services have hundreds of thousands of paid subscriptions and can charge a slotting fee to the manufacturers for the privilege of inclusion, while others pay the wholesale price to get a product in their boxes. There’s Bark Box for dog owners, Mystery Tackle Box for fishing enthusiasts, his-and-hers underwear (Manpacks and Panty by Post), and the very crowded beauty field (Test Tube, Birch Box, Beauty Bar).

Food makers have flocked to subscription commerce.
It’s a natural fit. There’s a constant parade of small, independent food artisans, and food lovers have insatiable appetites for new and different tastes. The producers gain access to specialized consumer niches, getting their products in the right hands, and consumers get the thrill of discovery with little effort or expense.

The return on investment to the food producers is a little murky; it’s not clear that subscription boxes convert enough samplers into customers. But it feels like a pure win for food lovers.
Here are some of the more interesting food subscriptions out there:

Love With Food sends out 8+ samples in each $10 (shipping included) monthly box, skewed heavily toward high-quality snacks and treats like granola, hand-made marshmallows, herbal teas, and salsas.

KnoshBox is also heavy on the snacks. Monthly boxes are themed (Autumn Harvest, Wine Trails), and focused on small, regional American producers. The $30 boxes (shipping included) are filled with full-sized jam jars and biscotti bags.

Sometimes it seems like all the interesting food artisans live in Brooklyn or the Bay Area. Gotham Box taps into foodie envy by curating a monthly selection of new treats out of either New York or San Francisco ($20 including shipping).

Mantry‘s subscription boxes are designed to stock what they call the’ modern man’s pantry.’ The focus, they say, is on the rare, the exotic, and the functional (cuz Babes recognize a man with taste), which seems to mean a lot of hot sauce, jerky, and chocolate. If you want in, you can add your name to the waiting list.

The Turntable Kitchen offers a monthly ‘curated food and music discovery experience delivered to your door’. Each $25 (including shipping) pairing box brings a couple of old favorites on 7-inch vinyl plus a digital mix-tape of carefully chosen new artists; a recipe collection, tasting notes, and a few exotic ingredients to pair with the music.

Subscription boxes are a boon to special dieters.
Pick your allergens, singly or in combination (dairy, egg, soy, wheat, tree nuts…) and Tasterie will compile a monthly selection that’s been subjected to a rigorous screening and verification process to ensure allergen-free ingredients and processes ($20 including shipping). Paleo Pax is for followers of the fad diet that aspires to mimic the 10,000 year-old regimen of hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic era before the advent of agriculture and domesticated animals. For a monthly $18 (plus shipping), expect to see lots of nuts, dried berries, and foods made from sea kelp.

Lost Crates is the meta-curator of curated boxes. They have assembled a lineup of online lifestyle curators and create proprietary boxes (prices vary) for Joy the Baker, the Shiksa in the Kitchen, EcoSalon, and others. A clever quiz guides you to your ‘soulmate crate.’

My Subscription Addiction is a review site for the expanding universe of subscription commerce.

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When Organics are Worth It (and when you can get away with conventionally-grown)

Janice | August 28, 2012 - 11:52 am

Do I dare to eat a peach?

– T.S. Eliot, from the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

There’s no two ways about it: we pay dearly for our organics.
The premium is usually 20–100%, and when the conventional counterparts are laced with toxic chemicals we gladly fork it over.
But an all-organic diet isn’t always practical or available, much less affordable. Thankfully, there are times when it’s not essential.

The Dirty Dozen and The Clean Fifteen give you a strategy for stretching your grocery budget. Using pesticide residue testing data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Working Group ranks the most popular produce items by levels of pesticide contamination. Shop selectively with these rankings as your guide and you’ll reduce your exposure to pesticides while getting the most bang for your grocery buck.

The Dirty Dozen
You just have to bite the bullet and pay the premium for organic varieties of these twelve fruits and vegetables. Pesticide levels are so high that even with careful washing and peeling there is no way to avoid ingesting a good-sized dose.

Thin-skinned fruits and vegetables are almost always more susceptible to pesticides leeching into the flesh. Apples have especially high levels because of the crevices at the top and bottom of the fruit. Similarly, spinach and celery are very porous, leaving pesticides trapped in the small openings. While peppers have thick skins, pesticide residue clings to the surface even when they are scrubbed.

It’s estimated that you can reduce your total pesticide exposure by 80% if you stick with organic varieties of just this dozen fruits and vegetables:

Apples

Strawberries Red Pepper

Bell peppers Celery

Celery

Peaches

Nectarines (imported) Grapes

Grapes

Spinach

Lettuce

Blueberries (domestic)

Potatoes

Cucumbers

The worst of the worst:
Based on pesticide residue testing data, imported nectarines are the worst offender. Every single sample tested positive for pesticides, and the total weight of pesticides clinging to the fruit is the highest of any food crop. Apples, celery, and imported plums are close behind, all testing positive in more than 95% of samples. Bell peppers have the distinction of contamination by the greatest variety of pesticides. The USDA found 88 different pesticide residues among its bell pepper samples, with as many as 15 different pesticides detected on individual samples.

The Clean Fifteen
These fifteen fruits and vegetables tend to have low levels of pesticide contamination even when they are grown conventionally. Most of the fifteen have thick, protective skins, husks, or pods, while broccoli and cabbage are cold weather crops that are grown when pests are less prevalent. Tree fruits often require fewer pesticides because they are high above the ground where they are less susceptible to insects.

If you’re rationing your grocery budget, there’s room for compromise with these items:

Onions

Sweet Corn

Pineapple

Avocado

Cabbage

Sweet peas

Asparagus

Mangoes

Eggplant

Kiwi

Cantaloupe (domestic)

Sweet potatoes

Grapefruit Watermelon Mushrooms

The best of the pretty good:
Based on pesticide residue testing data, avocado, sweet corn and onions are the cleanest conventionally-grown food crops with no detectable pesticide on 98% or more of the samples tested. Pineapple tops the 90% clean mark, while about two out of three melons are pesticide-free. Multiple contaminations are rare among the Clean Fifteen, and no more than one type of pesticide was detected on more than 90% of cabbage, asparagus, sweet peas, eggplant, and sweet potato samples.

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Don’t Give Away Your ‘Like’ Button

Janice | June 27, 2012 - 12:07 pm

image via NewLikes

The Facebook ‘like’ button is perhaps the most valuable technological innovation of the last few decades.
It’s the keys to the kingdom, the feature that turns social networks into something more than the sum of its users, the revenue generator that adds billions to Facebook’s coffers, and the engine that propelled Facebook’s IPO into the stratosphere.
So why don’t you have something to show for it?

A recently settled class action lawsuit laid this all out for us. We learned how a little click of the thumbs-up icon is turning us into unwitting, unpaid product endorsers. Our actions are plugging products to our social network; our names and photos are integrated into Sponsored Stories that appear on our friends’ pages. Facebook gets the ad revenue and the products get our endorsements, which is estimated to influence purchase decisions at three times the rate of straight advertising. We’ve become the ads, but we’re shut out of the equation.

Swaggable is here to shake up the model.
Swaggable hooks you up with free products and hopes you’ll continue to do what you’re already doing—share your opinions with your social network. You pay nothing, not even shipping costs, and manufacturers send free product samples. You’re not obligated to write a review, and you’re expected to be honest about the products so that your opinions can maintain a semblance of impartiality.

The brands that Swaggable represents are mostly specialty foods. You sign up via Facebook Connect, telling Swaggable what types of products you’re interested in, or you can make specific requests for products you want from their current offerings, with new ones added every week. Samples are full-sized retail packages of mostly new and trendy foods, and Swaggable highlights categories like organic, fair trade, vegan, and non-GMO. Right now they’re sampling granola bars, fancy nut butters, spiced nut mixes, coconut drinks and teas, and a few dozen other products.

Facebook has an estimated 600 million active users, each connected to an average of 130 friends who collectively click the ‘like’ or ‘comment’ buttons 112 million times every hour, adding billions to Facebook’s bottom line. We’re the ones holding all the cards and we don’t seem to know it. Swaggable puts a little pinkie finger on the scale to shift the balance of power a tiny bit toward us.

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Funny, you don’t look Jewish…

Janice | June 20, 2012 - 1:25 pm

: image via Kosher Ham

Why is it that nearly half of all the food in American supermarkets is kosher-certified?
There are roughly 6.5 million Jews in the U.S., just about 2% of the population. Maybe a million of them keep kosher.

A higher authority than the USDA
Kosher has become synonymous with purity and quality. It requires scrutiny and monitoring that exceed national standards, playing nicely in the current environment of heightened concerns about food safety. Labeling of kosher food is considered to be more trustworthy than mainstream labeling. Strict product labeling tells vegans and vegetarians when meat or dairy is present; Muslims can trust that kosher meat products contain no pork; and consumers with food allergies can safely monitor their diets.

The kosher label is so desirable that it now dominates new product launches. It is the number one label claim for new food and beverages, topping even organic, natural, and low fat. Mainstream retailers like WalMart and Whole Foods are hustling for certification to sell kosher chickens.

Of course the ancient, Jewish dietary laws stand for more than just food safety. Adherence is intended to connect daily living to a higher spiritual plane. For the typical kosher consumer, 85% of whom are not Jewish, faith is not a factor— just a lack of faith in the agencies that monitor our food system.

Pivotal kosher moments in US history:

Coca Cola (certified kosher, 1935)
Tropicana orange juice (1990)
Oreos (1997)
Kosher Pork (2011)
It’s like the Jewish version of the Holy Grail. It’s actually a Spanish variety of goose with a decided porkiness to its flesh.

Every one of them was a watershed. But nothing changed the way Americans look at kosher food like the 1972 Hebrew National hot dog commercial. As Uncle Sam munches on a hot dog, a disembodied, heavenly voice assures him that as a Hebrew National beef hot dog, it is free of the additives and by-products typically found in lesser processed meats. As the camera pans heavenward, the voice proclaims, “We answer to a higher authority.”

Kosher Quest has a guide to kosher package symbols and their certifying agencies.

Buck the trend and dine at Traif. Named for the Hebrew word for non-kosher, the Brooklyn restaurant is a celebration of pork and shellfish.

If you missed it the first time around, now’s your chance to view the seminal 1975 Hebrew National hot dog commercial.

Posted in food knowledge, shopping | 1 Comment

Facial Recognition Advertising: They’re watching you watching them

Janice | May 21, 2012 - 1:22 pm

: image via CEPro

Facial recognition: once the stuff of science fiction and high-tech crime fighting, it’s become the latest tool in marketing.

Picture this: you walk by a digital sign in the supermarket and up pops an ad touting salsa, or graham crackers, or one for Lean Cuisine—because it knows that you’re Hispanic, or a parent, or that you can stand to lose a few pounds.

New facial recognition advertising takes a high-definition scan of your face (and sometimes your body) and then extracts key metrics about the geometry of your bone structure—your jawline and cheekbones, the distance between your eyes and mouth. It compares your results to a massive database of facial markers and can identify your age group, gender, body type, and ethnicity, with what the industry claims to be 90% accuracy in most characteristics. Advertising is then targeted to your specific demographic.

It’s not the future; this is happening now.
Facial recognition software can already be found in vending machines, mall kiosks, and billboards. Las Vegas’ Venetian Hotel uses it to suggest restaurants as you pass through the lobby. Kraft supermarket ads switch their displays of mac and cheese menu variations based on the age and gender of the shoppers passing by. Facial recognition knows your hair color and body dimensions, if you’re pregnant, losing your hair, or likely to be menopausal, and there’s even a version that analyzes your facial symmetry and assigns a numerical ranking of attractiveness.

Obviously, privacy issues abound.
Luckily for the marketers, our online experience has already altered our expectations of personal privacy and security. Google scans our Gmail accounts, cookies track our online browsing, and Facebook has become a worldwide photo identification database. But facial recognition advertising is different. We are unwilling and unknowing participants. It can be found in public locations and we’re given no notice, no consent, and no chance to opt out.

If this sounds more like espionage than advertising, that’s no coincidence. Stealth marketing industry leader TruMedia (corporate motto: Every Face Counts) located its research division in Israel where it recruits many of its engineers from government security agencies where the technology was developed to identify terrorists. The commercial applications of facial recognition are, at this point, all about identifying a target demographic group, not to identify specific individuals as law enforcement does. But the information being gathered has the potential to violate privacy and civil liberties in the name of targeted marketing. At the least it could prove embarrassing as you push your cart through the supermarket trailed by ads for diet aids, prune juice, and hemorrhoid cream.

The tipping point of privacy
Industry analysts predict that by 2015, 22 million traditional signs in grocery stores, shopping malls, bus shelters, restaurants, and other locations will be replaced with interactive digital advertising. Commercial entities will be collecting and capitalizing on a mind-boggling array of personal data; and once it’s out there it stays out there. Somewhere along the line these intrusions upon our privacy will reach the point of no return.

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Campaign Swag: It’s Obama by a Landslide

Janice | May 18, 2012 - 12:09 pm

You know the Presidential election season is in full swing because both candidates have flung open the doors to their campaign merchandise shopping sites.

Obviously you’re making a statement when you wear an Obama t-shirt or slap a Romney bumper sticker on your car. And the candidates are making their own statements. The products they sell and the design aesthetics they choose extend their brands and offer insight to the spirit of the respective campaigns.

Campaign merchandise is so much more than t-shirts, bumper stickers, and buttons. Along with cat collars, dog bandanas, nail polish, and boxer shorts, the 2012 election has brought us a department store’s worth of kitchen goods: products for eating and drinking, cooking and serving.

We have a meatloaf-loving teetotaling challenger, and an incumbent who likes to wash down his arugula salad with craft-brewed beer. And it shows.

Romney: The Man and the Merch
It’s a good thing for Mitt Romney that we’re not voting on the merchandise.
Is anyone surprised that the candidate who lacks sizzle on the stump is a bore in the store?

Romney merchandise is dependably square and predictable. It upholds the G.O.P. tradition of unimaginative graphics— good enough but brand bland. It’s so lacking in personality and excitement that it makes you wonder if the dullness is deliberate and defiant, a badge or honor flying in the face of the Obama pizazz. Or maybe it’s all the campaign could muster.

There’s the white-with-red-and-blue Believe in America coffee mug, the white-with-red-and-blue Believe in America travel coffee cup, and the white-with-red-and-blue Believe in America travel water bottle. Slightly more daring is the Believe in America cork beverage coaster, hinting at the possibility of alcoholic beverages, and stepping out with a blue-with-red-and-white color scheme.

The only other offerings aimed at a foodie constituent are an apron and a reusable grocery shopping bag. You have to ask, ‘Where are the Oven Mitts?‘ You’d think it would be a no-brainer.

It really has been a four year Obama Foodorama.
Obama installed a vegetable garden on the White House lawn and a beehive in the back. He has turned state dinners into foodie events and bottled the first-ever White House home-brewed beer. Naturally we entered the election season with high hopes for some serious foodie swag, and Obama-Biden 2012 doesn’t disappoint.

The contrast with Romney is striking. The Obama team runs a high-spirited campaign with a self-deprecating sense of humor, an eye for graphic design, an appreciation of the cocktail hour, and a willingness to take some risks. Critics have taken swings at the campaign for its endless cavalcade of offerings and its painfully hip and elitist inclusion of high-end designers and celebrities, but at least it’s got personality.

Obama answers the citizenship conspiracy theorists with his Made in the USA birther mug— a relaxed Obama pictured on front is backed up by a photo of his long-form birth certificate. The Cup of Joe mug features the smiling mug of Joe Biden. The campaign pokes more fun celebrating the President’s vaguely Irish roots with the O’Bama pint glasses, and Biden’s working-class beginnings with the Cheers Champ beer can cozy. The Obama sunrise logo is also slapped onto neoprene wine bottle totes and 6-pack cooler/carriers, and it’s etched into tumblers and highball glasses, and stemware for wine and martinis.
This is not an administration that shies away from the libations.

Cooking with POTUS
Wear a Fired Up and Ready to Grill apron when you flip your burgers with the Obama sunrise spatula, while the waiting bun (yes, Michelle, it’s whole grain) bears the Shepard Fairey portrait courtesy of the Burnt Impressions toaster. Home cooks for Obama are in good company—The Braiser examined the Federal Election Commission’s individual filings, fundraising, and bundling efforts to identify the top 15 political contributions made by chefs. It’s 14:1 in favor of Obama, and only #15, former Iron Chef/Top Chef competitor Tim Love had opened his wallet for Romney. It’s worth noting that each of the top four on the list (Alice Waters, Marcus Samuelsson, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten) brought in more than a million dollars, compared to Love’s $500.

Of course campaign merchandise doesn’t win elections; if it did, the race would already be over.

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Should You Be Buying Your Groceries Online?

Janice | May 16, 2012 - 12:10 pm

Clicks or Bricks: which is cheaper, easier, greener?

Who wouldn’t want to cut out all those trips to the supermarket?
Hopefully you’ve already cut way back, with a larger portion of your food coming from farmers markets and other local sources, but you just can’t get everything. There will always be a need for the cans and bottle, cleaning supplies and paper goods that large chain stores offer cheaper and with better selection. We are still left with that most detestable of all household errands—the trip to the supermarket.

It’s misery from start to finish: the parking space in the next county, the shopping cart with a cranky wheel, the checkout line that inches along, and finally the multiple trips from car to kitchen hauling all those grocery bags. What if you could eliminate that dreaded chore AND reduce your environmental impact?

A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University’s Green Design Institute concluded that online purchases with home delivery can result in 35 percent less energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions than traditional shopping. Approximately 65 percent of total emissions generated by the traditional retail model comes from driving your own car to and from the store. Even though a huge, fuel-burning truck will be bringing the groceries to you, the incremental energy consumption and emissions created by one more shopping order and one more delivery stop added to the truck’s route is less significant than if you make the drive yourself.

There are also logistical differences in the supply chain that can lessen the environmental impact of online shopping. Traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers generally have items shipped from manufacturers to distributors to regional warehouses, where they are then redistributed to individual store locations. Online sellers can streamline the process. They usually eliminate at least one tier of regional warehousing, and some can even skip a few steps by relying on distribution partners to ship directly shipping to customer homes. This cuts back not just on the transportation of products, but also the bundled packaging and packing materials needed along the way.

Try it; you’ll like it.
Online grocery purchases are still at a miniscule 2% of overall sales, thriving in just a few urban niche markets. But those users are hooked. Among shoppers who tried out online shopping over the past year, 43% have become regular, weekly online customers and 12% are now monthly shoppers.

Here come the game-changers.
We’ve grown comfortable with online shopping, the modems are a lot faster, and gas prices are hovering around $4.00 a gallon. Walmart, already the nation’s biggest grocer, is experimenting with a new online service called Walmart To Go, while Amazon, the king of online retailers, has big plans for a national roll-out of its own service, AmazonFresh. There are plenty of alternatives for the Walmart averse— SOS eMarketing lists 50 online grocers including ethnic, regional, and specialty retailers, and we now have the nation’s first USDA-certified organic online grocer.

For the little things on your list…
We all know about the wasteful gas-guzzling miles spent on last minute trips for a few items. For that desperately needed quart of milk or bag of Milanos, we can look to an Italian crowd-sourcing experiment called Milk, Please!. The app lets a user send a shopping request to Milk, Please!, which is accessible online, via smartphones, and at supermarket kiosks. Someone who is planning a shopping trip or is already at the store can view the request and add the items to their own shopping list. They then drop the item off on their way home, and Milk, Please! handles the payment and reimbursement. Massachusetts-based Neighbor Favor is trying a similar tip-based service harnessing the abundant idle time and energy of college students.

Posted in home delivery, shopping, sustainability | Leave a comment

Supermarkets Roll Out Dedicated ‘Man Aisles’

Janice | March 28, 2012 - 12:24 pm

image via Paisley Magic

Men are increasingly taking over food shopping duties.
A Yahoo survey in 2011 found that 51% of 18 to 64 year old men now call themselves the primary shoppers for their households. So far, there are few reports of testicle shrinkage.

Stores are starting to test dedicated ‘man aisles.’
Marketers like Proctor & Gamble and Kraft are encouraging stores to create ‘male-friendly’ zones stocked with razors, manly-scented grooming products, and convenience foods with added man appeal. Wal-Mart, CVS, Walgreens, and the H-E-B supermarket chain are all installing them in stores in 2012, and Target has been experimenting with them in about 1,000 of their locations. The idea is to create a safe haven within the stores where men won’t have to encounter troubling lady things like Tampax and mustache bleach, or be led astray by probiotic yogurt and frilly tarragon leaves.

As one stereotype falls, another rises to take its place.
Men are no longer the hapless dolts of the household. They can finally be trusted to walk into a supermarket with a list and walk out with more than chips, bacon, and beer.

But apparently men now live under a threat of feminization. Gender roles might have been redefined, but they still don’t want to be caught doing ‘women’s work.’ The male ego needs reassurance; it needs to shop in man-caves carved out from the lavender-scented terrain of pink razors, cotton balls, and rice cakes lest there be emasculation by association.

Evolutionary scientists have applauded the man aisles. They theorize that men and women have different approaches to grocery shopping because men are meant to be hunters, while women, as natural gatherers, are better suited to shopping. The theory goes that man has no interest in strolling the aisles. He’s programmed to treat the supermarket like a prehistoric hunter; he should get in and out quickly and stay in safe territory. Of course we have to forget for the moment that about one in ten men is on the hunt for a good under-eye cream to reduce puffiness.

Last year, the Nielsen Company examined the differences in shopping behavior between the sexes. The study looked at how, where, and when they shop, and what they’re buying. The big surprise was the sameness of the results. While women continue to do the majority of the shopping in every category but convenience stores and gas stations, the purchase patterns are virtually identical, and the differences in shopping frequency are narrowing across all shopping channels.

Look inside one of the new man zones.
The Boston Globe takes us on a tour of the men’s aisle inside a Texas supermarket.

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The Buck Stops Here: The New Dollar Store Grocery Shopper

Janice | March 13, 2012 - 2:37 pm

No wonder dollar stores are booming.
10 early-season blueberries, or a snack stack of crackers,
or 2 candy necklaces, or ½ a box of breadcrumbs.
This is what a dollar buys you at the supermarket.

Fresh eggs, corn flakes, and imported olive oil.
The dollar store is no longer the quirky bazaar full of cheap trinkets and last year’s Super Bowl t-shirts. Dollar General, with nearly 10,000 locations, is now the nation’s largest retailer, and it got there selling groceries. Dollar stores have installed coolers and freezer cases and vastly expanded their food offerings. Food and other typical grocery items now account for nearly three-fourths of dollar store sales.

Hey, Richie Rich, didja get lost on the way to Whole Foods?
A third of all shoppers regularly buy traditional grocery items at dollar stores. There’s still a core of lower-income customers, but since the market meltdown of 2008 and the stagnant, jobless recovery that followed, there are a lot more late model cars in the parking lots and plenty of manicured soccer moms prowling the aisles.

The stores have responded to the new shoppers by sprucing up and mixing in more national brands and upscale offerings. A trip to the dollar store used to be a scavenger hunt through an unpredictable mish mash of random lots, obscure labels, salvage goods, and other detritus of overheated global manufacturing. You never knew what you might serendipitously stumble across. More recently, the stores have made an effort to standardize their merchandise offerings as well as store layouts and signage so that shoppers can get in and out efficiently and reliably check off everything on their shopping lists.

For the dollar store newbie:

Savvy Sugar tells you How to Buy Groceries at the Dollar Store.

Separate the deals from the duds with Yahoo Shine’s The Super-Saver’s Guide to Grocery Shopping at Dollar Stores.

Posted in shopping | 2 Comments

A Guide to the Foodie Holiday Gift Guides

Janice | November 28, 2011 - 11:52 am

image via 7DTV

Holiday gift guides are supposed to make life a little easier at this time of year.
In theory, they are carefully curated, well-targeted selections that keep us from slogging through too many websites to come up with the perfect gift. But with so many gift guides out there, now we find ourselves slogging through them.
That’s why Gigabiting has done the slogging for you, to come up with a carefully curated, well-targeted selection of holiday gift guides for all the food lovers on your list.

Hit the ground running this holiday shopping season.
The Wall Street Journal has A Foodie’s Guide to Cyber Monday 2011.

They like kitchen hacks and the science behind the cooking.
Shop for the innovative cook at Seattle Weekly’s Food Geek Gift Guide: 2011.

Let them show their love with wearable food gifts.
The Huffington Post has 12 T-Shirts and Totes for Food Lovers.

They’re cool and they cook; for them, you can pick up a set of knives reflecting the specialized techniques of 20 ethnic cuisines, or a honey dipper inspired by the geometry of the beehive.
It’s Gifts for Your Foodie Friend from the Cool Hunting Holiday Gift Guide.

The cheeseboard is from reclaimed slate, and the espresso machine is hand-cranked.
It’s the Green Gift Guide for foodies from Treehugger.

Turn soybeans into soymilk and fruit juice into boozy hooch.
There are all kinds of gifts for all kinds of DIYers from Kitchen Daily’s 10 Make-Your-Own Food Kits.

They’re obsessed with swan-necked pour over kettles and debate the virtues of wet-processed beans.
Please the coffee lovers in your life with a selection from Dear Coffee, I Love You’s Coffee Lover Gift Guide 2011.

Have any food bloggers on your list? We need some love at holiday time just like anybody else.
My Kitchen Addiction mixes the professional, the practical, and the personal in the Food Blogger Gift Guide.

Here’s a gift that’s one-size-fits-all:
Give a gift to end hunger from the Feeding America Gift Catalog.
$12 buys a child’s breakfast for 3 months; for $90 you can provide 6 months’ worth of dinners for a family of 4.

Posted in holidays, shopping | Tagged holiday, shopping | Leave a comment

Paying More, Getting Less: Your Incredible Shrinking Groceries

Janice | November 8, 2011 - 1:46 pm

[image via Slow Poke Comics]

Coming soon to a supermarket near you…

Two Musketeers candy bars, Demitasse-a-Soup, Product 18 cereal.
It’s not your imagination; your groceries really are shrinking. Everything but the prices.

Hellmanns’s mayonnaise, Skippy peanut butter, and Tropicana orange juice are among hundreds of national brands that have shrunk their packaging in recent months. An 8 oz. Dannon yogurt now weighs in at 6, while the 6 oz. Yoplait dropped to 4. Kellogg slimmed cereal boxes by an average of 2.4 oz., and Wrigley’s 17-stick PlenTPak is not so plenTiful at 15. Mission prefers to play a shell game with its tortillas, dropping 2 from the 10-pack, then adding 2 to the 8-pack and calling it a ‘bonus;’ kind of like the ‘extra’ hour we get for daylight savings time.

Portion reduction, short-sizing, eco-friendly packaging—whatever they want to call it, it’s just a way of flying under the radar with price increases.

At least a dozen eggs is still twelve.

We are losing our benchmarks. A pint of Häagen-Dazs is now 2 oz. shy of that measure, and the former half gallon carton of Dreyers or Breyers ice cream has taken two separate hits to get to the current 1.5 quart size. The old one pound can of Maxwell House or Folgers coffee now weighs in at around 12 oz., just like a supermarket bag of Starbucks beans, in case you thought you were getting a full pound. Some reductions are more troubling than others—it’s problematic when you can’t squeeze two decent sandwiches out of the smaller size can of Starkist tuna, while four fewer Double Stuf Oreos will hardly be missed.

It’s not that we begrudge the manufacturers their profit margins. They are feeling the squeeze, coping with the rising cost of ingredients plus high fuel prices. Holding the line on supermarket pricing through down-sized packaging can make the product more attractive to budget shoppers. What irks is the disingenuousness; the sense that the manufacturers are pulling a fast one when they tout their new ‘value-added redesign,’ or ‘slim-ship enviro-packaging.’

As the frequently resized Alice said to the Wonderland caterpillar:
I’m not particular as to size, only one doesn’t like changing so often, you know.

The shoppers’ advocacy site The Consumerist will keep you up to date on shrinking grocery items with its regular feature, Grocery Shrink Ray.

Posted in food business, shopping | Tagged recession, supermarkets | 2 Comments

Smelling and Selling

Janice | October 4, 2011 - 8:50 am

Your appetite perks up the minute you walk into the supermarket.
There’s the homey smell of roasting chickens as they take a slow turn around the rotisserie, a faint herbal-citrusy scent rising from neatly stacked pyramids of produce, and of course the fresh-baked aroma of yeasty cinnamon goodness floating through the air of the in-store bakery.
What are you really smelling?

Supermarkets, restaurants, and other retailers are pumping more and more artificial fragrances through their stores. The practice goes by lots of different names–retail atmospherics, neuromarketing, sensory branding, olfactory marketing, scent logos–whatever you want to call it, it’s making you spend more money.

Sure, food smells make you hungry, but there’s more to it than that. Your sense of smell is directly connected to the emotional control center of your brain, where it triggers a response that influences your behavior. When a particular scent taps into the right emotions, you’re more inclined to make a purchase.

This stuff really works.
According to the Scent Marketing Institute, Nike was able to boost its customers’ intent to purchase by 80% when certain scents were added to their store environment. Gas stations can triple their mini-mart coffee sales, nightclubs serve more cocktails, and toy stores can get parents to linger longer with the right scent (it’s orange-seawater-peppermint for nightclubs and piña colada for toy-shopping grown-ups— go figure).

Food is a natural for scent marketing. Most of what we perceive as taste actually comes from our sense of smell. Our taste buds perceive only bitter, salty, sweet, sour, and umami flavors, and we already rely on odor molecules for specific taste sensations. Plus, it’s easy to perfume the air with chocolate or freshly baked bread, and not so simple to devise a suitable smell for sneakers or Legos .

Sensory marketing is nothing new.
A breakthrough in nebulization technology, in which a scented oil is converted into a dry vapor, has made fragranced air more commercially viable, but for years hotels have pumped a little bacon smell into elevator shafts in the morning to boost room service breakfast business, and theme parks have been tempting you to buy popcorn and sweets with scent machines hidden in the landscaping. More recently, Starbucks became so convinced of the power of scent marketing that it nearly abandoned its successful line of hot breakfasts because of the way the smell of heating sandwiches interferes with the coffee aroma.

Reeking of deception
Aggressive scent marketing by a New York supermarket has opened an ethical debate. Brooklyn’s Net Cost market has had great success with five nebulizers that pipe different fragrances through strategic store locations, seeing sales rise by 7% for the corresponding foods. The problem is that the store also disperses cooking smells for items that aren’t prepared on the premises, and for items it doesn’t even carry. Customers have complained that the store is misrepresenting its products, and that they feel misled and manipulated by the scents.

You can get a good overview of retail atmospherics at the website for ScentAir, the scent supplier to Net Cost markets, among its tens of thousands of global installations. ScentAir offers 350 smells by monthly subscription from its fragrance library, although to me, separate entries for funnel cake and waffle cone feels like so much hair splitting.

Last month’s New Scientist looks at the ways in which smells shape our moods, behavior and decisions while barely registering in our conscious lives. Read The unsung sense: How smell rules your life.

From the Gigabiting archives, February, 2011: Food might be the way to a man’s heart, but the smell of food aims a little lower. Read Better than Viagra: Arousal by Food Smells.

Posted in Science/Technology, shopping | Tagged shopping, supermarkets, technology | 3 Comments