Old and run-down business goes away, omnipresent Dunkin Donuts comes in. One shouldn’t infer timing, nor cause-and-effect, of course. But perhaps signs of the times?

Meanwhile, a recent post on Bostonist maps out the density of DD in nearby Boston.

I figured I’d be eating some donuts on that trip, but I did not. I was quite excited to see a Tim Horton’s (a rare sighting in the US, especially away from a Canadian border) and ran in to get a butter tart (a dessert fave). Yum!

cap’n crunch doughnut, originally uploaded by mokin.

Still life with Bacon Maple Bar and Voodoo Doughnut, originally uploaded by HPZ.

voodoo doughnut, originally uploaded by Poisson.

blood-filled voodoo doughnut, originally uploaded by mokin.

I’ve got to get to Portland soon and check this place out. Cool menu, interesting attitude.

Grape Ape
(raised doughnut with vanilla frosting and grape powder)

Dirt
(raised doughnut covered with vanilla glaze and oreo cookies)

Arnold Palmer
(cake doughnut covered with lemon and tea powder)

San Dimas
(cake with three types of chocolate on top)

Butter Fingering
(Devils food, vanilla, and crushed Butterfinger)

Neapolitan
(chocoalte doughnut with vanilla frosting and strawberry quick powder)

Triple Chocolate Penetration
(chocolate doughnut, chocolate glaze, and cocoa-puffs)

Voodoo Doughnut
(voodoo doll doughnut)

Dirty Snowball
(chocolate cake doughnut covered with pink marshmallow glaze and surprise filling)

Apple Fritter
(apple/glaze/doughnut as big as your head)

The Memphis Mafia
(chocolate chips/banana/ peanutbutter/glaze big!)

Portland Creme
(raised doughnut filled with creme and covered in chocolate with two eyes)

Cock-n-Balls
(Bachlorette party favorite, tripple cream filled, with your favorite saying written right on it. Comes in its own pink box. $4.95 Order ahead as supplies can be limited.)

Nyquil Glazed and pepto-bismol (currently on hold)

No Name
A doughnut so good we couldn’t come up with a better name. It has chocolate rice crispys and peanutbutter on it.

VEGAN
(thats right, vegan doughnuts! assorted flavors, come in and eat many)

I run into these Kettle Chips any time I’m in a fancy/yuppie/specialty kind of food store. I admit to not having paid attention closely over the years, but I remember them appearing as a brand of authentic old-timey traditional (i.e., “quality”) chips, and it seems that all of a sudden they’ve been coming out with crazier and crazier flavors.

This would be a good Consumed piece, don’t you think? How did the brand offering evolve to what it is now? Their website outlines their commitment to adventurous flavors, all natural, and more on the type of ingredients and preparation process. Much of that is typical for a food company, but the flavors is an interesting twist. I’m reminded of Method, who have built a story around cleaning products that are safe, not animal-tested, effective, smell good, and are packaged to look good. You can pick one or two of those (i.e., beautiful packaging) as a hook and identify with that, rather than have the whole story be important. It’s surprising to see a gourmet/quality story with unusual flavors, it’s surprising to see a safe cleanser with a gorgeous package that you can leave out. But beyond surprise is a sense that these might be the real attractors, while all that other stuff is just fine, of course.

Meanwhile, thinking about flavors reminded me of the awesome social commentary found in this riff from the Kids in the Hall:

In the beginning, there was Miracle Whip. One kind of cheese, and fish came in sticks. Bread was white, and milk was homo [there is a carton of “homo milk”]. Our condiments were mustard, relish, and ketchup. Our spices were salt, pepper, and paprika. These were our sacraments. [closes fridge]

Garlic was ethnic. Mysterious. Something out of the Arabian Nights. And then one day it happened. Food exploded. People, yeah, people put down their Alan’s Apple Juice and share of pudding, picked up a bowl of tofu, slathered it with President’s Choice spicy Thai sauce, yeah, and washed it all down with a mango-guava seltzer.

You know, there are so many new products nowadays and I confess half of them I can’t identify. I guess it’s like that with people too. You know I can’t tell a pita bread from a cactus pear or a Korean from a Filipino. I feel left behind. I do. I’m not *modern*.

I’m embarrassed to buy water in a bottle unless it’s for the iron. And I still believe– call me square but I still believe that tangerines are just for Christmas. You know what? I think it all started with marble cheese. I do! Yep. Well, think about it ’cause right after they introduced that, they came up with salt and vinegar chips. Then it was sour cream ‘n’ onion, homestyle, before you know it chips were being sold in a tuuube. Where will it all end?

I’ve uploaded some new pictures to the Museum of Foreign Grocery Products

I’ve got quite a few more to do.

I blogged this before, back in 2004, but ah, technology. Actually a $5 cable is all I needed to be able to pull audio from a microcassette into my PC, and onto Odeo, so that I can blog it here.

I received this voice mail a couple of years ago. It’s obviously misdirected, perhaps because of my Museum of Foreign Groceries which used to be displayed on this site. But that’s all packaged foods, so? Hard to figure out what the other person was thinking, but it’s funny anyway. Give it a listen!

Note: I’ve redacted the phone number to protect her privacy.

Fresh and Clean International Food Safety Standards

When I took this picture (in Bangkok) I marveled at the fact that something as basic as food safety was advertised as a benefit to shoppers. What about taste? Value? Good times? Good friends? An interesting menu? Nope. Fresh. Clean. Safe.

Yet here in the U.S. we’ve got scallion problems at Taco Bell and recent problems with spinach. Am I having a Michael Pollan-induced panic or are we not as far ahead as we kid ourselves into believing?

The Hannaford grocery chain has developed their own ratings system for the nutritional value of grocery products. From this story

A New England supermarket chain has developed a 1-to-3 star nutritional rating system that flunks most of the foods consumers think are good for them.

After plugging 27,000 products into its system, the Hannaford Brothers chain found that 77 percent of the foods failed to receive even one good nutrition star, The New York Times reports.

Hannaford said many of the processed foods advertised as being healthy failed to gain a star because they contained too much sodium, sugar or fat.

Most fruits and vegetables earned the highest rating of three stars along with salmon and high-fiber cereals.

Making its debut in September, Hannaford’s rating system puts the chain in the awkward position of judging the very products it’s trying to sell. In fact, most of Hannaford’s own store brands failed to get any stars, the Times said.

“We are saying there are no bad foods,” Hannaford spokeswoman Caren Epstein told the newspaper. “This is a good, better and best system.”

Hannaford’s nutritionists acknowledge their system is more stringent than the guidelines used by the Food and Drug Administration.

A couple of things of note here. First, the subjectivity of any measuring and rating system means that establishing standards will always be tough. The challenge to non-nutritionists to understand the complexity of ingredients, preparation, nutrition, etc. is enormous. I would suggest it’s impossible. Do multiple layers of ratings systems help or hinder? And related, is the second issue, where a retailer (a food retailer, even) is assessing the quality of the products they are selling. If a product is packaged and branded as being healthy, but it’s label is in opposition to how many stars it receives, will there be pressure on Hannaford to back down? It seems that this is healthy for consumers (so to speak) but may be a retailing nightmare. I hope they stick to their guns, but I wonder if other channels would be so bold. The online world has brought us a lot of customer reviews that obviously can be quite critical, but does that work in a bricks+mortar setting when the negative assessment comes from the bricks+mortar itself?

Interesting methodology (and findings) for understanding the factors that influence our eating behaviors at the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell

In an eight-seat lab designed to look like a cozy kitchen, Dr. Wansink offers free lunches in exchange for hard data. He opened the lab at Cornell in April, after he moved it from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he spent eight years conducting experiments in cafeterias, grocery stores and movie theaters.
…
Although people think they make 15 food decisions a day on average, his research shows the number is well over 200. Some are obvious, some are subtle. The bigger the plate, the larger the spoon, the deeper the bag, the more we eat. But sometimes we decide how much to eat based on how much the person next to us is eating, sometimes moderating our intake by more than 20 percent up or down to match our dining companion.
…
Moviegoers in a Chicago suburb were given free stale popcorn, some in medium-size buckets, some in large buckets. What was left in the buckets was weighed at the end of the movie. The people with larger buckets ate 53 percent more than people with smaller buckets. And people didn’t eat the popcorn because they liked it, he said. They were driven by hidden persuaders: the distraction of the movie, the sound of other people eating popcorn and the Pavlovian popcorn trigger that is activated when we step into a movie theater.

Dr. Wansink is particularly proud of his bottomless soup bowl, which he and some undergraduates devised with insulated tubing, plastic dinnerware and a pot of hot tomato soup rigged to keep the bowl about half full. The idea was to test which would make people stop eating: visual cues, or a feeling of fullness.

People using normal soup bowls ate about nine ounces. The typical bottomless soup bowl diner ate 15 ounces. Some of those ate more than a quart, and didn’t stop until the 20-minute experiment was over. When asked to estimate how many calories they had consumed, both groups thought they had eaten about the same amount, and 113 fewer calories on average than they actually had.

A sidebar listing other experiments and results is here (link may expire).

Yeah, dude. Keep eating sugar cereal like this and you’re going to have a serious diabetes problem. You already look like you’re suffering from ADD. You (or your guardian) might want to have a doctor check that out.

This weekend we checked out Palo Alto’s new restaurant, The Counter; a place that is having some buzz in the blogosphere (and their original Santa Monica place supposedly being mentioned on Oprah). The thrust seems to be highly customizable burgers. Kinda like The Fractured Prune’s version of donuts I blogged about recently.

I was surprised at how sedate and genteel the whole thing was, aesthetically. I was expecting much more of a cartoony-branded affair. This was nice.

Even the cash featured art more than heavily branded graphics. This worked against them a little bit – it was hard to figure out what to do, there was no hostess stand. Upon coming in, if no one is there to greet you, you see a stack of cilpboards with menus. Are these for us? I actually told the guy who came up “we have no idea what we are doing” – a comment I wouldn’t normally make (I’m not that insecure, but really, we couldn’t figure out the script. A bit more wayfinding signage, branded or not, would have helped.

Here’s the menu:

There’s a lot of choices there! It’s surprising, exciting, and overwhelming. They could use a little help in form design here, again, asking you to wayfind through a series of decisions (although burger OR bowl needs some visual work to make the decision-fork a little clearer). But really, the impact of that massive set of choices (some with price premiums, some not) is pretty incredible.

They have mitigated that slightly with a set of pre-defined burgers, where they’ve chosen a few combinations, given them names (The Counter Burger) and saved you the trouble of figuring it out. But what I want is to make my own custom burger – the key experience here, it seems – but with some guidance: what goes with what? what tastes complement other tastes?

If you want to redo a room, you can consult a color wheel for info on complementary colors, you can find advice that might tell you to pick the carpet first and then select paint and fabric next [whatever the advice might be], that hot colors look good in a small room, and cool colors in a big room will make it feel more empty [again, or whatever – I’m making this up].

It’d be pretty amazing to have some help with this, if you want it. If you know what you want to eat, go for it, but if you need some help pairing up sauces and buns and so on, what can we do? Perhaps The Counter wants you to experiment and come back over and over again (we felt that urge, certainly), but what fun it would be to have some guidance!

We figured it out, eventually, with a mix of traditional (tomatoes) and curious (hard boiled eggs, english muffin) choices.

Appetizers: dill pickle chips, yet again proving that anything is good when breaded and fried. And a half-and-half appetizer of regular fries (poor) and sweet potato fries (good, but not the best I’d ever had).

Burgers were unique, tasty, fun. Overall a good experience. We’re eager to go back and try something different next time. But $70 for four burgers, appetizers, a couple of beers and glasses of wine? Ouch.

They had just the right amount of new-restaurant inquiries from servers and managers asking us if everything was okay; good problem solving when something was missing (they ran in and got us a plate of the stuff we wanted).

Strange sign seen near the UXWeek hotel in D.C. Fractured Prune is a strange name for a donut shop (I mean shoppe). Their website explains how they named the chain after Prunella Shriek, a female athlete (sometimes injured) and landowner from the 1800s. But more interesting (as if the story of Prunella isn’t jaw-dropping in and of itself) is that “Here’s the fun part — you pick the toppings, glazes and sugars for your donuts!” from choices such as

* GLAZES
honey, banana, chocolate, maple, strawberry, raspberry, peanut butter, mocha, mint, cherry, lemon, orange, blueberry, mixed berry, caramel
* TOPPINGS
rainbow sprinkles, chocolate sprinkles, coconut, peanuts, Oreo cookie, mini chocolate chips, graham cracker crumbs
* SUGARS
powdered, granulated, cinnamon/sugar

and resulting in a wild array of interesting combinations:

Peppermint Patty
Mint / Mini Chips

Blueberry Hill
Blueberry / Powdered Sugar

Trail Mix
Banana / Nuts / Coconut / Jimmies

Who knew? I just saw a strange logo and an old deli being torn down. Looks like an interesting version of a familiar product, with customization as an easy but powerful tool for reinvention. I would bet it’s a pretty fun experience, too.

In Fruit Comes To The Door I wrote about some our experience with home delivery of organic produce

Small farms – I don’t know if this true and I don’t care to verify it but I get the vibe that the producers of these products (perhaps because of the organic thing) are small businesses themselves, and as consumers we hear about the corporate farms and how that’s vaguely bad, so there’s a further flavor of Doing Good attached to this purchase.
Local farms – Again, I don’t know if this is true, but it’s part of the mythology of the service – but I’m guessing the food hasn’t come a long way (the stand itself highlights some local farms). We’re being told that having a product sit on a truck and burn fuel to go a long distance isn’t good for us or the environment.

Nice improvement to the weekly pricelist from Sweet Peas (in the form of a spreadsheet) – now includes the name of the grower, their location, and the distance to Montara, where Sweet Peas (and we) are located.

Much, but not everything is local (however you interpret that term), but at least they are transparent about it. Way to go, Sweet Peas!

Speaking of local food, I had an amazing (free) lunch at Google’s Cafe 150 a few weeks back. Everything is from within 150 miles.

Life does imitate The Simpsons, or at least exhibit the absurditity so well captured by The Simpsons. First, while I’m all about avoiding waste and am brimming in admiration for cultures that use every part of the buffalo, it’s hard not to be a bit suspicious when the Dole Nutrition Institute goes to some great lengths to offer non-food (but hey, they are healthy) uses for Dole products.

For example, Banana Bread Head

Have a couple of bananas that have ripened beyond their prime? Don’t throw them away! Treat your hair to this vitamin-rich conditioning pack by blending a banana with a tablespoon or two of honey, plus a few drops of almond or vanilla extract for extra shine and a yummy fragrance that will remind you of mom’s fresh-baked banana bread.

Mix together banana, and honey in a blender. Wet hair with warm water and apply. For extra penetration, use plastic shower cap or wrap your hair with a towel. Wait about 20 minutes – perfect time to try the banana mask below – then rinse thoroughly, following with shampoo and conditioner as usual.

Mashed banana functions as a mucilage, much like aloe vera gel, protecting hair from environmental damage and smoothing frizzy flyaway hair. By bringing moisture to the surface of your scalp, this pack also serves as an excellent treatment for a dry, flaky scalp.

I’m going to be sick. I have been known to sport some fruity-smelling hair, but really, too much. Remember Steve Martin’s deodorant?

Tunafish Sandwich! I put a tunafish sandwich under each arm, one or two behind the ears… I don’t smell like any other guy! And it’s economical too, because the smell lasts for four or five days.

Dole also offers information on some other fresh fruit stuff to rub on yourself, including
* Lana’i Pineapple Body Scrub
* Strawberry Body Smoothie
* Indian Mangocado Body Polish
* Brown Sugar Jojoba Scrub
* Caribbean Conditioner
* Green Goddess Mask
* After-Beach Banana Mask
* Pi?±a Party Peel
* Good Morning Mask
* Papaya Peel
* Queen Bee Cleanser
* Green Tea Tonic

And elsewhere in Homer-esque food stuffs comes The Butter Trough, a restaurant in Atlanta that serves a strangely limited menu of bread, breadsticks, butter, and iced tea. It’s all free, thanks to advertising.

Finally, we serve you the absolute best and freshest supply of butter to be found in the region. Made from only organic minerals, The Butter Trough’s butter is made daily for your enjoyment. Twice hourly, the supply of butter in The Butter Trough is refilled. For your enjoyment, our farm clad employees slop the super heated butter into the butter trough so that you can enjoy it at its most liquid consistency.

The butter is made of minerals? Employees are “farm clad” and “slop” the butter into a trough? Damn right it better be free because who the hell would pay for this?

Don’t miss their catchy slogan “Friends. Fun. Food. Free.”

[via Mom; The Consumerist]

In a post-Omnivore’s Dilemma world, we had a recent chance to participate in a service usually reserved for big cities – home delivery of organic produce.

Here in Montara (pop. 4000 or something; home to an Alpaca ranch, a cafe, and a convenience store but very little else commercial) there is a little produce stand called “Sweet Peas” and they’ve begun home delivery.

I don’t think I’ve ever had non-restaurant food delivered (and I can’t remember the last time I had restaurant food delivered at home). We were totally struck by our visit to the suburbs of Mumbai when our host called and ordered some bottles of water and cigarettes and they appeared a few minutes later. One of my first real design/research projects, in fact, was a grocery store home delivery service (pre-Webvan, in fact, pre-web). And many many years later, I finally experienced it.

They send out a Tuesday email with a spreadsheet; you fill it out and email it back that day and the food comes on Friday. Leave the resuable boxes (they have our names on a sticker) out next week and do it all over again

I’m intrigued by the complexity of the cultural factors that impact the experience, and here’s my first pass at it:

Home delivery – food comes to the door – time-saving and convenience
Organic – I admit I don’t care about this as a principle, but some of the food does taste better, richer, fresher. There’s a snob factor to organic as well that I’m sure I am participating in. Hey, those two boxes cost $41. The prices are definitely higher, but I’m trying not to compare apples and apples, if you will.
Local business – I am surprised at how much this appeals to me – maybe the lack of commerce in my area makes this more tangible. Maybe I can relate, as a small business myself. The fact that we walk our dog past the owner’s home and see the garage filled with produce boxes makes it more tangible; we’re presumably doing good for our community and helping someone we can point to make a living. Of course, our Safeway employs locally and shopping there gives people jobs well. But Safeway seems like The Man and this feels like Sticking It To The Man; a rare chance to feel some power, to have some choices. These delivery services have appeared over the past several years in big places like New York (where FreshDirect seems to have had a similar cultural impact to Starbucks) and Vancouver. We’re getting some of that big city flavor of small(er) business in our own small community.
Small farms – I don’t know if this true and I don’t care to verify it but I get the vibe that the producers of these products (perhaps because of the organic thing) are small businesses themselves, and as consumers we hear about the corporate farms and how that’s vaguely bad, so there’s a further flavor of Doing Good attached to this purchase.
Local farms – Again, I don’t know if this is true, but it’s part of the mythology of the service – but I’m guessing the food hasn’t come a long way (the stand itself highlights some local farms). We’re being told that having a product sit on a truck and burn fuel to go a long distance isn’t good for us or the environment.
Reactive eating – For our first purchase, we picked from a list, but Sweet Peas will also let you specify a weekly dollar amount and simply pick stuff for you based on what’s fresh that week. In combination with the local food thing, this suggests a different philosophy of food consumption, that we bend with nature rather than forcing it to our will through the magic of science
Surprise and Mass CustomizationBecause of their local and small nature, Sweet Peas seems very willing to help come up with a weekly menu that is some combination of staples (i.e., we always want 3 bananas) and what’s fresh (i.e., to make a total of $XX.XX). Even if we don’t make use of that, the flexibility and choice seem very appealing.

I’ll be in Toronto tomorrow to give a talk about user research and cultural insight to a group of people working in the food industry (primarily) as sensory scientists; smell-and-taste researchers who I think work on groovy stuff like “mouth feel” and so on. Sounds like a great group; they’ve got a lot of registrants for our workshop and we’re going to do a bit of an observational walk-around exercise in some different neighborhoods in Toronto. I’m looking forward to it, despite taking a red-eye flight tonight.