Campbell’s Seeds (in Japan) is produced by a third party, Tokyo-based World Flower Service. Inside is a choice of seeds to grow miniature tomatoes, miniature pumpkins or green peas. The idea of a more labor-intensive Campbell’s came to mind from an interior design magazine that showed the can immortalized by Andy Warhol being used to grow herbs in the kitchen.
Intro
Pete’s Tofu2Go is a series of products that attempts to create new, appealing, and useful applications for tofu.
This includes Snackable in four flavors, with dipping sauces
* Sesame Ginger with Jazzed Ginger Soy Sauce
* Thai Tango with Mango Wasabi Sauce
* Lemon Pepper with Mango Chipotle Sauce (U.S. only)
* Santa Fe Sizzle with Pineapple Mango Fusion Sauce (U.S. only)
as well as Marinated Cubes in Tequila Lime and Sesame Sizzle (for cooking or snacking), and dessert.
The Package
We tried two flavors of dessert tofu, Very Berry, and Caramel. Looks pretty good on the package; bright colors, familiar flavors (i.e., yogurt, or pudding).
Look at the tiny little spoon they come with! Kinda cute, if somewhat less than optimally functional.
Here’s everything. Each package contains two substantial containers. and two baby spoons.
The packages break apart – with some effort – for individual consumption, and I guess packing in lunches, etc. We tried it at home.
Serving
In order to open it, one must grasp the clear thin plastic layer at one corner and pull back. It’s fairly well attached, and so one must steady the hand against a surface in order to pull. Of course, at the beginning of the opening process, the only thing to steady against is the tofu itself. This caused the strawberry version to bulge rather sickly through the opening, a large layer heaving with eagerness to depart.
When I finally got the plastic off, the excess liquid in the container gathered on top of the tofu, presenting a wet, glistening, slightly pink and almost alive surface. It wasn’t so appetizing.
But things went from bad to really bad when I opened the caramel. Some difference in the texture of the dessert lead to a completely different bulging behavior. With the caramel, the pressure of my hand on the plastic caused the tofu to flood sickeningly and rapidly out the opening.
It was the first time I wished I was a videoblogger, because the video would be much better than these pictures. The quick and dramatic depature of the tofu slurry looked for all the world like an exploding zit. Not good.
Eating
I really was hoping for the best. But it was inedible. The water in each spoonful created multiple textures, a weakly-flavored water with a gelatinous pile of glop in the middle. With no yogurt or pudding taste, but something like medicine, a Robitussin or other medication that makes ya shiver.
And even though the package says “serving suggestion” – I really did think the caramel was going to have some drizzled caramel sauce or a layer of topping in the container somewhere. I figured the phrase referred to the nice berries on the side but not the lack of a topping. I felt grossed out, but also scammed.
This is a product to avoid.
Note: This is the fourth in an occasional series of reviews of new grocery (and other) products that strike me as interesting or unusual. See also Tiger Power, Grapple, and Bumblebee Entre Style Tuna.
A simple DIY ring
Here’s an easy DIY ring that looks cool and takes seconds to make. In this era of ReadyMade magazine and being green and beauty is where you find it, why not, I ask you? Why not, indeed?
Take an ordinary unopened carton of some beverage. We used Chocolate Silk because it’s made with Real Soy and therefore must be good for you. Open up the screw-top lid.
The freshness seal is what you want. There’s our quarry!
Take the freshness seal off. You just might want to drink some of the soymilk at this point.
Voila!
Lovely. Oops, time for a manicure!
Here’s a brilliant rant about the supermarket shopping experience
We are surrounded. We are immersed. American consumer culture is teeming with so many neon-colored, overprocessed, semicomestible, demon-spawn products we can no longer even recognize how bad it is, how it is all meant to drive us slowly insane, so slowly we forget to keep asking why we feel so sick all the time, and we just shut the hell up and buy more giant tubs of Country Crock to go with our liquefied reconstituted pork tubes because we think this is the only way.
In this Slate article by Dan Crane the fancy-delancy salts and their poor-as-peter siblings are put through their taste-test paces.
Although sodium chloride is the primary component of all salt, the texture and shape of the crystals must also be considered, as those qualities fundamentally impact salt’s taste and how it interacts with food. Does it provide satisfying crunch, dissolve nicely when it should? How well does it season food? How well does it stand alone?
Three tests were performed on nine salts (from each of the four salt varieties) by eight tasters in New York City: the finger dip (self-explanatory), salt atop a slice of fresh cucumber, and salt used in pasta sauce made with unsalted canned tomatoes. (I made Marcella Hazan’s classic tomato sauce.)
While the East Coast results were interesting, I felt they were inconclusive. Thus, I embarked on Round 2, which took place in Los Angeles at one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants, the Edendale Grill in Silverlake. The restaurant kindly agreed to cook French fries and steaks for a group of eight testers, using each of the same nine salts.
In both rounds, testers were asked to blindly rate the salt from 1 to 10 and comment on its taste. The scores from all five rounds were averaged together for one final ‘taste’ score. Salts were also assigned an aesthetic rating based on the packaging and the look of the salt itself, since appearance is often as important as taste.
Dreyer’s is going to jam as many attributes into one packaging label as possible. If your mouth gets tired while saying it, you may have a design and branding problem.
Dreyer’s
Slow Churned
(Rich & Creamy)
Light
Vanilla
And the one at the link above (the image was too small to post here) also includes
New!
Vanilla Bean (with Real Bean Specks)
Meh. I’m exhausted. Too many subcategories of features and benefits and attributes and brand. Why is this so hard?
I didn’t know about this, but according this story, this slow-churning technology (with no props to John Hiatt, I guess) makes lower fat ice cream taste like it’s full-fat. Hmm.
Snapple-a-Day is a meal replacement beverage from Snapple, leveraging the brand of Snapple in a very weird way. It’s like they are distant cousins, there seems to be no direct relationship between the regular ol’ Snapple and this stuff (on the same grocery shelves with the various MetRx bars and other science-y kind of non-food foods).
There’s obviously some packaging scam going on here that I can’t quite sort out. Breakfast cereal seems to come in two sizes, say 16 oz and 21 oz. Visually, the two are almost equivalent, perhaps the larger size will be less than an inch taller and not visisbly wider when looking at the retail shelf. The price for the larger size can be very small; yesterday I saw a 20c increase for the larger size. Why would anyone, therefore, buy the smaller size?
If you ignore promotions (half price, 2 for 1) on either size, what is the purpose of the two sizes in the line? Is it a tactic to gain more shelf space by offering more product choices? That’s my best guess, but that just seems to ridiculous, I don’t want to believe it’s true. Any insights, please leave a comment!
are a brilliantly simple packaging and branding innovation. Give people more control over what they eat by packaging a fixed calorie amount.
100 calories seems like a harmless enough amount to snack on and it’s an easy number to help tally your daily intake. Portion control is a complex aspect of dieting, with endless confusion about what is a portion? What is a serving?
The 100 Calorie brand takes precedence over the ingredient brand (although some of those such as Oreo Thin Crisp are special-to-this-product-line extensions, with presumably lower-cal reformulations).
This is the third in an occasional series of reviews of new grocery (and other) products that strike me as interesting or unusual. See also Tiger Power and Grapple.
Intro
Bumblebee Entree-Style Tuna is one of the latest Home Meal Replacement products arriving in the grocery store. Home Meal Replacement, a lovely industry term usually abbreviated as HMR (which always sounds a little too close to HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) for me).
The idea is to help busy families get a traditional-type meal on the table quickly, through some innovations in packaging and distribution and food design. And maybe getting people to think a bit differently about what actually is necessary to constitute a meal.
The Package
The product comes in three flavors – we tried two of them: Lemon and Cracked Pepper, and Ginger and Soy. The third was Mesquite Grilled (not so appealing for tuna). Although check out the nutritional info – maybe we made the wrong choice because that Ginger & Soy has triple the sodium of the others – 43% of your RDA. Didn’t they use to salt fish to preserve it?
The packages are the latest foil envelope gizmo, the printing technology has come along since the early days of boil-and-bag. Bumblebee of course is a company known for tinned tuna (I’d call it canned tuna, but that doesn’t ring as well, does it?), but small type indicates this is gourmet wild tuna, which presumably means that it was caught, not farmed. I didn’t know that tuna was farmed, anyway, and I also assume that you can label anything as gourmet without challenge.
The back of the pouch shows the three easy steps (1 – Tear, 2 – Heat, 3 – Enjoy), with some helpful and encouraging requests such as “Notice the firm texture and seasoning!” and pointers to the “Convenient Preparation Options – The results are all Fabulous…” (and yeah, they did capitalize just Fabulous in that sentence – does that mean we need to have a Fabulous voice in our head when we read it? Fabulous!)
Preparation
Couldn’t be easier. Tear it open:
and put it on a plate (or baking dish, or skillet) – it can be heated in the oven or microwave, or on the stove-top. We opted for the toaster oven.
Whoops. A bit more goo comes flowing out of the pouch than one would expect. The picture on the back of the envelope is goo-free, and shows a much larger, thicker, and pinker looking steak than we got. And look how different the two flavors are. The Ginger and Soy (on the right) does have little sticks of ginger on top. I’m not sure what that is on the top of the other one. Let’s just say that’s spices, okay?
The instructions said a preheated-350-oven for 10 minutes. We used a toaster oven, and it wasn’t pre-heated, so I went for 11 minutes.
Eating
Cooked…
and served…
It wasn’t good. It wasn’t flaky, it was dry. It wasn’t enough food – look at those portions – that’s two halves on one plate (that way everyone got to try each flavor!). The rice was essential to mix in to each bit to try and stave off some of the dry tuna taste/texture.
Perhaps my 11-minute improvisation was disastrous to the end-product; I’d not expect that, but who knows how carefully they time these things in development.
Conclusion
Not such a good execution. Certainly, a compelling idea. Reasonably healthy and easy to prepare, just steps to a “real meal” – that definitely appeals to me. But if you are going to compromise at meal-time (and certainly that is almost inevitable) don’t set the expectations so high? At least in a new product category, if you want to survive, don’t set the expectations so high. This was not like eating fresh tuna, or even freshly prepared tuna. It was just over-flavored dry…something.
