Posts tagged “juice”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Oxfam Worldshake: a juice made from fairtrade produce from Cuba, Brazil, and Ecuador – Treehugger spotted this in Belgium in 2005, I bought one in Belgium last week. I was struck by Oxfam (an organization more well-known overseas than in North America) as a brand on a food product. I wonder what other products could be appropriately developed (and of course also branded) by non-profits, NGOs and charities. I'm not talking about silly cross promos like the United Airlines/American Cancer Society teddy bear I received recently, but where the mission of the organization is absolutely manifested in the production of the item itself. It makes perfect sense and it's what we expect from well-branded/designed products from the profit sector.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • IxDA SF presents Interaction09 Redux – Saturday, March 14th – I'll be leading a condensed version of my IXDA workshop from Vancouver (Well we did all this research…now what), looking at a framework for transforming questions into answers, answers into insights, and insights into actions.
  • Steve's photos from Vancouver, Feb 2009 – I was in Vancouver to run a workshop at the IXDA conference and to visit family. Some of the photos will make their way into dedicated blog posts but meanwhile here's the whole set.
  • Juice is in the details – Tropicana's redesign is being heralded for the caps that look like oranges. We've got a carton in the fridge and it's as plain as plain can be, so I'm not sure where these great caps are lurking. Meanwhile, back in 2006 we were seeing orange-looking caps on Florida's Natural packaging.
  • Tropicana reverts to "classic" packaging after their crappy redesign is met with broad scorn – Mea pulpa: "Asked if he was chagrined that consumers rejected the changes he believed they wanted, Mr. Campbell replied: “I feel it’s the right thing to do, to innovate as a company. I wouldn’t want to stop innovating as a result of this. At the same time, if consumers are speaking, you have to listen.”"

Food Preparation Customs

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Taipei 101

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Fresh juice

At the market in the basement of Taipei 101, I ordered a fresh juice from a juice stand. The young man who was making the juice rapidly measured and assembled the ingredients in a blender. As he was blending the fruit, he began to pour in honey. After a moment, he grabbed a long spoon, stuck it in what was becoming my drink, tasted and took a taste. Then with one hand he threw the spoon in the sink and with the other he added more honey.

Fruit, of course, is inconsistent. If you want to prepare food to a certain sweetness (or other taste attribute), and the ingredients aren’t exactly the same, how else can you do it without tasting?

In the west, at least, fast food is typically based on sourcing consistent ingredients and building a trainable process so the staff don’t have to use subjective judgments like taste in order to prepare a good product. As well, we don’t expect that people preparing our food would be eating it. In this case, the spoon was clean and was disposed of right away, so there was no chance of contamination, but the whole concept that this person consumed something and then gave me the rest was just so unfamiliar.

Yet another standard that I hadn’t even questioned until I saw it play out differently in Taipei.

Juice is in the details

Nice packaging detail. One might not notice the orange-section texture in the screw-top right away; makes for a nice surprise. I was strangely excited to discover this: a detail where none existed previously, a playfully gratuitous bit of decoration, a subtle feature that I felt the rush of discovery when encountering.

Series

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