Cooking And Gardening For Young Children.
Cooking And Gardening For Young Children.
CategoriesBook Reviews (2) Cooking (1) Eating (2) Family Recipe Testing (7) General and Intro (4) Growing (4) Interviews (1) News, Events & Campaigns (4)Most Recent EntriesCool Berry Smoothie With Tofu George And Flora's Secret Garden Filo Fish Fingers Reading The Labels - Interview with Clare Panchoo Easy Peasy Sponge Cake |
Coco Pops Update02/03/2010 21:27:00 Coco Pops Update
Just a quick update to say that Kelloggs appear to have accepted the fact that the campaign was unpopular and have agreed to take the ads down.
For more information see this blog entry by my brilliant twitter friend Jackie Schneider.
If you see the ads still up near you, please let Jackie know. She is totally on the case! Coco Pops 4 Life?12/02/2010 19:46:00 Coco Pops 4 Life?
Let's face it, it's not exactly new to find an advert targetting a group of people who would be magnetically drawn to the product, but are least well equipped to cope with it. Advertising consolidation loans, IVAs and cash for gold in the ad breaks for Jeremy Kyle, for example. A match made in heaven for the financiers skimming massive slices off the top, but for the financially-drowning viewers? Not so much. Slick commercials for cosmetic surgery in the ads for diet and fitness shows - No willpower? No problem. But Kelloggs latest Coco-Pops campaign has fallen so far south of the cynical-o-meter that it has attracted a degree of wrath it probably didn't expect.
I need to say straight up that I am irrationally fond of Kelloggs. I grew up with a lot of their products, I shared that weird misconception lots of Brits of my generation do that their products are somehow 'British', even though the company is, of course, based in Michigan. I can still remember when I first ate Coco-Pops and I am very fond of their Sultana Bran too.
But I am also a mom, and I know that Coco-Pops is not exactly the cornerstone of a nutritious diet. It is a fun cereal, and like a lot of products in its class, should be seen as an occasional treat. In our house the kids get to eat them when we go camping, in those tiny little cereal boxes which seem to make everything taste better. Chocolately they may be, complex carbohydrates they aint.
There was a moment a couple of years ago when it became apparent from the changes in slant of Coco-Pops adverts that the suggestion that they could be part of a nutritious breakfast was wearing a bit thin. A bowl of Coco Pops comprises more than 35% sugar and was voted in a parents jury as the children's breakfast cereal that children most want to eat, but which parents would prefer that they didn't. With official NHS statistics recording 10% of Reception age children as obese, and this proportion rising to 18% by the time they reach Year 6, the pressure on companies like Kelloggs to be more responsible about the way they market to children is justifiably high.
But recently Kelloggs have obviously decided that they will do better to not only give up the 'nutritious breakfast' slant, but bypass the breakfast argument altogether in favour of pitching Coco Pops as an after school snack. This is not in itself illegal or unethical, but when you consider that Kelloggs are a partner in the Change 4 Life programme, which focuses heavily on reducing children's intake of fat and sugar, it leaves a less than sweet taste in the mouth.
It was the new billboards that sent children's food campaigners over the edge. These posters appeared a couple of weeks ago on bus shelters on the way to and from schools. Campaigners are offended because Coco Pops' sugar and fat levels would preclude it from being served in schools yet the billboards focus on children going TO school and suggest they eat them AFTER school. One of Change 4 Life's major tactics is to help parents to find 'snack swaps' - lower sugar alternatives to favourite but unhealthy foods. Kelloggs argue that a 30g bowl of Coco Pops with milk has less sugar than 2 pieces of toast with jam or an average children's fruit yoghurt. But these foods would also be considered high in sugar and would be targeted for a food swap themselves. Not to mention the fact that I have never seen anyone eat a 30g bowl of cereal and feel satisfied enough to stop eating, let alone a hungry growing primary aged child coming home with the after school empties.
The billboards have attracted more attention than they might usually because it fell foul of the growing number of children's food campaigners, nutritionists and foodie parents on Twitter. Within hours of twitterer @jackieschneider posting a photo of the billboard outside her local school, a flurry of tweets had condemned the tactic.
The Children's Food Campaign at Sustain have come up with an unusual repost. They have created a webpage where you can add your own slogan to a Coco Pops billboard. So if you have ever been cross about junk food marketing at children, or just consider yourself a jingle writer in waiting, try your hand at your own slogan here.
What do you think? Is it an over-reaction? Or is Kelloggs being hypocritical here? And if you're really cross, you can email Kelloggs at corporateresponsibility@kellogg.com.
Good Food Is Good Business04/08/2009 18:10:00 Good Food is Good Business I was thrilled last week to find out that The Foodies Books have been shortlisted for the Semi Finals of the HSBC Start Up Stars Awards.
The awards are in their ninth year and celebrate the innovation and dedication of entrepreneurs and their businesses in their first 3 years of operation. It's a cool and prestigious awards scheme which attracts thousands of entrants so I am frankly totally shocked and thrilled to get to the last sixty. Keep your fingers crossed for me for the next stages!
However this blog is not all about me and how chuffed I am (I really am!). Like anyone in a competition, I immediately went to the HSBC awards website to check out my competition - who wouldn't, right? I expected to find lots of cut-throat businesses and not really many in my more ethical area of work, so if I don't win I could at least feel morally superior... Boy, was I wrong!
In the list of semi finalists there are a good number who are doing something which could just as easily be run as a charity or a social enterprise, but clearly doing good business at the same time. Some of them are actually not-for-profit, and many of them are making decent money by making everyone else's life a bit easier. It's heartening to see how many people have had an idea for something worthwhile and then have got off their seats to turn it into a reality which pays them enough to do it properly for a living. In fairness there is quite a lot of emphasis on ethical and green trading in the HSBC criteria so I shouldn't really be shocked, but I still was pleasantly surprised.
But what most caught my eye was that there are quite a few businesses concerned with sustainable, healthy food and with children's food. It seems that business minds are seeing the potential of this critically important area and that can only be good news for all of us.
For people who love jam on their toast, but could live without the boatloads of refined sugar in it, Scottish teenager Fraser Doherty's SuperJam company could be just the thing - making jams from his gran's original recipes but using superfruit berries and using fruit juices to sweeten them, his jams are available in supermarkets and I'll definitely be looking out for them now I know they are there.
There is a definite wind in the air for food products where you know the ingredients and they haven't been fiddled about with too much. Not for nothing Innocent became so popular. Well, Shaken Udder have carried on this tradition with their back to basics milkshakes, which they have been selling at festivals for years. We all have good intentions about eating healthily but sometimes time constraints get in the way. Graze have tackled this by providing healthy boxes of unadulterated fruit, nuts, seeds and other yummies for busy people to well, er.. graze, instead of resorting to the office vending machine. Great idea! Another thing many of us would like to do, but don't always get organised enough to achieve, is buying more locally produced groceries. It's lovely to go to all your local shops but can be time consuming and after a particularly hard week, getting the kids off to bed and then drinking a glass of wine while clicking on the internet shop from the local megamarket can sometimes be very tempting. Buylocal.net are operating in quite a few areas of the country and striving to reconcile this by allowing the same convenience of online ordering for their customers with a delivery service which draws from a range of local suppliers. Bonus! But as you might expect, I am most excited by the inclusion of two other children's food related businesses in the shortlist. The Kids Cooking Company is right up my street with their cute children's kitchen wares - cookie cutters, non-slip bowls and spoons and proper grown-up quality silicone cake tins. You'll know that I believe getting hands on is the best way to enthuse children about food and this company being shortlisted shows that their is plenty of demand for this kind of product, which makes me feel very optimistic. The other directly child related company in the list is The UK Foodhall. Karen McQuade was the 2008 winner of the Local Authority Catering Association's Award for The Outstanding Supplier of The Year. You'd not be surprised to find out that I am passionate about the quality of school dinners. For a generation of children where many of the parents have minimal cooking skills, the school dinner can be a critical part of a child's nutritional intake and I can't say enough how grateful I am that Jeanette Orrey, Jamie Oliver and others have worked so hard to get this on the agenda. My own children's school, Orleton Primary, is a Food For Life School and the quality of their school dinners, prepared on site, is fantastic. But many schools have no option but to buy in from a caterer and in those cases it is massively important that the caterers have more than just margins at the heart of their business. The UK Foodhall supplies British farm assured animal products and vegetarian alternatives as well as healthy vending solutions to schools. Fab. Obviously I personally hope I win the lot! But as it's a pretty tough shortlist, I am just chuffed to bits that so many of my competitors are taking food seriously. I am heartened that it seems that local, less processed, healthy foods are seen as good business sense as well as ethically right on, and that this is reflected in such a high proportion being in the last 60. Clearly kids health is not only our business, it's also good business! Stay well Joanne PS Keep your fingers crossed eh!
|
