How can brands show REAL love?
Alternative headline: "Greggs & Uber Eats partner to pump £10 worth of garbage disguised as baked goods into unsuspecting partners."
Yep, the societal schizophrenia continues.
On the one hand we have Jamie Oliver & Marcus Rashford evangelising about school dinners.
On the other, one of the nation's biggest brands, Greggs, is chemically designing sausage rolls with the scientific gusto of Oppenheimer.
Just watch the Netflix documentary on Greggs with Grace Dent, which amounts to a thinly disguised promo / press release. It's all secret labs and hidden codes.
Yes, this is the reality of the industrial food complex – right up there in levels of madness with its other industrial complex cousins (military and the like).
We celebrate life, extract value from it and, ultimately, kill it.
I'm pretty sure, when early Christians prayed for their daily bread they weren't hoping for this:
Water, Fortified Wheat Flour (Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Pork (20%), Palm Oil, Rusk (Wheat), Seasoning (Salt, Yeast Extract, Modified Starch, Pea Fibre, Sugar, Stabiliser (Diphosphates), Ground White Pepper, Barley Malt Extract, Acidity Regulator (Tartaric Acid), Preservative (Sodium Metabisulphite), Spice Extracts, Rapeseed Oil, Herb Extracts), Glaze (Water, Sunflower Oil, Rapeseed Oil, Modified Starch, Milk Protein, Emulsifier (Mono- and Diacetyl Tartaric Acid Esters of Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids, Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids), Skimmed Milk Powder, Stabiliser (Carboxy Methyl Cellulose, Carrageenan, Cellulose), Acidity Regulator (Sodium Phosphates), Colour (Carotenes)), Rapeseed Oil, Isolated Soya Protein, Wheat Gluten, Salt, Wheat Protein.
I know we're made of stardust which is essentially chemical compounds – but I don't think that's what was meant.
Call me old fashioned, a hipster, or a foreigner – but from a cultural standpoint, I grew up with the understanding that bread and baked goods came from bakeries run by people that have been honing their craft for years.
Food is a fundamental part of Britain's systemic trauma to do with class.
Anything made with love and care is considered either 'posh' or 'hipster' – and out of reach for the masses.
This is wrong and perpetuates the class system that says 'nice things are for the upper classes, not us. We, the other classes, deserve garbage.'
Sure, brands like Greggs are in the mass production space.
But they could make the effort to capitalise on the traditional role of a bakery to sustain, nurture – and show some ❤️ to the people in its communities.
They certainly have the budget, these brand partnerships aren't cheap.
Narrowing profit margins = love. It would bring a much greater halo effect to the brand than some ill thought out, half-assed, performative brand partnership cobbled together for Valentine's day. 🤷🏾♀️
https://lnkd.in/e7w9Gx2F
Moon cakes will fall out of fashion because they are too sweet.