As part of my marketing training at Colgate-Palmolive I worked as a sales rep visiting Sydney supermarkets. The experience left me deeply scarred. Supermarket managers are people who have spent 10 years or more being bastardised by their superiors and by the time they reach the giddy heights they are ready to dish it out. Young sales reps are treated with arrogance and contempt.

I don’t need to tell you that a visit to a supermarket is a de-humanising experience. To this day I avoid the supermarket as much as I can, despite the obvious convenience of single stop shopping.

Supermarkets are not very innovative businesses. The last success in supermarket marketing happened when Woolworths clobbered the competition with the “Fresh Food” positioning in the 1980s.

I find myself shopping at boutique supermarkets these days; I drive past my closest supermarket to get to Fresh Provisions in Mount Lawley where the fruit/veg is better, where there is a quality selection of cheese, scrummy mueslis, rich chocolates, be right back just going to get a snack …

I know it costs me more to shop here but I don’t feel like I’m being processed. Some of the people who work there TALK to me for god’s sake.

Mainstream supermarkets don’t bother competing in this segment and I think that is a mistake. I am a profitable customer; I buy premium quality food products. And they would get a decent hunk of my business if they had a section of local, gourmet food products. This could be a new marketing push for a chain.

I would brand it as Coles’ Local, making it a new section which promoted direct-delivered product from small suppliers and constantly showcased NEW and seasonal products. It would require more management than other sections but it would be high margin and it could deliver one of the chains something they undervalue at present; point of difference.

A magazine called Food Companion is running a food industry competition for the best new name for kangaroo meat. Why a new name? Obviously they believe that the cute animal thing interferes with the eat fleshy thing. The argument is, we don’t eat cows we eat beef. We don’t eat pigs we eat pork. So I’m going to go along with this and develop a name by the end of the article. To help you go the distance, I promise not to make any lame kangaroo gags.

Obviously the first thing to do is find out what’s what in the industry. The Kangaroo Industry Association of Australia’s strategic plan is located here. It’s been put together by industry people and it’s a very honest assessment of where they are. I’m going to accept their conclusions. Here’s a bit of an overview:

The industry continues to grow at about 7% per annum, ie. they’re doing pretty well. It splits up into skins (sold overseas), manufacturing meat (the profitable un-tapped small-goods segment), pet meat (substantial domestic sales) and human consumption (under-developed). Obviously we need to concentrate on HC here.

The market is domestic; apparently there is too much anti-industry propaganda overseas and reading between the lines they could not reliably supply large export quantities anyway. The industry cull is decided by government on the basis of the annual environmental conditions.

Their strengths include a good healthy product and a great environmental story. Weaknesses? Persistent “consumer perception” problems, a “challenging” taste and perhaps connected to that, a lack of enthusiasm from restaurants.

The study makes clear that the industry doesn’t yet know what it’s image should be (they are going to research this) but we know that the product will need to be premium priced compared to beef. I think the research will say their best bet is “healthy red-meat alternative”.

I heard someone say that one strong possibility for a name was to use one of the several hundred aboriginal words describing kangaroos. WRONG! BAD STUDENT! The bush dining experience is not the next big thing in Australian cafés; don’t go there.

So now that we know a little about the product, let’s think about how it’s going to be marketed. The meat is rich and gamey but I think the main strength is the “lean and healthy” message. Contemporary cuisine has moved away from steaks and it would help to concentrate on forms which remind people less of the cute animal; mince, strips and carpaccio for instance. Seems to me every time you serve a kangaroo steak you invite a comparison with beef.

The carpaccio is a starter, the mince might be developed as a pasta dish (the most popular main in Australia) and the strips might be an Asian dish with noodles and vegetables. You’d need a couple of signature dishes which could be promoted with national competitions. Blow your promotional budget on Best Kangaroo Salad; Best Kangaroo Pasta dish. Don’t for God’s sake waste it on boring old magazine advertising.

The Japanese eat fried crickets at New Year by the way so you could invent an Australian New Year dish called kanga cricket. Sorry.

So. The name. Well, you could aim for something health-driven or environmental but that would be WRONG! IDIOT! It’s FOOD you bone-head; you gotta go for appetite appeal. It should say moist, succulent, tender, juicy, spicy, saucy. If that made your mouth water you know I’m on the right track. The sound of it should dance on the tongue, hang on the roof of your mouth and slip down your throat like an oyster. If it’s to be served with pasta it should sound like a town in rural Umbria. Feminine, alluring, wanting you back; andelina.

Australia’s biggest juice company, Berri, is about to be taken over by a Filipino company, San Miguel. It’s a damned shame really since the company has a long history as a growers’ cooperative and has developed into a good marketing organisation with the potential to export successfully. Ah well. Here’s a new product idea for their parent company.

Orange juice is the volume product in juice sales (90% of fruit juice produced is orange juice) but I’ve never heard of a mandarin juice. Have you ever tasted it? I suspect the reason one has not been produced is that growers yield more for “eating fruit” than “juicing fruit”. If your oranges are not eating quality they are downgraded and sold as juicing oranges. What happens to the mandarins that are not eating quality? Betchya they get thrown out; there is no secondary market.

The growth segment in the orange juice market is fresh juice. A fresh mandarin juice would have novelty value. Not only that but a fair number of people prefer eating mandarins to oranges. They would be certain to trial the product. People would expect this to be a boutique product so it could sustain a premium price. I would package it in very small containers (like Yakult). The juice is sweeter and richer than orange juice so a small serve would work best. And small, high priced drinks would work well in the route trade. The only tricky issue would be the short shelf life of the products.

Mandarins are known colloquially (and affectionately) as mandies. That should be the brand name. It is not yet registered as a trade mark (check here non-believers). No charge, fellas.

The Australian Olive Oil industry is making great product. Check out some of these products. The boutique products you can get from the growers themselves or some specialty stores are generally sensational though often damned expensive. Here are the 2004 show results – just released.

The cheap imported European oil in supermarkets is atrocious. This is because the Europeans retain good quality product for their own markets and export poor quality product after it’s been sitting around for months. After all, we’ve been swallowing it for years. Bland at best but frequently rancid. It’s a sad fact that people here have got used to the taste of rancid oil. Get thee to an olive oil tasting!

Olive oil does not last. It’s a fruit juice. It’s perishable. But the industry here have failed to explain that to the market so far. There are reasons why they haven’t done this – no retailer wants to be stuck with oil that is past its best-by date. But the producers really need to educate the domestic market quickly if they’re going to convince people to spend $10 a litre on olive oil – canola oil (shudder) sells for $2.

Like wines, olive oils should carry a vintage. More than a 12 months old it should come off the shelf. All public relations and marketing activity should be constructed around the release date of the fresh oils. The Australian Olive Association could coordinate a national education campaign on television announcing the introduction of vintages.

The premise for the enormous capital raisings that have gone on in Australia fuelling huge plantings of olives (yep, the poor old investors got taken again) was that Australia could supply fresh olives into the European market, where they appreciate the value of fresh oil, in their off season. But the extensive plantings mean that a lot of product needs to be sold domestically as well.

The industry’s long term future is best served by educating Australians about the fact that unlike processed oils (veg oil and canola), extra virgin olive oil goes off. That way they will undermine the cheap European imports and build awareness of quality. Then it’s a question of selling Australian oils in larger containers so that the consumer doesn’t have to pay $40 a litre for the stuff.