Louise Marsland (@Louise_Marsland)’s weekly pick of recent product, packaging and design launches:
- Banting bonanza from Woolies
- Cadbury’s releases Book of Joy
- Philips’ new Airfryer, and
- another winning wine.
Woolworths is CarbClever
There are nine meals, a soup and three vegetable dishes, which are being introduced countrywide. Dishes include Thai red chicken curry with a rich coconut sauce and a cauliflower, bacon and cheese bake. Woolies says the range also excludes wheat, grains, legumes and pulses.
“Many of our customers have been requesting easy meals that provide options for their lifestyles,” says Woolworths managing director of foods, Zyda Rylands. “After months of careful testing, we are proud to reveal these ready-prepared meals and accompaniments. As these products are also microwaveable and combine flavours and cooking styles, they should have wide appeal.”
Other flavour-packed meals are smoked pork with creamed cabbage and spinach in a sage cream sauce, and beef meatballs with cauliflower mash, roasted vegetables and tomato sauce. Yum, yum.
If I had a farm, I’d be planting almond trees and cauliflower right now as the use of almond flour and cauliflower as banting staples to replace carbs pushes prices higher in the more affluent neighbourhoods and results in a scarcity of product!
Joy to the world
Cadbury has taken its Triplets campaign — featuring the animated triplets in the womb singing with joy because mom was eating a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate bar — to the next level, asking South Africans to ‘name’ the triplets in the integrated consumer-driven campaign which concluded with a book of baby names.
In the three months since the campaign launched, the Cadbury Dairy Milk Facebook following has grown by over 900%, mainly due to the public response to the Triplets TV spot and engagement from the ‘Name the Triplets’ Facebook campaign.
With the launch of the book, the triplets have also ‘named’: Thabiso (“one who brings joy” in Sotho), Intokozo (meaning “joy” in Zulu) and Gcobani (which means “joyful” in Xhosa). The campaign will conclude with giveaways of the limited edition Cadbury Dairy Milk Little Book of Joy on the Cadbury Dairy Milk SA Facebook page.
“We were delighted with the passionate and creative manner in which South Africans captured the essence of our message of joy, evident in the heart-warming drawings, the many descriptive name entries and engaging fan art we received throughout the campaign,” comments Meredith Kelly, Mondelēz SA category lead for chocolate.
“South Africans are inherently joyful — we dance and sing to celebrate important occasions — and that’s something the ‘Triplets’ campaign has successfully tapped into. Cadbury Dairy Milk is the trigger to ‘Free the Joy’ that lives within each of us.”
Cooking on air
Philips has launched a new version of its Avance Collection Airfryer XL. The cooking appliance uses Philip’s proprietary Rapid Air Technology, which is described as combining rapid and precisely circulating hot air with an optimal temperature profile and unique ‘starfish’ design to cook meals.
The main health boast is that the appliance uses up to 80% less fat during cooking — using air instead of oil.
The Avance Collection Airfryer XL can ‘fry’, grill, bake, roast and cook a wide variety of foods, from brownies to whole chickens and beef fillet. The new model sports 50% greater capacity at 1.2kg yet still retains a compact size.
As well as featuring dishwasher-safe and non-stick parts, the Avance Collection Airfryer XL comes with a smart preset mode that remembers your most-used settings, automatic shut-off and digital touch panel controls. The set also includes a recipe book.
Winters Drift’s warm welcome
The Winters Drift Pinot Noir 2013, the second vintage but the first commercially available vintage from this Elgin producer, has been awarded a Double Gold at the 2014 Michelangelo International Wine & Spirits Awards. This accolade follows its recent Top Six award from Classic Wine.
The Winters Drift wines are grown on the historic Glen Elgin farm. The vineyards are cared for by viticulturist Christiaan Cloete, and the wines are made by Koen Roose at Spioenkop Wines in Elgin.
Tasting notes: this wine is described as delivering everything you would expect from a young Pinot Noir, including an abundance of red cherries, varietal spice, truffles, forest-floor notes and subtle oaking from 11 months in first and second-fill French oak. The palate should be complex and satisfying, with a softness that is unique to Pinot Noir. It is meant to age well over the next three-to-five years.
Shelf Life is a weekly column by Louise Marsland on MarkLives. Tweet new product, packaging and design launches to @louise_marsland 
or email her at louise.marsland at gmail.com. Want to sponsor Shelf Life? Contact us here.
Louise has written about the FMCG, media, marketing and advertising industry for 20 years as a former editor of magazines AdVantage, Marketing Mix and Progressive Retailing, as well as websites Bizcommunity.com and FMCGFiles. She also edited the weekly Wednesday Media & Marketing Page for The New Age newspaper. She is currently the publishing editor of industry trendwatching portal, TRENDAFRiCA, for consumer insight, research and trends in Africa; a regular industry columnist and speaker; a consultant on content strategy; and contributing editor to Fast Company South Africa magazine, which has just launched in South Africa.
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