A slow walk around Loblaws.
Feb. 22nd, 2006 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chickenfeetA some of you know, I have spent a fair amount of my working life in and around the food industry, as well as being somewhat food obsessed generally. As a result I sometimes spend more time in the supermarket looking at products I would be most unlikely to buy than the average punter. Today I was struck by a number of trends in my local Loblaw (1) store.
Fresh, chilled entrees finally seem to have arrived. Of course, they've been around in the UK for around twenty years but logistics has always been a huge barrier here. I remember the discussions at a large US soup company some fifteen years ago where it was not considered viable to take the product to market even in the Boston-Washington corridor.
The general range of "Indian" (2) products available is now more or less comparable to a Sainsbury or Tesco. It's only taken an extra fifteen years for that to happen! Most of thse products are either manufactured here or imported from the UK. Next to nothing comes from India. Oddly enough, Indian stores here carry Indian convenience foods but the selection is quite different. That's also true of certain kinds of Chinese food, though typically not entrees.
The Thais are now exporting for the European/North American market. There are loads of Thai manufactured products on the shelf that no Thai person would ever buy and that you wouldn't find in a Thai grocery here; premixed salad dressing and pad thai sauce for example. Even some of the things that you might see, like curry pastes or roasted chilli paste, have obviously been made rethought for the western market; different packaging, smaller sizes and higher prices! They've probably been substantially dechillied for the Canadian market too but I don't know that for sure. Thai food in restaurants here is usually terribly bland. Oddly though, they didn't have something as basic as fish sauce.
FN1 - Loblaw is a fairly upscale supermarket chain that pioneered premium private label in Canada and very obviously rips off marketing concepts from Sainsbury and Tesco.
FN2 - "Indian" as in Finchley. The sort of thing the average UK high street curry house serves as reinterpreted by Tesco.
Fresh, chilled entrees finally seem to have arrived. Of course, they've been around in the UK for around twenty years but logistics has always been a huge barrier here. I remember the discussions at a large US soup company some fifteen years ago where it was not considered viable to take the product to market even in the Boston-Washington corridor.
The general range of "Indian" (2) products available is now more or less comparable to a Sainsbury or Tesco. It's only taken an extra fifteen years for that to happen! Most of thse products are either manufactured here or imported from the UK. Next to nothing comes from India. Oddly enough, Indian stores here carry Indian convenience foods but the selection is quite different. That's also true of certain kinds of Chinese food, though typically not entrees.
The Thais are now exporting for the European/North American market. There are loads of Thai manufactured products on the shelf that no Thai person would ever buy and that you wouldn't find in a Thai grocery here; premixed salad dressing and pad thai sauce for example. Even some of the things that you might see, like curry pastes or roasted chilli paste, have obviously been made rethought for the western market; different packaging, smaller sizes and higher prices! They've probably been substantially dechillied for the Canadian market too but I don't know that for sure. Thai food in restaurants here is usually terribly bland. Oddly though, they didn't have something as basic as fish sauce.
FN1 - Loblaw is a fairly upscale supermarket chain that pioneered premium private label in Canada and very obviously rips off marketing concepts from Sainsbury and Tesco.
FN2 - "Indian" as in Finchley. The sort of thing the average UK high street curry house serves as reinterpreted by Tesco.
