Columns

The amount of croissants I had consumed in the past week shouldn’t be legally allowed. Paris was feeding me an endless plate of macarons, creme brûlée, and chocolate crêpes; how could I refuse? I had to start running again. But as I dodged old ladies walking their dogs, school children twirling their backpacks, and the inevitable sidewalk café, I couldn’t help but wonder: where are all the other runners?

By / ALEXANDRA Creange

I never encountered another runner, or anyone else who seemed to be exercising for that matter. I could feel the locals staring at me, and naïvely thought it was because of my neon shorts. After a few more eerily similar running experiences, I stopped. No one else in Paris was exercising, so why should I? I was determined to discover the French secret to staying slim while consuming a diet full of, well, everything I had ever learned was bad for you.

As I became more familiar with everyday life in France, I realized that the French “secret” for staying thin was really no secret at all. Learning to eat like a Parisian, walk like a Parisian, and carry groceries up six flights of stairs like a Parisian, taught me the fundamental differences between American and French lifestyles. One faces an obesity epidemic while the other remains perfectly healthy.

As a kid, the birthday wish was the all-important-part of my birthday celebration. Blowing out those candles meant there was a glimmer of hope that some small dream in my heart would have a chance of coming true.

By / Irene tortorella

Sometimes we have to look at our past to chart the future, and so let’s go back to 1988 at Loblaw, when the President’s Choice “Decadent” chocolate chip cookie launched. It was amazing in its marketing simplicity, and this is why it became the #1 selling cookie throughout Canada in less than a year. Simple and brilliant.

By / Perry Seelert

The category territory was intelligent too in that Dave Nichol intentionally targeted cookies (one of the highest volume categories) where own brands hadn’t proven themselves, and where Nabisco’s Chips Ahoy was a well entrenched, but a pretty marginal product experience.

The bold language at the time for the brand, let alone a retailer brand, “Decadent”, helped to get it noticed and give it some much needed hype, but it was the skilled twisting of product features that was the beauty of it all. The Decadent has more chocolate chips than Chips Ahoy, in fact 39% of the entire cookie, which was a blaring feature on the pack and embedded throughout the graphic language. It also was made with real creamery butter versus HFCS and cottonseed oils.

By / Koen de Jong, Managing Director at International Private Label Consul t (IPLC)

Many private label manufacturers are often too much internally focussed. With a strategic focus on producing retailer brands they have limited outside options as they face only a few buyers. Operating in an extremely demanding environment a pre-requisite to survive is a continuous effort to reduce costs in the company. The outcome may become a threat if it results in a reactive, somewhat inward looking organization however. To my experience it is in the nature of a private label manufacturer to reluctantly share best practices with the outside world and in such a case a commercial due diligence by an outside party could add tremendous value. To be benchmarked against other operators in the category will most likely generate valuable and actionable insights.

Last week we finalized such an analysis for a private label manufacturer in the frozen food category in Austria. The company acknowledged to have potential to improve its performance and was keen to learn from best practices in the industry. Therefore, help from the outside was called in. Based on an analysis and diagnoses a comparison was made with best in class private label manufacturers. Subsequently, recommendations were formulated to make steps towards operational excellence. No rocket science, just sharing insight from a deep understanding of the private label industry, followed-up by workshops and training.

By / RICHARD KOHN