What’s trending now

When I went over to a friend’s house recently, he couldn’t wait to show us the delights of his halogen oven. He cooked up a pizza but frankly, I think a normal oven does the job much better on such a food item. What he loves about the halogen oven is that it uses very little electricity. It also frees his oven up for other uses, such as drying automotive parts out. To say his household is a blokey one is an understatement.

This got me to thinking about other food-related wonders we have been sold over the years. My mother-in-law recently purchased a spiraliser, which turns vegetables into spaghetti-like threads. How many of us have a bread oven sitting on our countertop? And how many use it regularly?

In food, it is pomegranates that will save us. Kale, blueberries, quinoa… The list of trends continues.

Dairy is as susceptible as anything else to a trend, but then again, a lot of things remain the same. Back in 1997, Danone introduced a plastic biodegradable pot in Germany for its Jahrezeit yogurt. It shows that the drive for environmentalism is continual, whether it’s called that or sustainability. Packaging waste continues to be a bugbear, as WRAP will tell you.

Then again, sometimes these things die a merciful death. The trend of adding omega-3 to every dairy product has quietly subsided, but back in 2007, Cricketer Farm in the UK developed cheddar marketed to children and enriched with omega-3. Further back in 1998, MD Foods had a line that features a bio yogurt with folic acid, to go along with its Pact spread with omega-3, targeted towards women. These were some of the many products trying to shoehorn omega-3 into an already nutrient rich substrate.

I am also happy to report that the Orange Grove “dessert cheese”, which combined soft cheese with a middle layer of candied orange and was topped with glace orange “for an eye-catching presentation” from 1997, was subsequently dropped from the Waitrose lineup here in the UK. There may be someone still writing angry letters to the supermarket about the loss of this product from the cheese board/dessert trolley, but I hope not.

Finally, here is a reminder from October 1998 that the more things change, the more they stay the same for dairy. The headline is, “Russian crisis rocks European dairy markets.”

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