Cupcakes: World’s most adorable food trend

Cupcakes- How can you resist?

I think I have successfully branded myself as “that girl who loves cupcakes.” Okay, so maybe it was as easy as just squealing at the sight and mention of them. It also doesn’t hurt that I tend to bake them for everyone– from my closest friends, to my entire accounting class (yes, that did happen). Anyway, as a result, people associate me with cupcakes. And friends keep sending me texts about cake. 

Sometimes this means picture messages of the desserts they’re about to consume and sometimes they’re just alerting me about a new cupcake TV show they’re excited about. My friends and family have also begun to give me really fun gifts like cupcake-shaped stationary, magnets and lip glosses (cupcake shape AND flavor). While I absolutely adore that my name seems to pop into others’ heads upon the mention of cupcakes, I have to wonder how the cupcake came to appear so often in American culture in the first place. 

Because I’m sure you’ve noticed. Cupcakes are everywhere in 2010. 

If only these rows were never-ending.

The ultra-trend 

Sure, we’ve seen food trends before. Certain foods like sweet potato fries and chipotle mayo seem to gain popularity and then proceed to show up on menus and in dishes everywhere. But rarely do popular foods begin appearing places other than on plates. 

Cupcakes appear to have grown into something even bigger than just a food trend. Borderlining on a lifestyle. They seem to have sprinkled their sparkly pink magic on America and it’s quite possible they are taking over. 

In addition to cupcake boutiques popping up in almost every city (some gaining much fame), bigger businesses such as Cinnabon have begun to get in on the cupcake craze as well. Food trends, as these companies have discovered, definitely lead to profits. Heck, even Taco Bell attempted to join the market. 

These cute little things have become such a phenomenon that news organizations are trying to guess what will come next when the cupcake frenzy dies down. Others simply cannot wait until it does. 

The power of pastry 

Because this is my cupcake post (me– that girl who loves cupcakes!) and I am really reveling in my research process, I have for you a list of cupcake-related items. Just to prove how ubiquitous cupcakes truly are. 

• Wall art.
• Many cupcake blogs, including Cupcakes Take the Cake, my favorite– by far the best place for cupcake news and saliva-inducing pictures.
• A shirt that says “Peace Love Cupcakes.”
• Wine glasses.
• A car seat. Yes.
• Instructional signs.

And my favorite: 

• A $59.99 child-sized “Cupcake Fairy” Halloween costume. She has a wand, antenna and wings.

I personally believe that cupcakes have a universal power of making people happy. And any food that can produce smiles just by existing is a good thing.

Corporate campaigns: Helpful or hypocrisy?

Triscuit and Kraft want you to start a community garden.

I think I’m the target audience for Triscuit’s Home Farming campaign ads. They keep popping up during my Food Network shows and in my Real Simple magazine. Or maybe they pop up everywhere, including places I wouldn’t see them like ESPN and car magazines, but I like to group myself in the foodie demographic and I hope marketers do too. Anyway, I wanted to learn more about the campaign and have since learned several things:

1. Triscuit, a product of Kraft Foods, has teamed up with the non-profit Urban Farming to grow 50 community farms across the country.
2. It has also launched a website encouraging consumers to plant their own gardens. The site includes instructions and tips for growing ingredients at home.
3. Though Triscuit is contributing to a good cause, local gardening and sustainability, people have noticed that the corporation behind the campaign is potentially part of the reason the home gardening movement has grown so much over the years.

Counterproductive cracker campaign

This post by Laura Mathews on Punk Rock Gardens, a community gardening blog out of Pennsylvania, questions Triscuit’s and Kraft Foods’ motives. While the Home Farming campaign promotes home gardening and local eating, it is still being presented by Kraft Foods, a major producer of processed and prepackaged food. Mathews says Kraft is attempting to use this campaign to position its products as containing real ingredients, ignoring the fact that they’re really full of unnatural additives. She writes:

OK, it’s nice that a big company believes there a lot of interest in growing food. Enough interest, actually, that they want to grab on and join the gravy train.  BUT, what I understand about the people who are taking back control of their food supply, is that they –we- became interested in growing food because we lost faith in the quality of food produced by companies like Kraft.

If you’re interested, read the rest of her post. It’s really good and it brings up a lot of great points.

Does eating fried chicken on top of lettuce make it healthier? What about eating it when the proceeds contribute to curing cancer?

Colbert’s conclusion

The whole idea of large corporations launching campaigns attempting to solve problems they may have contributed to reminded me of this utterly fantastic clip from the Colbert Report in April (seriously, watch it if you have time- it’s great. Skip to 1:13 to get right to the campaign part). In it, Colbert discusses how people were questioning KFC’s Buckets for the Cure campaign.

During the campaign, KFC donated 50 cents for each pink bucket of chicken sold to the Susan G. Komen for the cure, the non-profit that raises money for breast cancer research. However, as Colbert mentions in the clip, many people were upset at the idea of promoting the sale and consumption of unhealthy fried chicken to raise money for an organization that is working to save women’s lives.

He has his own theory on what to do to remedy KFC’s potential hypocrisy. I have my own. KFC, Kraft and all other corporations and organizations should think about what their campaigns say about their brands before they launch them. And consumers should consider what matters most to them: that companies are helping to solve problems when their products cause other ones or that the companies are helping at all.

Craving comments

So what do you think? Should people just appreciate these corporate campaigns for the help they’re supplying others? Or should we question the motives (and profit) behind them? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Domino’s effect: What happens when you insult your own product?

People are notoriously picky about their pizza. Did Domino's earn new customers with its new taste?

Ever since I saw the Domino’s ads about its new pizza recipe at the beginning of the year, I wanted to write a post about its campaign. You know, the one where its chefs went on TV and repeated all the horrible things people were saying about its old pizza, while assuring you it’s much better now. Being an observer of food PR, I had to wonder how effective this campaign would be when I first saw it.

Pizza trashing

Yes, the company is following the favorite PR rule of transparency and honesty,  but really? Would this campaign improve sales and image? What would consumers thinks? Would people run out to try the new recipe? To be honest, I wanted to wait to post about this until after I had tried the new stuff, so I could add a fun personal anecdote of my trial. However, the commercials apparently did not motivate me enough to spend money/time on it. (It also didn’t help that I recently started making homemade healthy-ish pizzas that I happen to love.)

Apparently, product-trashing campaigns are not a rare occurrence. This article in The Washington Post discusses similar successful campaigns and features interesting information on Domino’s motivation for its product-change.

The results are in

Slashfood’s Leslie Pariseau just wrote a post on the current results of Domino’s newest campaign. Though I had my skepticism, it appears the campaign is working! Pariseau reported a 14.3 percent sales increase in this year’s first quarter, with sales expected to continue to rise.

Upon further examination of this campaign, I’m not surprised. Domino’s did a fantastic job promoting its Pizza Turnaround campaign and sharing with consumers why it was necessary to start completely over with its pizza recipe. Even though I haven’t tried it so don’t know if I would continue to buy it, watching its promotional video made me want to try the new pizza more than ever.

The documentary features interviews with Domino’s executives and employees discussing their reactions to consumers’ negative comments toward its old recipe pizza. Viewers get to see the effects comments like “microwave pizza is far superior” had on the people who represented and made it every day. Domino’s motivation for improving its product is made clear in this video. The company obviously cares about pleasing and retaining customers, and producing a product its employees can be proud to produce. The video was pretty effective, because it made me want to care about these nice people right back.

Domino’s President Patrick Doyle in Pizza Turnaround video:

You can either use the negative comments to get you down or you can use them to excite you and energize your process of making a better pizza. We did the latter.

The video shows the process of coming up with a new, tastier pizza recipe. Domino’s chefs discuss the taste and quality of the ingredients it now uses. I’m not gonna lie… the vivid descriptions and images definitely made me hungry for pizza. Good job Domino’s, you may have just gained another new customer for lunch tomorrow.

[Side note: I apologize for the lapse between posts. I have not given up my love for food, PR or writing, so I fully intend to keep up the blogging—starting now. Food news and publicity are everywhere, so it shouldn’t be a hard task! Thanks for reading!]

Warm up to watermelon this winter

Juicy watermelon: Not just a summer staple.

Okay, so I’m just going to come out and say it. I absolutely love when an ordinary fruit or vegetable gets a PR makeover and emerges a more accessible, versatile ingredient before your very eyes. It’s like a 90’s chick-flick set in your grocer’s produce section.

I was enthralled when the U.S. Potato Board transformed the boring old spud into a healthy, inexpensive meal option worthy of a Prom Queen title and overjoyed when Hunt’s used its Fairy Godmother magic on canned tomatoes (see past posts). My latest find is an organization attempting to make that star quarterback notice an old summer favorite, even during football season.

The scene

It’s February. You’re outside shoveling the snow in your driveway. When you finish, you go inside your warm home, take off your coat and boots and cozy up to your fireplace with a good book and a nice… slice of fresh watermelon?

Maybe not quite, but the National Watermelon Promotion Board is devoted to positioning the watermelon as a year-round fruit.

The NWPB even uses watermelon to help celebrate Valentine's Day.

The action

In efforts to stimulate the watermelon industry, the NWPB provides the public with craft and recipe ideas, as well as watermelon nutritional facts and other benefits on its Web site. Last May, The NWPB launched What About Watermelon?, a blog devoted to sharing the watermelon’s many year-round uses with readers. To learn more about the blog’s purposes, read it’s first post written by Mark Arney, the NWPB’s Executive Director.

One of my favorite features of the blog is the weekly recipes reflecting the current season. In the fall and winter months, the recipes themselves help encourage the consumption of watermelon in cold weather. Some revolve around seasonal events and holidays, and some feature the fruit in warm and savory main-course applications that consumers may not usually consider.

The fact that the recipe titles are sometimes bizarre-sounding (recently posted was a recipe for a Super Bowl-inspired, football-shaped watermelon “cake” complete with cream cheese frosting and licorice decorations) is just further proof of how creative, innovative and hard-working the NWPB is getting in their efforts to promote the watermelon.

The suspenseful cliffhanger

Between the watermelon recipes, facts and stories featured every week on the What About Watermelon? blog, plus separate but similar features on the NWPB’s site, there is certainly no shortage of watermelon information available on the Internet. The tactics are backed by good intentions and creative ideas. However, I gather a feeling that the promotional materials are not being seen by a very large audience.

What About Watermelon? is still a fairly new blog and I see it doing very well if it continues to deliver interesting posts and inventive uses for the watermelon. The NWPB has an online newsroom where marketing materials are readily available for inquiring journalists. However, it has not updated its collection of press releases and news clips since 2007. In order to achieve positive results, it needs to continue its promotional efforts.

So, with a little bit more persistence from the NWPB, I do believe that America’s favorite green and pink summer treat can score a year-round seat at the popular kids’ lunch table.