THE SLOW SIMMER

Pushing novelty in food requires patience and bridge-building.

How many truly new foods have you adopted in the past 10 years? Don’t count the cronuts, cruffins, cragels, or other fanciful chimeras. Let’s focus on items that tasted utterly foreign to you at first, yet became part of your culinary habits after some time. Hummus perhaps, if you came of age in the US in the 2000s?

A common belief in entrepreneurship is that the right innovation can unlock rapid growth. We associate disruption with scaling. Does this logic apply in food entrepreneurship though? It took two decades between hummus’ first introduction to US grocery stores and it's becoming a household item. That’s a lot by start-up standards. For comparison, it took less than 3 years for smart phones to reach a 40% market penetration.

Unlike tech products, foods have generally been around for years, catering to niche consumers, before they get their big break and pervade the collective consciousness. This is a challenge if you are a food entrepreneur. Even more so because you might well have biased views of the market. Studies show that food neophobia, i.e. the aversion to unfamiliar foods, is tied to socioeconomic indicators. If you’re a young, middle to upper class cosmopolitan – as most entrepreneurs are – you are more likely to seek, try, and adopt new foods and spend time around like-minded early adopters. As a result, you might misestimate the market’s readiness for a novel product.

Having accepted that culinary tastes move sluggishly, you might still ask: is it possible to shape trends and accelerate the sales of novel products. What experience tells us first is that creating buzz is a hazardous tactic for long-term success. There is evidence that cultural items that experience rapid uptakes tend to be abandoned faster. Who today remembers Heinz’s green “EZ Squirt” ketchup – also available in orange, purple, and teal? Launched in the early 2000s, the product meant to add fun to kids’ meals. And it did, with initial sales exceeding all expectations. However, within months, the kids had moved on to the next craze.

Domino's playbook: creating an Indian pizza

Accelerating the adoption of new foods requires patience and building on existing cultural foundations. When Domino's launched in India in 1996, eating pizza was far from common among Indians of all backgrounds. The chain kept its Western brand aesthetic, but immediately played to the local taste in the smallest details: it selected a flour with taste notes familiar to Indian consumers, developed a primarily vegetarian menu, and expanded its topping options to include local flavors such as spicy raw banana. Very quickly, Domino’s had surpassed every other western-food chain in India, including many earlier movers. Also, its strategy became the playbook for penetrating the Indian market with a new food propositions. Today, McDonald’s India proposes a mostly-vegetarian menu, with a Chicken Maharaja Mac as a flagship, and Subway’s top selling item is the Paneer Tikka.

The evolution of the hummus market in the US offers another potent example of how to accelerate the adoption of a new food, and this time without adapting its flavor. Twenty years ago, hummus was little known outside the American-Mediterranean communities and market leaders were doing little to demystify its exoticism. Kraft’s Athenos’s first big campaign featured the character of a “yia-yia”, the stereotypical Greek grandma - altogether adorable and insufferable. Al-Wadi Al Akhdar and Cortas - both highly popular brands among Arab communities - still sold hummus in unattractive tin cans with labels conjuring traditional Lebanese rural imagery. Most consumers could not relate to any of that.

Sabra's playbook: Making hummus a dip

Sabra changed the game in the mid-2000s by, as Scott Goodson put it, “[connecting] with Americans where and how they already eat, instead of trying to bring Americans to the Mediterranean”. For a start, Sabra promoted hummus as a dip. To the purists, that was a reductive – bordering on sacrilegious – notion, but it also cleverly tethered the product to the fast-rising chips-and-dips category. It indicated to consumers that they already knew what to do with a tub of hummus. Later, the phenomenally successful Share the World campaign, started in 2011, featured diverse characters, each describing how s/he liked his/her hummus. The message was clear: the best way to eat hummus is your way! And just like that, the hummus spread (pun intended).

The “Dip Life to the Fullest” advertising campaign a couple of years later added an educational component. Sabra set out to coach Americans on how to eat hummus the traditional way – in case you’re wondering, it’s more about micro-scooping than dipping. Interestingly, the campaign did little to change the habits of customers that had already adopted the product. But it was breaking the last remaining barriers before the late adopters: the hummus experience was simple, fun, and only a small step out of their comfort zones. Sabra’s market share rose from less than 8% in 2008 to over 60% in 2016, while that of every other major player… well… dipped.

So, Sabra’s and Domino’s. Two different strategies - one focused on adapting taste, the other on adapting presentation - but with a common core assumption: Revolutions don’t happen in food consumption. Winning consumers starts with building bridges to their comfort zones.