Category: Food News
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Even Tesco says we're wasting too much food
That crinkled bag of salad with mushy brown juice, lingering on at the end of your fridge. The old banana which, even as the brown dots consume the skin, you’ll get around to eating any day now. And the sinking feeling of guilt every time you look at the half-pan of bread, and feel torn…
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Camile Thai using crowdfunding to set up new restaurant
Camile Thai is a Dublin takeaway chain that currently appears to be doing pretty well in their businesses in Rathmines, Dun Laoghaire, Phibsboro and Dolphin’s Barn. They recently took the interesting step of launching a crowdfunding campaign to open a new branch. I’m very familiar with crowdfunding for projects related to arts and charity, but…
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Tayto Chocolate: A Thing That Exists
The evil geniuses at Tayto recently pulled off a PR masterstroke while simultaneously going into bold new flavour combination territory, with their Tayto chocolate bar. This bar is milk chocolate with shards of cheese and onion crisps throughout it. The combination of salty and sweet is long established; and works beautifully with things like salted…
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Snobbery against cheap food: How doing the right thing is a stick to beat the poor
Cheap eats. German discounters. Euro value shops. Big supermarkets. Iceland. We’ve often lambasted here for being excessively focused on the cheap. Or told that it’s immoral to not buy organic. Or that we should only eat Fairtrade or totally ethical produce. Or that decent humans buy from small, local producers at farmer’s markets, choosing fresh…
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More snazzy marketing: SuperValu's Eat Irish for a Week Campaign
For the Irish week that’s in it, here’s another ad that grabbed my attention: SuperValu’s Eat Irish for a Week campaign. Simple enough idea. Buy items from their shopping list and feed a family of four for a week for less than €100 a week using only Irish ingredients. SuperValu boast that 75 per cent…
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Aldi's Swap and Save campaign: Why are we reluctant to abandon our favourite brands?
Two interesting initiatives caught my eye over the past few weeks. I’ll start with Aldi and come back to SuperValu in a few days. You’ve probably seen the ads where Aldi asked eight people to switch from their main supermarket to Aldi for eight weeks. The participants were recruited through an independent consultancy. The four…
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Ethical food shopping: Oxfam’s “Behind the Brands” campaign
Shopping is an ethical minefield. Does buying the odd bunch of Fairtrade bananas make a real difference? Is eating meat wrecking the planet? Should we only be eating organic fruit and vegetables? And who can afford all of this? The amount of competing viewpoints confuses consumers even further. It’s no wonder that most people are a…
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Don’t waste your money on organic fruit and veg
Overheard middle-class conversation: “I really want to switch to all organic fruit and veg – it’s just so expensive.” “Sometimes I feel really guilty buying non-organic,” said the other woman. “It’s just so bad for the environment.” “Can’t be good for your health either. All those toxins.” They’re both wrong. Organic isn’t better for…
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Best before and use-by: How to eat “gone off” food and not die
I felt very slightly queasy yesterday. The soup was four days past the use-by, but I ate it anyway because I couldn’t bear to let it go to waste. Ah, I was fine. Didn’t get sick or nothing. Grrrr… Later that day I came across some research from safefood Ireland, which showed that one in three…
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The steady march of own brands
In today’s Irish Times Pricewatch section, Conor Pope looks at the mass switch to own brand labels: Despite food price inflation, shoppers are managing their shopping budgets by trading down to private labels, shopping around, shopping to a budget and planning in advance. Four out of five shoppers now believe it is imperative that they…