Branding: Jamie Oliver - Watching the Salt

By JULIETTE ROSSANT As important as it is to establish a brand in the marketplace, it is perhaps more important to manage the brand. What does managing a brand mean? In practical terms, it means making sure that the products that bare the brand name are consistent with the brand message. For most celebrity chefs, that means endorsing products, or putting their name on products that reflect the quality of cuisine in their restaurants. Stray too far from your brand, or endorse inferior products, and you risk a backlash that could damage your reputation. Consider Jamie Oliver's hard-won position as a champion of better UK school food and better food choices for all British. He has fought to get fresh food onto children's plates, get parents to make better choices in the grocery stores, and get grocery stores to offer more free-range, organic food. The hubbub now is about one of the foods he has railed against most, Bernard Matthews's Turkey Twizzlers, a kind of pre-cooked food made from about 34% turkey, and plenty of pork fat and salt, extruded in a twisted shape that is reheated before eating. They contain 21.2% fat and 1.24g of salt. On his TV show, Jamie's School Dinners, Jamie claimed that Turkey Twizzlers represented just the kind of unhealthy food kids should not eat. Unfortunately, after the show ran, sales of Turkey Twizzlers jumped by 32%. Jamie is in hot water now because it turns out that his own branded pasta sauce is higher in salt (though not fat) then Turkey Twizzlers. The Guardian reports that: His spicy olive, garlic and tomato sauce, which is sold in supermarkets and is popular with busy parents, contains 3g of salt per 100g - up to six times as much as some rival products, and twice as much as the equivalent weight of the much-maligned Turkey Twizzlers. What was Jamie's reaction? A spokesman for Oliver denied the chef had let down parents. "Jamie spent a lot of time working on these sauces and they are designed to be eaten in the Italian way - one jar with at least 500g of pasta - feeding four to six people. "Because they are more concentrated than rivals you don't need as much - and the salt content is dissipated. We are now looking at changing our labelling to make this is clearer to consumers. A little of Jamie's sauce goes a long way." This is a response that consumers expect from a corporation – not a chef who is taking their brand and message seriously. Changing the labeling would still mean that the sauce is outside the standards set for school lunches, making the sauce unhealthy. Wouldn't it be better to lower the salt content in the product, and couple that with new labeling – and a new campaign about how to serve only a little sauce? Though that might get an even worse backlash than the originnal campaign against Turkey Twizzlers. But the fact is that even Turkey Twizzlers have a new recipe with only .925g of salt per 100g. Previous articles: Jamie Oliver & Paul McCartney: - Anti-Landmine Campaign Jamie Oliver Label: Sainsburys v. Tesco Jamie Oliver: Chicken Out! Jamie Oliver: Jamie At Home Jamie Oliver: Cook with Jamie Jamie Oliver Cartoon By Aardman Jamie Oliver Betters British School Food FOOD PIX: Jamie Oliver Fat Suit Nora Sands: Nora's Dinners Jamie Oliver Signs Sainsbury's Jamie Oliver New Year: School Lunch Jamie Oliver on Vodafone Live! Jamie Oliver: Real Guts Fat Lady Sings Jamie Oliver Jamie Oliver: School Lunch July 4: East Meets West Wall Street Journal: Beef over Chef Sponsorship? Amazon UK's Steamy Xmas Chefs [Food Television - complete] [Chefs & Branding - complete] Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging --> back to Super Chef