Monday, June 27, 2016

Food For All

It has been well documented that more than 30% of food is wasted where there are no packaging systems in place to pack farm harvest collected food.

Today of course it is sad to report that in modern economies more food is thrown away than eaten.

More than 200 years ago the economist Thomas Malthus worried that population growth would exceed food production. So far it has not.

What suddenly has started to worry the food corporations is that productivity of staple foods has reached a plateau. Yields are at their maximum. Next on the horizon is that the warming of the earth affects farming, thereby causing crop losses to increase.

The solution is going to require a lot of technology in how we manage the crops we plant; for example, genome-based formulas that allow crops to become more nutritious at the same time that crops with heat and drought properties are gaining interest.

Now that we can plan on nutritious high yield crops getting them harvest ready and packed quickly into pouches is essential. Pest prevention is absolutely necessary. So the storage silos have to be designed to be pest-free and packing rooms on site are essential as well as roads to take the crops to market.

The pouch being the perfect partner in all of this, allowing gas flushing, and improved shelf life. More pouches packed per container reduces the number of trucks and keeps all aware of the environmental concerns in the equation.

With predictions from the Food and Agricultural Organization of 10 billion world population by 2050, care should be taken to save as much food as harvested or the Malthusian worry will become a reality. All this augers well for the future of pouch packaging.

Monday, June 20, 2016

Millennials and email?

Surprise surprise, we learn that people actually guard the sanctity of their emails and this very much applies to the millennial generation. This does not mean they necessarily write emails but that they READ them, and newsletters let them comment within the article of interest by email. (See Clover for young woman).

Whilst millennials might not use emails for their social lives they sure like it for their records around finances and personal information gleaned from reading targeted newsletters. These are on selected subjects for example food, clothing, travel, organic, environment friendly products and finance.

The prediction that email would die with Twitter, instant messaging etc. has failed and a new found fact is that millennials like targeted newsletters and email allows them access to this information and for want of a better word the newsletter could become short versions of the long gone encyclopedias. Want school or car information look up a newsletter. Want to visit or buy a product, look at a targeted newsletter.

Suddenly a new market is emerging factual brief details by video and comments on a specific subject all via a newsletter.

The editor also becomes important and must be a millennial for the newsletter to gain a following.

The slick trick is all in the headline. Newsletter Editors are doing all they can to catch the millennials interest and allow them through the newsletter to read, watch videos, talk online and get into the subject rather than have a sales person try to sell them the product.

This makes the newsletter suddenly very private to the reader. You can almost access the mind of the writer through the story line in the article. This turns it into a conversation not a sales pitch.

All this is so important to the product marketing staff today. Keep ahead, know your customers has never been more important in selling in this information based society.