Food Processing - January 2008 - (Page 21)

PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT Hillshire farm makes an interesting but confusing entrée salad that should be marketed as a kit or starter. An entrée salad – but where’s the lettuce? By Hollis Ashman, Jacqueline Beckley and Jennifer Maca, Consumer Understanding Editors I f there’s any menu category that has evolved and matured to suit America’s expanding tastes, it’s this one (salad)” – so wrote Restaurant Hospitality magazine in 2005. Salads generally were made of greens and occasionally tomatoes and relegated to the status of “side dish.” In the late 1930s, the Cobb Salad was invented at the Brown Derby Restaurant in Hollywood, and the “entrée salad” was born. Lunch is prime salad eating time. But who has the time to wash and trim a head of lettuce? Shred cheese? Cook and crumble some bacon? And, to truly make it an entrée, a mealin-one instead of a side salad, you need to cook and dice some sort of protein to go along with the greens. How does a food processor meet consumers’ demands for freshness, quality, premiumness and variety with a pre-made salad? Sara Lee’s Hillshire Farm brand answers with a kit with all the complex ingredients … except the most important one, the lettuce. For this review, we chose the chicken and bacon club salad. Understanding the marketplace The market size for pre-cut, bagged salad/salad dressing/salad topping is $4.2 billion, according to 2002 Mintel Intl. figures, with a growth rate of 9 percent per year. The big players are Dole, Fresh Express and Ready Pac, along with private label. The spoilage rate of produce is high, yet these perishables account for 50 percent of supermarket sales. Freshness through packaging has driven the success of bagged salads. However, there is a limit that consumers are willing to pay for the increased freshness and convenience from the packaging. Hillshire Farm saw the opportunity to take its well recognized name in meats and knowledge of deli perishablity to help consumers get the convenience and heartiness they want in salads. The key is to provide options for people who will appreciate the benefits of precut, prepackaged, proportioned and caloriecounted salad ingredients (chopped chicken, bacon crumbles, shredded cheese, croutons, and dressing) but who don’t want to do fast-food salads and won’t make them from scratch. Hillshire Farm Entrée Salads have been created for both women and men who need a meal that requires little preparation during the middle of the day. These people have somewhat higher budgets for lunch and are willing to spend them on convenience but will not trade off quality. According to our Crave It! and Healthy You! insights, color and taste are important in salad, but so are texture and consistency. And for most salad eaters, the more textures and flavors the better. The mild creaminess of cheese juxtaposed with the sweet and spicy crunchiness of croutons or onions are examples January 2008 food processing • 21 www.foodprocessing.com http://www.foodprocessing.com

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Food Processing - January 2008 Contents Editor's Plate NewsBites The Trends Rollout Food Biz Kids Product Spotlight Seventh Annual Manufacturing Trends Surbey Product Development Ingredients Plant Operations Plant Operations & Packaging New Supplier Products Toops Scoops

Food Processing - January 2008

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