Check out this new packaging from pickle giant Vlasic, a subsidiary of Pinnacle Foods—which also owns Bird’s Eye, Aunt Jemima, Swanson and Lender’s Bagels among other things, and is in turn owned by the multibillion financial group Blackstone Group.*
Someone in Vlasic’s marketing department realized that artisinal, farmers’ market “look” would be a good move in the current market... And indeed, the packaging did momentarily fool me into thinking that Aunt Mabel canned these in her root cellar high in the Catskills, or something like that.
Major food companies have been biting natural food store style for a while now. Even the potato chip aisle of the supermarket is now crammed with sea-salt encrusted fried taters packaged in plastic that looks vaguely like a paper bag. And there is, of course, also a blog devoted solely to tracking this stuff.
Anyway, a term for this is needed, along the lines of “astroturfing” (for fake grassroots groups organized by big business). Probably one already exists, but for the moment and for lack of a better term, I’m going with f’artisanal—for fake artisinal. Or maybe that should be phartisinal, the “ph” standing for “phony.” (I’m leaning toward the f’, as the apostrophe lends it that extra ersatz air.)
Expect to see a lot more f’artisinal or phartisinal products on your market shelves in the next few months and years. As noted at Man Are We Screwed,
Marketers know that consumers buy into this artisan imagery. More than 800 new food products have christened themselves artisan something-or-other in the past five years, reports researcher Datamonitor. While fewer than 80 new foods dubbed themselves artisan just four years ago, the number more than doubled to nearly 200 in 2010.
“The word artisan suggests that the product is less likely to be mass-produced,” says Tom Vierhile, innovation insights director at Datamonitor. “It also suggests the product may be less processed and perhaps better tasting and maybe even be better for you.”
As even USA Today has noted by now, you can start your day with a Starbucks Artisan Breakfast Sandwich, snack on Frito-Lay’s Artisan Recipe Tostitos, and have dinner in front of the TV with a Domino’s Artisan Pizza. For at least 20 years now, the real genius of American consumer capitalism has been its ability to quickly spot “fringe” trends which have mainstream marketing potential.
(Exhibit A: Urban Outfitters. Way back in the mid-’90s, I started work on a script for a never-achieved movie tentatively entitled The Thrifters. The story was about bunch of impoverished Williamsburg/Lower East Side hipsters who unknowingly get hired by a shady marketing guy to roam the country’s secondhand and vintage shops, prospecting for thriftstore finds. The marketing guy hasn’t told them that he works for J. Screw, which plans to convert their coolhunting into mainstream merchandising millions... They’d eventually wise up and sour on the enterprise, with their road trip then heading into Thelma & Louise or U Turn territory. The plot might have been slightly novel c. 1995; today it would just be a shrug-inducing documentary of existing reality...)
And even before this f’artisinal/phartisinal trend crests, already it’s being over: The New York Times this past week announced that authenticity is over—even as others try to reassert the validity and integrity of handmade goods.Take that, West Elm... Meanwhile, the phenomenon is hardly new. As Paul Goodman wrote more than 50 years ago in The Empire City:
If I was ready to vomit in those earlier days, what dirty words must I emply to mention the decades of 1920-1940, the sabbath of publicity and advertising, and every word of it an insult to honor and intelligence? Even the conceivable perfections of life are trivial; but what a degrading, ruinous and wasted effort to try for a single one in this sinkk of corruption! Who could have a clean taste?
Or, per a suggestion of a Gawker commenter, as Bill Hicks put it:
* A small-but-not-entirely-unexpected irony: per Wikipedia, Vlasic did actually grow out of a small local business based in Detroit, founded by a Croatian immigrant named Franjo Vlašić roughly 100 years ago.
