Another busy week for Australia’s food and beverage sector, kicking off with the launch of The Great Unwaste on Sunday and sliding towards a long weekend with the sizeable merger of the Original Juice Company, SPC Global, and Nature One Dairy. Let’s have a recap as well as a look at some overseas news.
Three and a half years of research culminated in End Food Waste Australia’s (EFWA) launch of its national behaviour change campaign – think Life. Be in it. (for those of us over a certain age) or Slip Slop Slap, for food waste – The Great Unwaste.
At the National Food Waste Summit in July, members of the team behind the research and creative shared some of the findings that informed the ad campaign. Monash Sustainable Development Institute, BehaviourWorks, senior research fellow, Dr Mark Boulet, made the room full of delegates audibly gasp when he revealed the project’s workshops found there were 25 behaviours consumers engaged in when it came to household food waste. Twenty-five.
“But before we rushed into the design of an intervention, what we wanted to do was not bring our own assumptions to the issue, because we are not our target audience. We really want to understand the behaviours from the perspective of households, not food waste nerd like us. We tried to pull apart from our focus groups and interviews what could help people use up the food in their fridge and what prevents them from doing so.
“This is what I loved; our targets were willing to go there with us is. We put our assumptions about consumers to the side and let them direct us as to the shape and scope of the campaign,” Boulet said.
Also, for those of us who love a statistic, their research showed how big scary numbers can hinder rather than prompt change. It turns out those massive numbers I mentioned up front can hinder rather than prompt change. EFWA campaign director, Mandy Hall, summed it up, “Blame, shame, and burden are the enemy of behaviour change.”
Anyway, check out the first piece of creative here, the first in what will be a long play to educate, inspire, and change all of us and how we think – and act.
After that excitement came news the ACCC getting an extra $30 million from the feds to put towards its investigations of the supermarkets. In case the boot on the other foot was also needed.
How many legal minds do you think it took to determine how long was long enough before allegedly jacking up prices, lowering them again and saying it was on sale? I would have thought the length of time would be inverse to the length of time it had been at the starting price. Two years at $1? Then two years at $2 before you throw that trajectory into reverse. Now that’s a sale price. (Note: I did not study law.)
Moving on.
Nissin Foods Company – a Chinese food company best known for brands Nissin and Doll that operates in Vietnam, Taiwan, and Korea, as well as China and Hong Kong – acquired Australian company ABC Pastry, which makes frozen dumplings under the same moniker, for $33.7 million.
I’m not sure how familiar you are with frozen dumplings, but I have many children and ABC Dumplings have been a mainstay of our existence for the better part of a decade.
Nissin sees the acquisition as leveraging its move into Australia and strengthening its presence in other markets.
The founders of ABC Pastry, Peter and Frances Gao, started the company in 1998 when they emigrated here from China and missed the dumplings of home.
But that deal was just an amuse bouche to what was to come.
The Original Juice Company acquired SPC Global and Nature One Dairy this week.
I heard Jeff Kennett, chair of OJC, speak earlier this year at the Global Food Forum about his fury and frustration than successive federal governments have failed to implement a national agriculture, food production, or water plan. “We have wasted decades,” he said.
At the press conference announcing the acquisition, Kennett reiterated that sentiment,
“The decision today gives us an opportunity to recognise the importance of farmers and those employed in our manufacturing and distribution system. For me, it is a very important moment,” he said.
As Kennett called it, it was the empire striking back at the foreign companies buying Australian agricultural land and manufacturing capabilities.
Hussein Rifai, current chair of SPC, soon to be chair of ‘the new’ SPC Global, as the conglomerate will be called, has skin in the game, owning 58 per cent of SPC. When his JV acquired SPC from Coca-Cola Amatil in 2019 for $40 million, Rifai told me they were going to grow SPC into the Nestlé of Australia. Some pesky things have got in the way, the pandemic, catastrophic weather events, you know the deal, but now, with this announcement? They might well do it.
Some international news that caught my eye
In the US, egg prices spiked 28.1 per cent in August - the largest increase of any food tracked by the US Bureau of Labor Statistic. Bird flu was been listed as one of the primary reasons, with more than 100 million birds lost since 2022.
Nestlé has launched a plant-based meat product, Maggi Rindecarne, that is designed to be blended with conventional beef. Hybrid meats are going to be the path of change. If Chileans will eat less meat then the rest of us need to have a good hard look at ourselves.
PepsiCo has acquired Mexican food company, Siete Foods, for $1.2 billion. PepsiCo liked its “authenticity” and growing better-for-you product range. Siete Foods was founded in 2014.
