Marketing question I guess (I don't know how to title this thread).

Everything that exists has always existed. At least the material for it has. Someone could have built a computer in the year 406. The raw materials existed at least if not the knowledge.

Which brings me to…flavors.

Why do companies bring out products with flavors as if they just fell out of the sky?
Pomegranates have existed as long as we have. Yet if one were to time travel back a decade or 2 ago they’d be hard pressed to find anything pomegranate flavored. But now there are all sorts of juices, drinks, and fruit bars with it in, as if it just was suddenly invented.

Nacho cheese, sour cream and onion, cool ranch. I don’t recall seeing chips with these flavors in the 60’s. But hell, in the 70’s it was like they were just invented. I’m quite sure sour cream and onions existed before 1972.

Same thing with kiwi, watermelon, and (blech :smack: ) pumpkin spice. Years ago few if any products had these flavors.

So do companies keep things like this under wraps until the current trend get’s old? Do they already know what flavor sensation they’ll introduce in 2027? Are we all of a sudden going to realize the taste sensation of celery? And will it be marketed as though they just invented it?

Near Princeton there is a company that specializes in coming up with new flavors and scents. Marketers think that doing the same thing long enough gets stale. Sometimes it works - I don’t remember pumpkin flavored anything when I was a kid.

It isn’t just flavors. Ever look at sheets of paint colors? I did a column once proposing that instead of red, yellow and green for project dashboard we use more specific colors, so I collected a bunch of sheets of paint colors. In visits to 2 hardware stores I had over 200 colors, none of them just white. (How boring.)
It all makes work for the working marketer to do.

There is a whole discipline devoted to this:

Since this involves food, let’s move it to IMHO.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

That is interesting.

But what’s weird to me is how they are coming out with flavors that have always, Always, ALWAYS existed and presenting them as if a space alien just delivered them.

My favorite example is pomegranate. 20 years ago nothing (except an actual pomegranate) was pomegranate flavored. Why did it occur to someone in the 90’s to flavor things like that and not a long time before that? Surely Madison Avenue knew about pomegranates in the 1950’s. And kiwis, etc…
Can you imagine traveling back to 1952 and asking for a kiwi flavored drink. You’d either be looked upon as nuts or a genius.

Just seems odd to me that something that has always been all of a sudden seems new to people.

As far as your question on timing of those new flavours - most food products evolve. They start with basic flavours and move into more variations over time - plain potato chips, to salted, to cheese to BBQ, to salt & vinegar etc. If you have no idea what a potato chip is, a plain would be the easiest to try first. OTOH, if the first chip you ever tried was spicy jalapeño dijon honey flavour you may never have a second.

When it comes to some of the more “exotic” flavours,it makes no sense to launch a new flavour no one has heard of, or knows what it tastes like. Lately I’ve seen potato chips in Indian flavours like Curry, Chicken Tikka Masala, Butter chicken etc. These flavours have existed for 1000+ years, but why would a company launch them in America when few have ever tried that flavour before? I would suspect that even now, outside of big urban centres where Indian restaurants exist, these flavours would flop completely.

Usually new flavour trends start with small companies who go into more obscure flavours to differentiate themselves from the big guys. If those start to get sales, the big guys will quickly copy them (we called it “fast adapting”)

Manufacturers have new-product development teams (I was one of them for a time) whose job is to look for those new flavour trends and determine what and when to launch. I attended food shows, read lots of websites and magazines, looked at competitors, etc, for new flavours we could “fast adapt”.

We’d also work with our suppliers, “flavour houses”, who would tell us international flavour trends entering North America. Lastly we had an annual global new product development meeting where every country in the world would present their new flavours as well as what their research showed were the future trending flavours in their countries.

I’d narrow down all that to about 10 flavours I thought might work. Of that 10, we might have capacity (financial, sales, manufacturing) to launch 1 or 2. We’d then do consumer research (Do you know what an Acai berry is? What it tastes like? How likely would you be to try an Acai flavoured XXXX if you saw it in the shelf?). Consumer pre-knowledge of a flavour was a big factor, most companies don’t have the budgets to educate consumers and/or do massive sampling programs.

Pomegranates have existed forever, but people in the US haven’t eaten them forever. I first had a pomegranate in Uzbekistan (where they are way better than the ones you get here, BTW), and fell in love with them. I ate one a day the whole time my family was traveling through the Asian regions of the Soviet Union.

When we came back to the US, there were no pomegranates in the stores. This was 1978. I didn’t see a pomegranate in the US until the 1990s, and that was in New York City. I think it took several years after they were introduced on the coasts to work their way to Podunk. So before about 2000, the US wasn’t “ready” for pomegranate juice. Add to it that it tends to be expensive, and no one it going to first try it as an expensive bottle of juice, unless you can hype it as a wonder cure, antioxidant, weight-loss drug, whatever, or all the stuff they say about the acai.

And that, even bearing in mind that American pomegranates are not as good as the ones you get in near east Asia. But they are still pretty good.

I don’t know why sour cream and chives chips would have taken a long time to catch on, because sour cream and chive dip was around in the 1970s, at least, and maybe earlier. Maybe they were available earlier than the OP is remembering.

But basically, people aren’t going to buy a food if they’ve never heard of the flavor.

Then, there’s something called “market saturation.” The juice market for little kids was saturated a long time ago, so the only way to sell more juice was to try to market it to adults. That’s why juices started getting sold in flavors that were 1) a little more exotic, so they seemed sophisticated; and 2) in flavors about which sellers could make health claims, like “They have antioxidants!” It’s why all the different potato chips, as well. You’ll eat more of them if you have more flavors to choose from, at least so the theory goes.

Oh I ate pomogranates in the 70s, my Daddy planted a tree and then another, apparently for mating!!? I am not sure where I heard this, but isn’t Dr.Pepper made with pomogranate?

I had pomegranate in the mid 60’s. My mother bought them at the National grocery store. This was in southeastern Wisconsin.

They can be a mess to eat and the juice is more permanent than a Sharpie. She’d make me sit out side and eat it wearing an old tee shirt.

I also remember a kid named Sean having a kiwi in his sack lunch when I was in middle school. He only went there for 1 year so it was 5th grade/1971. That was also SE WI.

The Marketing Answer to your Marketing Question is: because Humans notice things that are different. That’s why famous brands sometimes change their packaging, splash New!!! all over it, but the fine print says “new packaging, same great taste!”

In this case, new flavors are new opportunities to try to be the Shiny New Thing. Oreos and their limited edition fillings; same with M&Ms.

But those flavors aren’t actually “new”. They have always existed. I just wonder if companies intentionally don’t put them out so that they will have something “new” to put out in the future.

Hard to believe that nobody thought of pumpkin spice a zillion years ago.

There’s a lot of time and research that goes into developing flavors for commercially produced foods. I think it’s less holding stuff back and more don’t have the resources to develop a flavor recipe for the zillion different flavors you could make a chip all at the same time.

Here’s a video of a guy making custom potato chip flavors for his friends. It doesn’t go horribly, but it’s obvious that some of the flavors are pretty much disasters and one person may like one flavor while someone else hates it. If he wanted to seriously turn those flavors into something marketable, he’d need to do a lot more tweaking and testing. Scale that up for a giant food conglomerate like Lay’s and I think it makes more sense why they don’t flood the market with 800 different chip flavors immediately.

Pomegranate was found to be one of the best sources of anti-oxidants. Anti-oxidants were the fad in health and nutrition at the time. This led to the profusion of pomegranate drinks and flavors.

Huh? :smiley:

I’ll be damned if I can find the link right now, but I also recall that three things have happened to be a factor in the current pomegranate ‘explosion’…
[ol]
[li]Improvements in the processing now allow for the easier separation and juicing of the fruit.[/li][li]Some tariff on processed pomegranate has been lifted.[/li][li]The Pom Wonderful people have sunk an f-ton of money into expanding their crop and marketing the resulting products.[/li][/ol]

I would imagine for things like sour cream and onion flavored chips, their rise in popularity had to do with innovations in cheaply extracting or simulating flavors then applying them to a chip in a satisfactory way. Technology!

Doubt it. I mean, I’m sure they have a pipeline of products, but sitting on an innovation because your existing products are doing well is a great way to get scooped by your competition. Generally things are tested and tweaked until they look promising, then pushed hard. If you’re, say, a VP at a major food brand, and you have a product that all your market testing says is going to be a hit, sitting on it is a great way to get fired. Not saying it never happens, but I doubt it’s the dominant factor in when things get released.

I think it’s more like fashion. The concept of a tee shirt has always existed, but they’re popular now. Fedoras still work just as well as they are, but culture has changed. Fashion designers can make new clothes, but they don’t actually control what the market will want. Food scientists can make new flavors (or, rather, apply existing flavors to things that haven’t had them applied before), but they can’t make people like the taste.

Also, it does actually take time to produce these things. Pomegranates always existed, but how long is the juice stable in affordable packaging? Which blends of juices including pomegranate are the most popular? When is the pomegranate supply chain mature and robust enough to launch a major food brand?

Years ago, I met a guy who was a sales manager for POM, the pomegranate juice with the distinctive three-lobed bottle. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I believe that at least part of the reason it happened when it did was that pomegranate farmers organized and tried to promote the juice.

Remember the horrendously successful “Got Milk” ads? Milk has always existed, but the advertising push happened because milk producers coordinated.

In at least some cases (McRib is an example) a new food product is predicated on a supply glut. Maybe, one year the market was oversupplied with pomegranates, making the potential profit margins for a success high enough to risk producing and marketing the juice.

Pomegranate flavor has been around, and in fact ubiquitous, for many decades. It’s just that they used to call it cherry flavor. You see, the artificial flavor that’s labeled “cherry” is actually designed to mimic Maraschino cherries, cherries which have been soaked in Grenadine syrup (this is what you’ll typically find on top of a sundae). The resulting fruits end up tasting more like the Grenadine than they do like unsoaked cherries. And Grenadine syrup is made from, you guessed it, pomegranates.

Our garden has several pomegranate trees. :slight_smile: But they’re scrawny and almost fruitless. :frowning:

In My Hungry Opinion.

Especially as no one called them that until 1962.

Feijoa juice is way nicer anyhow.

Is kiwi popular again or something? I vaguely remember it from the late 80s/early 90s with kiwi-strawberry drinks, and that’s about it. I’m not sure I’ve even had a kiwi in the last decade.