Banting diet fad is keeping the tills ringing
RETAILERS are tapping into the high-fat food phenomenon as the Tim Noakes diet hype grows, and restaurants serving pizzas, stodgy pastas and crusty sandwiches adapt.
Nuts, butter, cream, double thick yoghurt and coconut oil are more popular than ever. But retailers are reluctant to say just how good sales are.
Zyda Rylands, Woolworths MD of Food, said: “It is very difficult to discern the impact of Banting, or any other diet, on our current food sales.
“We can, however, see a marginal increase in foods closely associated with the Banting diet” such as high-fat dairy products.
Trends over the past six months include good sales of cauliflower (a must-have ingredient for Noakes’s cauli-mash).
But there was still interest in lower-fat products, Rylands said.
And for those who are not worrying about their weight, chocolates and sweets still sell well.
Alec Dunlop, general manager at high-end retailer Thrupps, said products such as almond butter, chai seed (a high-protein grain with Omega-3) and flax seed were very popular.
Sean Gomes, MD of Wellness Warehouse, said the launch of the Real Meal Revolution, which advocates eating more fat and far fewer carbohydrates, had inspired innovation and change in the health food industry.
“Where you would once only find nut butter [such as almond and macadamia] in jars, now you can get it in a squeeze pack for snacking.”
But for some retailers, customers who are on Banting are a minority.
Sarita van Wyk, spokeswoman for Shoprite Holdings, said: “We currently have 26 million individual customers who fre- quent our stores.” On a national basis, these “food diets do not really impact the mainstream shopper and are limited mainly to the well-heeled SA consumer”.
But for restaurants that rely on those with disposal incomes, catering for this new fad makes business sense.
Stephen and Eileen Cross, owners of Bread and Butter, a Cape Town eatery known for its sandwiches, noticed customers were trading sandwiches for salads. In February, they put up two specials boards of Banting-friendly meals, and business boomed. “We’ve never been quiet, but the results were remarkable,” he said. “It’s too big a movement not to incorporate it into our menu.”
Cross says Banting treats such as cheesecake, chocolate brownies and a coconut and almond-flour loaf with nuts and honey sell like, well, hot cakes.
Ellie’s Deli @The Noordhoek Café hasn’t sold one pasta in three weeks. Owner Ellie Nield said that since introducing Banting onto the menu it has attracted new customers from as far as Somerset West and the Strand. “If I look across the restaurant right now, there are three tables eating Banting chocolate cake for breakfast.”
The Banting menu has helped the restaurant through the typically quiet Cape Town winter. And while production costs have gone up, Nield says “people are aware of what these things cost to make”.
Wayne Kaminsky of Fitchef, a company that sells prepared healthy meals, said it introduced Banting meals, but the diet’s popularity means cauliflower and coconut cream have been hard to find.
“We cannot get hold of a highquality coconut cream at the moment.
“I used to pay R11 for a head of cauliflower, and now people are charging R25.”