Spoilt for choice
My Food Bag caters for people who want relief from making decisions.
Would you let someone else dictate what you ate for dinner every night? Our food tastes are so personal and pronounced that the obvious response would seem to be no way. But that is exactly the service My Food Bag began offering less than four years ago and its success has been phenomenal. Last year its revenue hit $100 million, making it one of New Zealand’s fastest-growing companies. It has now expanded into Australia.
Co-founders Cecilia Robinson and her husband, James, first came across the idea for the home-delivery food service in Sweden and instantly loved it. “It resolved a problem,” says Robinson. “It meant we never had to argue about what to have for dinner.”
They started out producing a gourmet food bag for couples and a classic family bag. Both arrived on the doorstep every Sunday evening complete with recipes by Nadia Lim and all the ingredients needed
“We have seven or eight core bags. If we did 20 or 30, it wouldn’t be a success.”
to make them, aside from a few basic staples. Now options include gluten-free or vegetarian meals, and packs for solo eaters. The recent launch of Bargain Box, aimed at families on a tight budget, was its most successful yet.
So how did Robinson know people were going to like the service and the food the
company sends out? In part it was gut instinct, she says, because they liked it so much themselves, but they also went through an exhaustive listening process, involving social media channels, email feedback and testing with customers.
“One of the keys is that we offer some choice, but not too much,” says Robinson. “We have seven or eight core bags. If we did 20 or 30, it wouldn’t be a success. We need to distil customers’ needs and they have to trust us. It’s an intimate relationship. People get really passionate about food.”
Robinson, a working mother of two young children, has observed how the amount of choice in life can become a challenge. To have some of those food decisions removed is actually a relief for many.
“We send out an email every week with the menu that is coming up and a lot of people say they delete it because they don’t want to know,” she says. “We’re overloaded with so much information with whatever we do. Booking a holiday, for instance, you can find out everything about the resort online. So it’s nice having a surprise, something that just happens without you being in control of it. People say they like the mystery, and unboxing feels like Christmas.”
Understanding the fluidity of tastes has been important. For instance, My Food Bag now has a classic bag for couples as an alternative to the gourmet offering.
“Why did we do that? It was a novelty for our customers to be eating duck, venison and eye fillet. But they get conditioned. Sometimes it’s nice to have something not as gourmet, like a lasagne.”
The service particularly suits families; those with set routines and limits in their lives. Fussy eaters can find it expands their likes, and it can be particularly helpful in encouraging children to try new things.
“If you’re a foodie, you think you’re going to be this amazing parent and your child will eat everything, but they just don’t and it’s really hard work,” says Robinson, who has a new baby, Leila, and a four-year-old son, Thomas.
“We have the family bag and it’s made Thomas a better eater. On Sunday night, we had salmon with chipotle ketchup and vegetables and he ate it happily. He loves his orange fish, as he calls it.”
It’s nice having a surprise, something that just happens without you being in control of it.
way the target group could avoid being linked with the geeks was to abandon it and move on to something else.
Tastes are fluid. We adapt them to be like some people, and not like others. “It plays out in funny ways,” says Vanderbilt. “Ironically, the most distinct subcultures from the mainstream tend to be the most conformist.”
He references a character from the satirical sketch show Portlandia, hipster Spyke, who wears a chin beard and shell art and rides a fixed-gear bike, until he sees someone he previously thought of as being straight doing the same, at which point he declares everything he likes to be “over”.
Of course, sometimes we like things simply because we think we’re supposed to.
“They did an interesting experiment in a Swiss art gallery of putting a painting at the centre of the room and then moving it to the corner,” says Vanderbilt. “Once they moved it to the corner, the viewing exposure dropped off dramatically. To like something, you have to be exposed to it. The same painting might have dropped in people’s estimation because it wasn’t in the centre of the room, where they are trained to think the important art will be. I cite that as a neat example, a very subtle thing that might be shaping our choice without our being aware of it.”
FOCUS ON DISLIKE
The problem in this era of overwhelming choice, when we have access to millions of songs to listen to on Spotify and Pandora, a vast catalogue of movies and TV shows to watch on Netflix, hundreds of thousands of books to read on Amazon, when even ordering a cup of coffee is fraught with complexity, is that liking stuff takes up a lot of time. Vanderbilt suspects we would be better focusing on our dislikes. They reveal more about you, he argues, and can be a block to new and interesting experiences.
“I came to the conclusion that it was really my dislikes I should begin to think about and unpack a little bit,” he says. “When I began to examine what food dislikes I have, I came up with fennel. I didn’t eat it as a child, it wasn’t a popular ingredient and I developed this story that I didn’t like it. After reading the research, I realised this was ridiculous. I have no biological aversion to it. I just need to start eating it more and I’ll like it.”
At food flavouring company McCormick, Vanderbilt met people who are paid to taste. The one thing they are never asked to consider as they develop the perfect potato chip or fresh tomato profile is whether they like or dislike it. Preferences would only get in the way of a full experience.
“I came to the conclusion that there are really few things out there that we shouldn’t like,” says Vanderbilt. “It’s quite easy to expand your horizons if you can strip away in your mind that there’s not really a reason you should be having this dislike for something.”
So now the world has been changed by infinite choice and online word-of-mouth, what is the future of liking?
“I guess the trend is towards bigger and smaller with less room in the middle,” says Vanderbilt. “You have the massive trends that everyone taps into – the song of the summer or the meme that’s going round at the moment. And then at the other extreme you have everyone’s micro tastes – the things you share with micro communities. So the middle might get weakened. The winner-takes-all effect just seems larger.”
As for his choice of favourite colour – it turns out blue is the shade most of us pick. The theory is that we prefer the colours of the things we like the most.
Blue evokes the clean sea and the clear sky. “Who doesn’t like these things?” says Vanderbilt. “We need them to survive.”
In our quest for individuality, few things have become more complicated than coffee.