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Thank God! I've been trying to find an oven fresh kitchen everywhere!

Here’s another one. I think I threw it up on Twitter once too. Another meaningless phrase that is supposed to sound good but sounds stupid instead. Who doesn’t like fresh? Not me! Who doesn’t like fresh from the oven? Nobody! Who doesn’t like their kitchen to be fresh from the oven? I…huh? WTF?

Pizza Delight wants everyone to know that they use ovens in their kitchens. I’m assuming microwave ovens don’t count here. Uh uh, these are ovens for fresh. These are oven that are in kitchens. I’m even going to give them the credit that they can’t possibly think they are impressing people by implying that their food was recently in an oven. Even the most craptastic quick-serve joint warms up their factory food in an oven prior to selling it.

Maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe the oven is just the qualifier and it’s the kitchen they want you to notice. Farm fresh eggs are fresh from the farm. Spring fresh shower spray is fresh like spring. Lemon fresh dish detergent is fresh like the scent of lemons. Oven fresh kitchens are …fresh like ovens?

Yeah, this is going nowhere.

Now available in a mind-blowing new format!!!!!

To be fair, I’m not taking issue with this ad specifically. It’s the television ads that accompany it that get me. Dairy Queen is offering a new smaller size? Good. Landfills were overflowing with the remains of discarded ‘small’ Blizzards so somebody had to do something anyway.

The ridiculous nonsensical phrase heard in the TV ads I doth protest is “all new”. ALL new? It’s flip’n ice cream in a freak’n cup! What’s new? Did DQ find some wild new way to put the ice cream in the cup? Is the spoon a fork now? Is the cup not actually a cup and is, in fact, a new concept device called a “bowl”?

Cars are often referred to as all new and I get that. They have to be designed, engineered, fabricated, and the components must be sourced from dozens of different manufacturers and I could go on. So perhaps some complicated tooling of the back shop took place in order to enable less product to be extruded from the machine? Maybe A new factory had to be built in Shenzhen, China to pulverize the Crispy Crunch bars. What if the the Blizzard is actually now a Flurry or a Frosty. No? Then I’m at a loss.

I found this card in the bathroom of my hotel room while I was doing lines of coke off of the top of the toilet tank and it made me laugh. I love seeing this kind of thing. It feeds my smugness. I think I’ll make it an ongoing theme here. I have no doubt there is little shortage of this sort of nonsensical statement that sounds good on the surface but 2 seconds after reading it you think, “Wait, what the hell does that even mean?”

Now, I don’t spend any more time in salons than the average guy, maybe 10-12 hours a week or so, but I don’t recall ever hearing many conversations about “unlocking nature’s potential”, and how huge multi-national consumer products companies just can’t seem to figure it out. For that matter, I have no idea what unlocking nature’s potential is exactly, and I suspect the simpletons who wrote this don’t either.

Obviously though, “YOU” have given this some sober thought, and have been under this impression for some time now. By now you’ve just become resigned to the sad fact that you will not be able to benefit from nature being unlocked without paying *gasp!* “salon prices!”

Why, oh why will the salons not share this magic with us? Think of all that can be achieved with nature’s potential being unlocked.

File this one under me just thinking aloud as I stuff my face with chips. Ah, but they are healthy chips, aren’t they? Well, maybe not actually healthy, but they are at least lower in self-hate inducing salt and fat.  President’s Choice has had their health conscious Blue Menu for a couple of years now. I’m a fan actually.  They seem to have managed that elusive trick of making packaged food seem both appealing and good for you. It’s the colour that’s got me thinking.

It’s common knowledge that warm colours like oranges, yellows, and reds stimulate appetite. If you ate in a McDonald’s any time in the 80′s, this point was made to you to an obnoxious degree.  Cool colours are not this way.  It is why nobody will eat in a Greek restaurant and blueberries are almost extinct.  Wait …what?  Ok …so that part isn’t true at all. I”m exaggerating, but it is true that some colours can trigger our brains to subconsciously awaken our inner glutton.  Blue is not among them.

Blue is cool, light, calm, and an excellent choice of color to make your customer feel like they have made a smart, health-wise decision. Appetizing though? No. Blue seems an odd choice for junk food at first blush.

Obviously President’s Choice wants you to feel like you aren’t really even eating junk food, and this leads me to my point and what I think is so interesting: A warm colour entices you to eat more out of the bag and the blue shouldn’t; but it does, doesn’t it? The healthy, light, non-gluttonous hue lulls us into feeling better about what we are doing, and the net result is the same. We still end up consuming too many chips! I know I’m often thinking about the price I pay as I pop every chip into my mouth, but less so for these ‘healthier’ ones. My guess is, I just eat more of ‘em.

I saw this at a McDonalds restaurant beside the napkin dispenser the other day. I found it interesting that my first reaction to the message was cynical. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that at all, I suppose, since my default response to almost everything is cynical. “Oh yes, McDonalds cares so bloody much for the environment (eye roll)!

Yes, I eat too much fast food. A few years ago they installed new dispensers requiring you to have a multi-tool and be McGyver to extract any more that 2 napkins at a time. I remember being cynical then too. Not just because I’m messy with ketchup and need more napkins that I should, but because it just seemed like McDonalds was tightening up on even the cheapest of things. I understood that scale of course. 31,000 restaurants use an awful lot of napkins, and people always help themselves to far more than they need. That’s a lot of pennies being thrown out every day that could be better spent on figuring out ways to get us to eat even more of their food.

The napkin jail cell didn’t do the trick, and now they have resorted to asking us to use just one serviette with our Big Mac. Of course, no one is going to do that, but I’ll tell you this; it was the first time I was actually conscious of how many I took, and that’s got to count for something. Surely this will serve to further reduce the amount of paper the chain will have to buy, and that will certainly mean they have more money to invest elsewhere. Good for them, their little cost reduction exercise will work, and they can fool us into thinking they are environmental angels. Crafty buggers!

Does it matter though? They are reducing costs, and it is reducing production and waste. Those are very good things, and I wish more major chains would focus on these reductions that benefit themselves as well as the environment. Small, easy steps in the right direction will prepare them to make the tougher ones later on. The only losers here are the napkin manufacturers and suppliers, but frankly, that is their problem to worry about.