Keeping Your Inner Foodie Alive

I don't know about you, but I joined the food industry because I love food...

It's a long lasting love affair, which started on family trips to France as a child...

Ripe, juicy peaches from the local market, with their sticky juice dripping down my chin, hunks of crusty bread slathered with salty, creamy butter.....tomatoes that tasted of.... well.... tomatoes!

And of course not forgetting all those stinky, gooey, yet delicious cheeses.

Simple classic pleasures, seasonal produce at it's best and plenty of it.

Then after school, whilst all my friends were watching cartoons, I was watching ready....steady.....cook, learning tips all the while.

I was lucky enough to grown up in a house full of delicious food.

This love of food has grown throughout my life, loving the restaurants and markets when I lived in London, then experiencing some of the most amazing food of my life whilst working for Marks and Spencer and travelling frequently to Italy to visit suppliers or on a research trip.

Learning the craft, passion and patience that go into some of the worlds best ingredients, such as Parma ham, Parmesan cheese and Balsamic vinegar, were inspirational experiences that I will never, ever forget.

Travelling to New York, Boston and Washington, hunting high and low for the most innovative and delicious cakes, whilst working for Costa Coffee, working with the worlds best chocolatiers, chefs, scientists...

If you love food, this industry can offer you so many opportunities to feed your soul with learning and inspiration, it's just wonderful.

But at the moment, it probably doesn't feel that wonderful for everyone all of the time...

It's tough out there.

Inflationary pressures are hitting from all angles, and for many teams, nearly 80% of their time might be spent on cost reduction projects.

It has to be done. It's undeniable. Sometimes it can be a really satisfying challenge, trying to balance quality with cost.

But when you have done it for the 3rd or 4th time, chip, chip, chipped away at that recipe, benchmarked it over and over again, when you are asked to consider changes you don't believe in, it doesn't exactly feel like....fun.

And when it becomes the majority of your work, when NPD teams are effectively purely EPD teams, it can be difficult to keep motivated.

We must continue, to offer guidance to our cross-functional teams, to try and achieve that balance correctly, to hold on to the elements that genuinely deliver the right quality to consumers, letting go of those that don't.

Challenging ourselves to recognise the things that drive true competitive advantage, because we love food and we know that our customers do too.

Our culinary knowledge means we know which things we can live without, and which things will really make the difference on the plate, in the homes of our consumers. We never want to disappoint them.

What they think when they bite into that product matters to us, it's why were are here.

So how do we keep our foodie mojo alive and keep our teams motivated when the going gets tough?

Here are some ideas...

• Keep on talking - sharing the latest dish you have been drooling over on Instagram is sharing your inspiration with each other. Even such a simple thing as chatting over what you have been cooking for dinner during team meetings can spark ideas.

• Feed each other - sharing food together evokes discussion, passion, memories - it doesn't have to be elaborate or time consuming if the pressure is on - it might be your guilty pleasure food or something that you used to get in your lunch box as a child. It's fun and a great way to learn about each other.

• Start a foodie cook book club, share your favourite recipes, maybe even cook them up for charity.

• Get out and about - if you have time, a full-day food safari, or even just a safari for lunchtime or breakfast, if you can't stretch to that then a retail store visit can be a great way to catch up with new launches and chat about future innovations.

• If you don't have a live innovation brief on the agenda, then why not set your team an innovation ideation challenge, or a mock brief for concept development, it will help to stretch those creative muscles and focus on the future.

• If you have a commute to work, check out a foodie podcast, I can highly recommend the following:

- Dish | Podcast on Spotify

-Comfort Eating with Grace Dent | Podcast on Spotify

- Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster | Podcast on Spotify

- Honey & Co: The Food Sessions | Podcast on Spotify

and of course...

- Fascinating Foodies | Podcast on Spotify

• Know that it is just for now, things will change. Just keep cooking, keep eating, keep talking and keep learning in the meantime.

I love helping to inspire others about food, and I understand how difficult it can be to do that, why not give me a call and chat it through, I would love to help with a team inspiration session or food safari.

But most of all, if you want to talk about food, I'm always here for that.