Leveraging its design chops in a whole new way, Target is launching a new multi-faceted marketing campaign behind its CPG products with a decidedly unique twist.

"The Everyday Collection" by Target isn't its latest limited edition designer collaboration. It's a minimalist campaign touting — wait for it — groceries, from cake mixes to laundry detergent, prenatal vitamins to cuts of steak. It's also applying its acknowledged sensibilities in fashion and design to promoting the, let's face it, more mundane SKUs in its inventory on behalf of its brand affiliates: consumer packaged goods.Continue reading...

Public apologies by high-profile experts are rare, making this week's anti-GMO reversal — call it a GMea Culpa — by British environmentalist, author and Oxford University visiting research associate Mark Lynas particularly stunning.

Lynas spurred the anti-GMO movement in the mid-‘90s, continuing to argue as recently as 2008 that corporate greed was threatening Mother Earth and her inhabitants; but at this week's Oxford Farming Conference, he recanted his position in a very public way.

“I want to start with some apologies," he stated. "For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.”

“As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely. So I guess you’ll be wondering—what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it?"Continue reading...

Candy and chocolate generally bring happiness to most folks, but they also are keeping a few law firms working overtime.

The latest ruling finds Nestle winning a case that Cadbury had brought against it to try and stop the trademarking of the shape of its Kit Kat bars. Cadbury had taken offense at Nestlé’s 2006 trademarking of Kit Kat as “four trapezoidal bars aligned on a rectangular base.”

After all, as TheHindu.com notes, Cadbury has its own similar chocolate bar, the Crispello, which has a “creamy centre, wrapped in a delicate crispy shell, covered with a delicious layer of Cadbury chocolate.”

But sorry, Cadbury. This time, you lose. Cadbury’s legal team will just have to remember how sweet it felt to beat Nestle recently in a battle over the color purple.Continue reading...

If innovation is the lifeblood of business, then General Mills will be pumping hard in the new year. The CPG giant released news about more than 100 new products that it will launch in its U.S. retail portfolio alone during its fiscal 2013.

General Mills would like to generate between 4 percent and 5 percent of its sales from new products "and we think we will be very much in that range," CEO Ken Powell told Wall Street analysts during a conference call this week, according to Ad Age. "We want to make sure that we are launching products that are bringing new consumers into [their brand] franchise, and we have steadily improved that number."

The new products range from new varieties of Fiber One products to a Snickerdoodles flavor of Chex Mix Muddy Buddies. And if there are some underlying themes to the whole list, they would be peanut butter and chocolate, along with fiber and protein, according to a General Mills blog post detailing the roster of new products.Continue reading...

Tide Pods are providing a robust helping of good news for Procter & Gamble in a year when its brands, products, strategy and even CEO have been taking a beating.

The company is projecting $500 million in first-year retail sales for pods, according to Ad Age. That's a major feat, given that of the 1,500 new consumer-packaged-goods launches tracked by SymphonyIRI in 2011, only 21 percent reached one-year sales of even $50 million.

Hungry for a big win at a time when nearly everything about its long-running formula for victory has been questioned, P&G has seen Tide Pods become a relatively rapid success since launching in February with a colorful campaign — with a few speed bumps along the way.Continue reading...

Check out the trash collection area of any restaurant. The containers overflow with the remnants of packaging that once contained the food now found on the eatery’s tables and its customers' stomachs. More than 75 million tons of packaging waste found its way to landfills in the U.S. alone in 2010, Slate reports. A waste, but what's a person to do?

Help is on the way. Researchers are moving quickly toward creating edible packaging that consumers won’t have to throw away. A fast-food chain in Brazil, called Bob’s after founder (and tennis champ) Robert Falkenburg, wrapped its burgers in edible wrappers and encouraged its customers to just not bother unwrapping before eating during a one-day promotion earlier this month, AFP reports.

Bob’s — the country’s first fast-food chain, established in 1952 — was so successful at testing its edible packaging, at right, that not a single customer threw away the wrappings, according to PSFK. The Guardian, meanwhile, notes “two US companies (that) are currently vying to be the first to commercially exploit” this marketplace.Continue reading...

Kellogg's Kashi brand has just introduced two new USDA Certified organic cereals, touting that it's using real organic fruit and whole grains in the wake of its Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) flap earlier this year. "We've always believed that nature makes the best-tasting ingredients, like the hearty whole grains and luscious organic fruit you can see and taste in our Berry Fruitful and Blackberry Hills cereals," states Keegan Sheridan, natural food and lifestyle expert at Kashi, in a press release.

Each serving of Berry Fruitful provides 6g of fiber and 46g of whole grains, nearly 100% of the recommended daily value, while Blackberry Hills offers 3g of fiber and 16g of whole grains per serving – and like all Kashi foods, both are free of preservatives, artificial flavors, colors and high fructose corn syrup. Equally important, both cereals carry the official Non-GMO Project Verified seal. But that still won't convince its GMO foes to re-embrace the brand.

Kashi doesn't broadcast the fact that it's owned by Kellogg, nor that it has used GMOs, because it's trying to be perceived as an independent brand to win a bigger share of the natural and organic food category, which grew 9.5% in 2011 to $31.5 billion in US sales. The brand's still recovering from being engulfed in a social media firestorm back in April, when a New England store boycotted it after discovering "that 100% of the soy used in Kashi products is genetically modified, and that when the USDA tested the grains used there were found to be pesticides that are known carcinogens and hormone disruptors."

Kashi's Keegan Sheridan defended the company's GMO usage with a YouTube video, but it's still getting flack from consumers opposed to GMOs on its Facebook page, as you can see at top.Continue reading...

Japan experienced a "lost decade" of economic stagnation in the Nineties, and that was bad enough. But now the CEO of Unilever warns that Europe's slump may end up lasting at least that long. And that means Unilever and the rest of the CPG industry will continue having to adapt to it.

"We are in for at least 10 years of slow economic growth in Europe, and I don't see that changing" after the continent already has been slumping for a few years, Paul Polman told Bloomberg. "The key thing is to see reality in the eye."

And while Polman looks for continued difficulties in the Dutch company's close European market, which accounts for about 25 percent of its $65 billion in annual sales, he also doesn't like what he sees — and foresees — in the economy of the U.S., for which Unilever now depends for about 16 percent of sales.Continue reading...