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BEYOND CASSEROLES, PUDDINGS AND RED WINE Winter provides opportunities to expand cooking repertoires while leveraging the traditional. By Illuminera Executive Director Norrelle Goldring. W inter is a time where you can amp up the hearty dish recipe promotions, with 2020 lockdowns bringing a nostalgic return to the familiar, and old-time favourites such as beef stroganoff making appearances on social media posts. Pies, casseroles and soups figure largely. You’d be silly not to leverage this natural behaviour in-store and in cooking related media touchpoints. The season is also an opportunity to capitalise on the baking trend. Illuminera’s Project Hearth and Chef studies indicated that 85 per cent of adult consumers are now baking, with nearly half enjoying giving it a try or having discovered it as a new passion. Interestingly, for all the pictures of people’s somewhat variable sourdough attempts flooding socials, bread is the least baked category and cakes the most, with cookies and muffins next. So, cake-making can be promoted as a winter weekend indoors activity. This baking trend can also be extended to promoting the making of puddings for winter, perhaps with classics such as lemon delicious, bread and butter, and rice puddings. Winter doesn’t just have to be heavy or rich fare, though. A cursory scroll through goodfood.com.au’s listings under ‘winter’ yields a number of winter salads featuring ingredients such as radicchio, pears, and blue cheese. Or witlof, prosciutto and gorgonzola (cheese appears to be a common theme). So, shoppers could also be given inspiration to try something different for winter, in line with the finding from the aforementioned Project Hearth that consumers are craving variety and experimentation after cooking most meals at home for the past 12 months. The winter months also feature several consumer commemorative and cultural occasions that could be tapped into in supermarket retail with occasion-based marketing both in-store and out of store. June Perhaps the most obvious winter occasion, the ski season, typically kicks off early to mid-June. This is an opportunity to promote stock-up and entertaining packages including cheese, crackers, wine and ingredients for the classic Glühwein for those both travelling to the snow and those entertaining at home. Even pre-pandemic, winter typically brought more hunkering down at home and entertaining guests there, than going out to restaurants, so there’s an opportunity for snow and ski themed small gatherings at home. The Queen’s birthday June long weekend represents another entertaining and barbecue-based occasion marketing opportunity, both for those entertaining at home and those going away for a few days and needing to stock up on supplies for campfire cooking and socialising. Western Australia’s WA Day the week prior, on 7 June, represents a micro, or at least state-based, occasion targeting opportunity similar to the Queen’s birthday long weekend, with home entertaining and barbecues high on the agenda. July Like the ski season, the gaining- in-popularity ‘Christmas in July’ is shifting beyond mountain region focus to become a broader entertaining occasion and an opportunity for turkey, ham and roast-based recipe promotions with the bonus of not being date specific within the month, so in-store activation and other communications will remain relevant for four weeks. Internationally, a couple of holidays in July can be tapped into for theming. The US Independence Day holiday and celebrations on 4 July are an opportunity to promote entertaining and food options such as hot dogs, burgers, American style barbecue pork or beef with rubs, and apple pie. At the other end of the food spectrum, France’s Bastille Day on 14 July is an opportunity to promote all things French, from the simple, such as bread baguettes and pain au chocolat, to crepes, ratatouille, roast Provençale chicken, and desserts such as clafoutis. August August seems to have fewer obvious occasions to tap into, aside from a Picnic Day holiday in the Northern Territory (2 August). Given that this is actually the coldest month of the year in many parts of Australia, the absence of specific occasions means August is a good time for more general ‘winter warmers’ recipe promotions. So, winter provides retailers and manufacturers with the opportunity to have their proverbial cake and eat it too (further evoking the Bastille Day theme, paraphrasing the infamous Marie Antoinette). That is, leverage traditional meals and dishes with recipe promotions and bundled displays, but also provide shoppers with the inspiration to experiment that they crave, by tapping into different entertaining and themed occasions. IN SEASON – WINTER WARMERS About Norrelle Goldring and Illuminera Australia Norrelle Goldring is Executive Director of Illuminera Australia, part of the fast-growing APAC analytics, research, strategy and activation based Illuminera Group of companies that specialises in consumer goods and retail. For more information, contact: Norrelle Goldring E: norrelle.goldring@illuminera.com M: +61 411 735 190 W: illuminera.com.au. MAY/JUN, 2021 CONVENIENCE WORLD 25