Flavor Country

A local company tastes the future of food marketing.

by Lisa Tauber

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Published: Apr 17, 2007

For First Flavor, food is like cars. "Who would've thought to buy a car without driving it first?" asks First Flavor president and CEO Jay Minkoff. "We're empowering the consumer by giving him more tools to evaluate the purchase of a product." One of those tools is the ability to taste a product without actually eating it.

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The Bala Cynwyd-based food-marketing company was founded in 2003, when Adnan Aziz, then a sophomore at University of Pennsylvania, sat in his dorm room watching Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Everlasting Gobstoppers and golden eggs might be the stuff of fantasy, Aziz figured, but fruit-flavored wallpaper seemed plausible. "I thought, 'That was kind of crazy for the time, but I bet nowadays that's possible,'" he says. Through a grant from Penn's Weiss Technology House, an incubator for student entrepreneurship, he set out to create edible art using rice paper and flavored markers.

Aziz began meeting with local entrepreneur Minkoff and Wharton alum Josh Kopelman, both of whom invested in the evolving business. He also retooled his original concept when he noted the success enjoyed by the $100 million edible-film industry — popularized by breath strips like Listerine PocketPacks.

First Flavor's Peel 'n Taste strips replicate the flavor of a product using flavor-profiling technology. The cherry vanilla cola strip, for example, tastes like flat cherry soda, but has a slight aftereffect that recalls the tingling of carbonation.

"Traditional food sampling is very expensive," says Minkoff. "You have to have live people there and they have to have a table set up." A Peel 'n Taste strip, either attached to the product itself or on a coupon (known as a Taste 'n Save), cuts the costs associated with traditional grocery-store samplers.

This isn't the first time strips have been used as marketing devices. Scent strips, which began popping up in magazines in the 1980s, completely transformed fragrance marketing. "It used to be that you got spritzed in the department store and that's how you found out what a new fragrance was," says Minkoff. "Now you can go shopping for fragrances by looking through your favorite magazine."

Minkoff thinks First Flavor has a strong case for sensory advertising — and with good reason. While the concept of using edible film specifically for marketing is innovative, it isn't asking companies to rethink the entire advertising framework. "They're already buying print advertising or doing point-of-sales marketing," he says. In the cluttered food market, Minkoff views Peel 'n Taste as a way for companies to stand out.

Of course, not all foods are created equal. While Minkoff says First Flavor can theoretically replicate anything, some foods, like chunky soup or rosemary chicken, are more difficult. Meaty flavors present the toughest challenge, but Minkoff says that if a company is set on it, First Flavor can do it. In general, however, Peel 'n Taste best replicates products whose most salient feature is taste, and not "mouthfeel," or consistency. Explains Minkoff, "We can't give you the crunch of the potato chips."

First Flavor is also experimenting with alcohol. In most states, liquor stores aren't allowed to provide wet samples of alcoholic beverages. But Peel 'n Taste strips can replicate the flavor of, say, lemon vodka, complete with alcohol burn, and dispense the strips in liquor stores, at concerts or in magazines for subscribers over 21. It can also make mixed-drink strips, so consumers can decide if they want to buy X-brand rum based on the taste of a mojito-flavored strip.

Could Wonka-like supermarkets, with consumers licking before buying, be the future? First Flavor is currently talking to two dozen major manufacturers and actively working on eight products set to roll out this summer. Says Minkoff, "We envision a day when the consumer will say, 'I want to taste this before buying it.'"

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Visit www.firstflavor.com for more information.

 

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