Innocent Smoothie.
Pieminister.
Jamie Oliver.
What do they all have in common?
They are all multi-million-pound corporations whose success is entirely dependent on their skill at convincing us that they are not.
Every ounce of their branding oozes ‘homemade’. From Jamie’s lovely jubbly worn out chopping boards, to the knitted hats adorning the new Innocent bottles.
Wax paper packaging, handpicked ingredients and your nan’s secret recipe – all tied together with brown string in one beautifully rustic package.
It is admirable the effort that these brands go to persuading us that they are ‘homemade’. Painting an idyllic picture of products carefully crafted in mums’ kitchens up and down the country, when in fact the reality is a large, Coca Cola-owned, factory in South Wales churning out 1000s of products a day.
Not quite what you had in mind when you thought of homemade.
In a world in which your mum can quite literally create a product in her kitchen, market her lovely home-grown brand through social media, and pop it on the international marketplace with a few simple clicks of her iPad, ‘homemade’ is what consumers have come to expect. We crave the personality. The back-story. We will lap up anything that makes us feel as though we aren’t just putting more money into the faceless giants of the corporate world.
And who can blame us?
All I’m suggesting is that we think for a moment. Let’s stop letting a little brown paper and beaten up wood fool us into presuming the product being sold to us is homemade, additive-free and ethically sourced.
Because, chances are, it’s not.
