The new Snap Pots from Heinz make me sad. This we have already established. But until I got in touch with Heinz to find out why it had decided to reinvent the wheel, I didn’t realise that I should have been sad about something else.
Because, according to Heinz, there are lots of people with “time pressured lifestyles” who want a “personalised portion” without having to “to hover by the hob, worry about waste or adding to the pile of unwashed pots and pans”. And, so, Heinz has responded to the British public’s “busy lifestyles” by creating the (unrecyclable plastic, remember) Snap Pots. Bravo.
“Consumers increasingly expect their food to be as convenient as possible” the Heinz press statement earnestly claims. Heinz fans have a “preference for their food to come in a convenient format” it stresses. But does that mean it ought to be pandering to the sorts of people who are so convinced of their own time-poverty?
Food-blindness is where people can look at a cupboard full of ingredients (even cans of beans) and not be able to see what will make a meal, or even what meal they could make. This is time-blindness, where people look at their evenings and aren’t able to see how they can produce a meal, or anything else, in that time.
Heinz is making more people time-blind through its own advertising. Because, of course, that’s what advertising is built to do: Sell us something we don’t need. And if you tell people with time-blindness (or food-blindness) often enough that fast is good, or healthy eating is slow, or proper cooking is stressful, then eventually a lot of them will believe it.
And Heinz uses the same argument that paparrazzi use – people demand it, and if they didn’t then they wouldn’t seek it out. But if they weren’t told to, would they even ask for it? Of course not. You’re not filling a void in people’s lives, you’re creating one. Again, the whole point of advertising.
I once lived with someone who would empty three quarters of a can into a pan, leaving the remnants forgotten on the side, then eat three quarters of the cooked beans, leaving the remnants cooling and forgotten in the pan. This person wasn’t busy, or ‘time pressured’. Just forgetful.
But I can easily see this person buying into the Snap Pot idea, convinced that it’s ‘what they need’. Then leaving three quarters of it uneaten and hurling the plastic pot into the bin. Yet they were happy enough with the tins, which could be recycled and didn’t need to end up in a landfill. That’s waste.
It’s idealistic to hope that Heinz might reconsider, that it might recognise that persuading people of the benefits of unrecyclable alternatives to perfectly usable recyclable options is incredibly short-sighted. It’s idealistic to hope that all businesses recongise that, pretty soon if not immediately, we’re all going to have to stop thinking only of short term gain and start thinking about long term consequences.
But that doesn’t mean we stop pushing, or stop trying to force these companies into realising their ignorance – and I’ll be tracking down Heinz again in an attempt to do just this. Sure, it might not change anything, but can anyone afford to give up?
Smart, sharp colleagues of mine scoff at climate change debate, predicting someone (someone else, that is, not them) will discover a technological solution, a ’silver bullet’. By the same thinking, should we just stop trying to treat cancer, and instead merely sit back and wait for someone else to discover the medicinal silver bullet too?
