The collapse of bowl foods

A few years ago, frozen rice bowls from Big Ben (Masterfoods) made a big splash and lured other food marketers to the profits to be found in bowls. Now, all the bowls are collapsing. Why? The companies marketing the bowl foods "took off their training wheels," i.e., didn't keep supporting them with big-time advertising. At the same time, bowls of fresh salad and fresh fruit gained presence in food stores, casting a processed shadow on the frozen rice and pasta bowls. The bowls don't fit in automobile cup holders, and they don't look like rice or pasta cooked at home. Americans are used to eating soup and salad in bowls, but not rice. We are used to thinking about lifestyles, but eating styles are an important part of our family culture and our personal style. Rice in bowls is "right" when we are visiting Asia or an Asian restaurant. It doesn't feel quite right on U.S. kitchen tables or TV viewing laps. Even when we take home leftover rice from Chinese restaurants, as millions of Americans pretty regularly do, the take-home containers have flat bottoms, whether they are the old-fashioned folding cartons with wire handles or the newer, plastic storage containers with straight sides and snap-on lids. The story is different for pasta, but it is still a story of shape (and not the shape lost to calories). When and if we eat pasta in a bowl, it's a flat-bottomed bowl that's not very deep at all. The pasta bowls in frozen food cases look no more "right" for pasta than the ovenable cartons of Michelina's.

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Convenience works best and longest when it approximates what we had and liked, in the first place. The plastic Coke and Pepsi bottles that resemble the old glass bottles are the best example of that.

Happy Holidays, Mona Doyle

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