Pretty amazing view, eh? Tower of London in the foreground, Tower Bridge, the Lord Mayor’s Chelsea Bun… And all from the top of the Gherkin where I found myself last Friday as part of House Creative’s Key Steps to FreeFrom Success.
And a very enjoyable morning it proved to be with Christine Colbert of House Creative and I sharing salutary tales of how NOT to launch freefrom products. (Far more useful to prospective producers than all those tales of success). Plus Lisa Tomlinson, a consumer brand planner who works closely with House, offering us some fascinating sights on how brands plan – along with some very interesting figures.
As she reminded us, consumer are ‘real’ people with real and complicated lives. As the great advertising guru David Ogilvy is so often quoted as saying: ‘the consumer is not a moron – she is your wife’…. So while figures are hugely useful – see the ones Lisa offered below – one needs to remember that each unit in those figures is a real, live person.
Lisa is a great enthusiast for Target Group Index (TGI), which is part of Kantar, and which has been surveying 24,000 adults every quarter since the 1960s, covering attributes and attitudes in every product sector and over many hundreds of brands. And they say that….
- 66.5 million – UK population
- 26 million think that our (their) diet could be improved
- 29 million do not want to buy/eat GM (genetically modified) foods
- 2 million are vegan
- 8.6 million are vegetarian
- 8.5 million limit their intake of gluten some of the time
- 2.5 million exclude gluten entirely from their diet
- 11.5 million limit their intake of dairy some of the time
- 1.9 million exclude dairy entirely from their diet
- 10 million think that healthy eating is only for fanatics – but that means that….
- 56.5 million believe that healthy eating is at least a moderately good thing!
Meanwhile the person most likely to buy gluten-free foods is:
- Working women between 45 and 54
- House owner with £30-40,000 income per year
- Living in Yorkshire or the South East
- Often separated and, whether or not they are, they do 86% of the household shopping
- Are ‘practical’ internet uses, looking for information – not ‘chatterers’.
I am not sure what use these figures are likely to be to you – but I just thought I would share. Meanwhile, I will also share….
Another image from my gherkin eyrie – the Walkie Talkie and the Cheesegrater (the one that was melting cars on the street)….
and…..
This picture is of one of the Dawn Redwoods that have been planted round the base of the Gherkin. It comes from the most delightful book of London Street Trees given to me last time he was in London by my lovely low allergen gardening friend Nigel Clarke. It is by Paul Wood (appropriately) and makes walking around London streets SO much more interesting that I think everyone should go and buy one.
Only 5,000 Dawn Redwoods survive in their natural habitat in China but since the end of WWII, city planners have somewhat fallen in love with them. They are part of the metasequoia family (Giant Redwoods) so they will get pretty big – although possibly even they will not make it quite up to the top of the Gherkin.
Dawn Redwoods….nice trees. They’re monoecious and they do shed some pollen, but almost no one seems to be allergic to it.
I’d caution though that they do get big, real big, and they’re messy, too. Unlike other species of redwoods, they’re deciduous, and lose all their leaves in the fall.
Too big for the average yard, but still, a pretty nice allergy-friendly city street tree.
Oh good – I am so glad that they also tick the allergy boxes… Well, there is a nice big pedestrian area for them to shed their leaves over – and the Gherkin is 40 odd stories high so I think they have some growing to do!
It is interesting that the data purports “2 million are vegan” yet only “1.9 million exclude dairy entirely from their diet”, given that vegans avoid dairy by definition. As some people who are not vegan avoid dairy, I would have expected the number of people excluding dairy from their diet to be more than the number of people who are vegan.
It would be interesting to know how many people are both vegan and also exclude gluten entirely from their diet. I am a gluten-avoiding vegan myself. Alas many suppliers seem to regard vegan and gluten-free as unlinked, so produce often vegan items with gluten in them. Maybe there is a correlation link, maybe not: it would be good to know if that can be found from the original data. If there is a correlation it could be very significant for food manufacturers to know that.
Some manufacturers keep adding milk into things as if it is a required ingredient. Oh for some frozen ready-made mashed potato with no milk in it, or frozen ready-made mashed carrot and swede mash with no milk in it.
Correlation links are not always obvious. For example, years ago I read that there was a much higher correlation between people who were interested in Esperanto being vegetarian than if the two factors were not correlated in practice. It was put down to concern for the feelings of others.
The dawn redwood is a very beautiful tree.
I notice the following quoted in the article.
> 8.5 million limit their intake of gluten some of the time
> 2.5 million exclude gluten entirely from their diet
I am wondering what, exactly, precisely, were the questions in the survey.
I am wondering why 6 million people purportedly (deliberately) limit their intake of gluten (only) some of the time.
I am wondering why someone would “limit their intake of gluten some of the time”.
Until I read those figures I was under the impression that if one is avoiding gluten it is a “total exclusion” or “not worth doing” choice..