Last month, some New York food bloggers were invited to what they thought was an underground restaurant in a West Village brownstone run by TV chef George Duran. In fact, they were walking into the culinary equivalent of Candid Camera:
The surprise: rather than being prepared by the chef, the lasagna they were served was Three Meat and Four Cheese Lasagna by Marie Callender’s, a frozen line from ConAgra Foods. Hidden cameras at the dinners, which were orchestrated by the Ketchum public relations unit of the Omnicom Group, captured reactions to the lasagna and to the dessert, Razzleberry Pie, also from Marie Callender’s.
“Our intention was to really have a special evening in a special location with Chef George Duran,” said Stephanie Moritz, senior director of public relations and social media at ConAgra.
“The twist at the end was not dissimilar with what brands like Pizza Hut and Domino’s have done in the recent past with success,” she said, referring to hidden-camera advertising campaigns. ConAgra expected to use the footage for promotional videos on YouTube and its Web site, and for bloggers to generate buzz when they wrote about being pleasantly surprised. [NYT]
The geniuses who orchestrated the publicity stunt forgot that many of the bloggers they invited were well-known critics of the heavily processed, additive-laden industrial cuisine that Marie Callender’s frozen lasagna epitomizes.
Several bloggers made it absolutely clear in the pre-meal rap session that they didn’t eat stuff like that.
A blogger who mentioned she was allergic to food coloring was served a zucchini entre while everyone was eating N-Meat, N-Cheese lasagna.
Her husband and co-blogger railed against food additives during the discussion, but that didn’t stop the organizers from trying to trick him into eating the lasagna (which contains sodium nitrate, BHA, BHT, disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate). He later wrote on his blog, Food Mayhem.com:
I started to eat the so-called “lasagna”. After a few bites I was done. I said to Jessica that the sausage-kibble inside tasted like what you get at Domino’s and that the whole thing tasted like pizza hut. Fortunately she shared some of her zucchini with me, and later that night I had dinner at home.
CongAgra has vowed not to use the hidden footage for promotional purposes, ostensibly in a gesture of contrition. Why else would ConAgra be reluctant to air footage of a prominent food blogger likening their product to kibble?
If anyone at Ketchum PR feels like leaking that footage, email me. I promise to use it for good.
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