Limited Edition Foods

Starting in January a new limited edition soda will be available in Japan. Grapefruit Fanta will celebrate Fanta’s fiftieth anniversary in the Japanese market, and will go on sale on January 14th.

The grapefruit flavor has been available in Spanish markets in the past, where it is sold as Fanta Toronja. It was also available as a limited edition in 2005 in the United Kingdom.

The Japanese market is rabid for limited edition food products, with limited edition sodas such as Pepsi’s Iced Cucumber sometimes selling out in less than two weeks. Companies often introduce products into the Japanese market anticipating they will sell out quickly in order to increase market awareness for the parent product and buzz about the brand. Whether the grapefruit flavor will do great things for Fanta remains to be seen, but given the fervor the flavor has created in other markets it seems likely this will be a popular drink.

Each Friday we take a break from limited edition foods and look back at classic foods, those foods that have been around for so long we take them for granted and almost assume they will be there forever. Past editions of Classic Food Friday have included peeks at Pez, Twinkies, Moon Pies, and even Green Giant Peas.

So my question for you, is what food would you like to see on Classic Food Fridays? I can think of a lot of foods, but will happily take requests. Would you like something with a holiday flavor as we head into December? Perhaps something really classic, like an ancient food? Or would you like to go back to limited editions all of the time, and abandon Classic Food Fridays altogether. Personally I like them, but if folks are ambivalent then we can do more limited editions. Let me know what you think, and I will see what I can do.

In related news, the blog has been pretty quiet for the past couple weeks and I want to apologize for that. My “real job” has been pretty hectic, we went through Thanksgiving, and I am prepping for something for the first of the year which hopefully you guys will like quite a bit. I appreciate your patience with me until then … please add Limited Edition Foods to your feed so you can see new posts when they go up, and please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions.

Allison at Reality on Bravo has a unique contest going on to celebrate the return of Project Runway, in which various bloggers compete in an elimination style vote off similar to what happens to the designers on the show. 

It’s called Project Blog, and each week Allison will assign the contestants a blogging task that is similar to the task the designers get on the show.  Bloggers win weekly prizes or stay in the competition based on a combination of judge’s decisions and fan support.  While the bloggers don’t get the advice of Tim Gunn or the gushings of Heidi Klum, they do get to have fun and potentially get more traffic.

As readers you are eligible to win prizes through Project Blog as well, either by commenting on Allison’s blog or by voting in one of the competitions.  Each week the prizes will change, so if you are interested in the concept you should check back and comment … or vote.

So why are we talking about this on Limited Edition Foods?  Originally I was chosen to be one of the contestants on Project Blog but had to back out due to an increase in commitments related to my day job, but I will still be supporting Project Blog by donating the prizes for the weekly competitions later in the competition.

The challenge for the first week was for each blogger to write a post describing who they are, the concept of their blog, and why they write.  If you are interested in checking that out, then this week’s contestants and posts are listed below:

1. Kate, Babylune: “The Blog I Write and the Woman Who Writes It”
2. Randi, Brad Pitt Watch: “The First Challenge”
3. Jodie, Gossip on Sports: “Project Blog: Week One Challenge”
4. Cynthia, TV of the Absurd: “The Five TV Shows that Changed My Life” 5. Winnie, Watching the View: “Project Blog: Why I Blog the View”
6. Sally, Style Fix: “The Fashionable Child Who Writes Becomes the Fashion Writer”
7. Kara, Colorado Review: “Why I Blog About Colorado Travel”
8. Mark, Get Incensed: “Project Blog. Bravo”

If you are interested in following the drama of Project Blog, then you can follow the action over at Reality on Bravo.  The first person to be eliminated will probably be announced sometime this week.

Just when I thought I had seen everything, here comes a special “collector’s edition” tin of Spam. As mentioned earlier in the week, usually we don’t like to cover limited edition packaging … but the idea of collector’s edition meat is so amazing that we had to make an exception.

While this limited edition Spam will only be available in rugby-loving countries such as the United Kingdom, cans have already found their way on E-bay.

Spam has had an amazingly good year, actually … they launched The Book of Spam, and even inspired a blogger to go 30 days eating nothing but Spam. Spam’s parent company, Hormel, even started selling chilled Spam deli meats for the first time in its long history. The new Spam Fritters are also quite popular in the U.K. Perhaps the limited edition tins of rugby Spam is just the thing to help them close out their 2007 in fine potted meat form.

Sunday, October 14 is National Dessert Day in the United States, and what better way to celebrate than by serving up a decadent dessert with your Sunday meal?

The Limited Edition Carmalized Pear and Toasted Almond ice cream from Haagan Dazs should inspire plenty of dessert ideas, or Elementary Chef has an easy recipe for a Mocha Brownie Torte.

Or you can have a celebration two-fer and simultaneously celebrate National Cookie Month, which is going on the entire month of October. Elementary Chef has a recipe for cookies that only requires three ingredients, or you can make ice cream sandwiches using some of Chips Ahoy!’s limited edition cookies.

Or you can simply make fun cookies, either as preparations for your Halloween party or just to enjoy at home. For a plethora of cookie recipes, including the recipe for the adorable Black Cat Cookies on a Stick shown above, check out CookieMadness.com.

dessert, brownie, cooking, Sunday, cookie, Halloween

Christmas meal planning is already underway in many households, as the big meal often means months of planning and coordination with friends and relatives. Shoppers in Ireland will have the opportunity to include a limited edition stuffing from Mr. Crumb in their feast this year, as the company is issuing a limited edition stuffing for the holidays. The limited edition stuffing will be over fifty percent fruits and vegetables, including cranberries and juniper berries, as well as holiday spices such as cinnamon. It sounds like a lovely product for holiday dinner, perhaps one that could be served with turkey and homemade raisin wine?

Mr. Crumb already makes numerous stuffing versions that are sold in stores around the United Kingdom. The small, award-winning food company based in the small Irish village of Finea, and is known for producing quality food items that can be reheated at home in the growing United Kingdom food maket. Mr. Crumb was named “Ireland’s Best Business” by the Small Firm’s Association last year and has a reputation for innovation in the rapidly-changing food retail business. For a list of British store chains that stock Mr. Crumb, including Tesco, click here.

Or if you really like stuffing, this is an interesting interview about the process of making it on a large scale that also includes musings about the future of stuffing with Mr. Crumb’s Operation Director Jason Coyle. Coyle wants to make future stuffings healthier by adding more vegetables and healthier ingredients, which meshes with the superfoods fascination in Europe.

Ireland, Coyle, Mr Crumb, Christmas, stuffing, dinner, Tesco, small company, cranberry, cinnamon, superfoods

It’s hard to get excited about much when it is so hot, but the readers of the Arkansas Times blog have been offering some interesting suggestions for dishes to cook when it feels like you are cooking a bit yourself. Not surprisingly, most of the suggestions center around vegetables and foods that are about as far from the typical processed and preservative laden limited edition food as possible. This comment about flavoring vegetables with meat was particularly interesting:

To beat the heat, we have to retrieve some of the logic of Southern food, as our foreparents cooked it. Our traditional foodways make sense in our climate, given our land, given the ethnic blend that makes us who we are.

The traditional Southern table was vegetable laden, and the vegetables came either fresh from the garden or fresh from vendors or the market — or from country cousins who brought care packages to city ones. It was not only picked fresh: it was cooked fresh.

The tired old cliche of over-cooked fat-laden vegetables misses the point of our traditional cuisine. Those “overcooked” vegetables were hundreds of times fresher than anything we can buy in supermarkets today. They were raised with a minimum of chemicals. Their inbuilt nutritional value was higher than anything we get in our lightly cooked “fresh” vegetables today.

Whether our foreparents knew of Jefferson’s famous dictum that meat should be eaten as a condiment, they practiced it, especially in summertime. With the abundance of fresh things from the garden, meat made its appearance on their tables mostly as a seasoning for the vegetables — the crowders, purple hulls, Kentucky wonders. A little pork sliced into the beans or field peas gave them the taste and mouthfeel of a meaty dish.

The eggplant and summer squash breaded with cornmeal was fried in meat drippings, adding more of a meat flavor to a meal revolving around vegetables. The cornbread and fried corn, the okra and tomatoes served with rice — all were seasoned with enough bacon grease to give them the flavor of bacon, without actually including meat.

When meat is not the main dish around which everything else revolves, it makes sense to add meat or grease as a seasoning. It’s also not as unhealthy as eating huge portions of meat at each meal.

Arkansas, food, vegetables

It seems like everyone has a favorite limited edition food from years past. I have a good friend who, like the author of Candyfreak, still dreams lustful dreams about the dark chocolate Reese’s cups that came out many years ago. I am luckier in that my all time favorite limited edition food, the Cadbury Mini Egg, is actually a seasonal item that returns each Spring.

How about you? What are your favorites, the limited editions that are gone but not forgotten?

Don’t forget that each time you comment on this blog during the month of August you are entered into a drawing for cash … so commenting about your favorite foods could be sweet in more ways than one.

limited edition, food, favorite, Cadbury, Reese’s

Many thanks and curses to Ryan at About Miami, who blogged about Euro sensation Mika and led to me finding this song which I can’t get out of my head! The connection between snack food obsessions and weight gain is well-documented, so for all of the ladies who have lost the battle of the bulge enjoy this song … contrary to popular belief, just because you have gained some pounds does not mean you have lost your beauty.

Mika, Big Girls are Beautiful, Miami

Welcome to the Limited Edition Foods blog, where we will be talking about the fun and finances of limited edition food products. Limited Edition Foods provide the perfect intersection of pop culture, mass marketing, sugary snacks, current events, and public policy. What better subject for a blog?

As a kid I used to read Advertising Age on the floor of my dad’s office, and as an adult I did some national marketing myself before becoming the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Food Law & Policy. Even when I was entrenched in the academic halls of the National Agricultural Law Center, I was always fascinated by the point where food products meet the consumer and all of data and additives and laws that go into that one moment where production and purchase combine.

My goal is to have some fun with these concepts in the months to come, mixing pop with culture and law with policy and of course a lot of sugar along the way.