The Food Scout

“One-night-stand” style research and mass-media advertising will become increasingly passe and inefficient now that companies are establishing websites and panels that give them more personal (and less commercial) connections with some of their core consumers. Not only does this allow them to monitor and understand these consumers’ needs and mindsets regarding a certain part of the consumer’s life, but it also provides a convenient interface for testing ideas for innovation purposes.

Not long ago, McDonald’s established a diverse “Mom’s Quality Correspondents” panel that has been spending a lot of time getting to know McDonald’s and allowing McDonald’s to better understand this important, but QSR-elusive, gatekeeper. Del Monte Foods has a dog-lover’s website (www.ilovemydog.us) that is an online community where pet owners share stories, problems and solutions — oh, and Del Monte uses the site to recruit members to help the company test and take new dog-food products to markets more quickly.

Similarly, Coca Cola launched SpriteYard in mid-2007, a digital community designed for one-the-go socializing via mobile phones (i.e., it’s targeted to teens because most adults only know how to use phones to call people and take photos). SpriteYard attracts users with mobile blogging capabilities, IM, mobisode, and visitone downloading, etc. It’s probably only a matter of time before Coca Cola moves beyond monitoring blog messages to glean insights and starts interfacing with users directly.

Sure, you can go to MySpace or Facebook and find all kinds of pages that companies like Burger King and Chili’s have put up to have a presence. And for fun, people link up with these sites to add to their friends count. But these sites are just bulletin boards, not really communities.

Of course, not all of these community-building sites is commercially driven - yet. One of my favorite newcomers on the list of food community-interest sites is the testerone-charged www.onebeermeals.com website. Here you will find how-to videos and step-by-step recipes from a bunch of college-age guys with enough guts to go in the kitchen and show other guys how to make some tasty meals without trying too hard. Guy food like “Cheeseburger & Fries Casserole” and “Salmon Bag O Fun,” all made in the microwave, of course. Oh, and did I mention the meals can be made in the time it takes to drink one beer!