Made with a dash of love

Does ‘love’ really make a difference when it comes to food?

It was a brilliant example of emotional marketing – the Singaporean food company Cerebros Pacific Ltd, owners of Fountain and Gravox, wanted to create a range of ready-made Asian pastes and sauces. The problem however was that the curry sauce and Pad Thai paste market was already over-crowded. The solution – a marketing campaign entitled ‘Recipes Made with Love’.

Nearly thirty years later, the Asian Home Gourmet brand can be found at nearly every supermarket and is considered a successful worldwide brand sold throughout Asia, the States, Europe and Asia. So the marketing worked. The defining ingredient though, was not listed on the packet, but rather mentioned in its advertising campaign. It was a little ingredient called ‘Love’.

But does ‘love’ actually make food taste better? Deborah Kesten, an alternative health nutritionist from the US believes it does. She calls it a "loving consciousness". She describes love as an energy that can be trapped, infused and directed through food preparation to the eater, which could explain why a mother’s cooking tastes better than the store-bought stuff, even if the tops are burnt and the insides are mushy.

It’s hard to believe that Asian Home Gourmet’s factory-produced range of soup and curry pastes have really been be ‘made with love’. Yet buyers certainly seemed to think the secret ingredient is present. Maybe it was just better than the other sauces on the market but one thing was for certain, the whole notion of ‘infusing food with love’ cemented the brand’s position in a very crowded market.

If anything this marketing concept tapped into the concept rof how preparing food for loved ones can make a meal taste better. As Magnus Hultberg, a UK food marketer, said: “That's what love does, makes you pay more attention to detail. And that attention to detail is what can make cooking go from good to great."

By Annette Lin

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/risager/3874668348/sizes/o/in/photostream/