So I’m home not even 24 hours when I pick up Wednesday’s NY Times to read a review of the Housewares Show. I nearly choked on my Grape Nuts as I scanned the article focusing on the preponderance of small electrics with “fast food settings.” It seems that microwaves with settings for store-bought cookie dough and frozen pizzas foretell the destruction of our civilization as we know it. “Expensive knives…and canning equipment” are “popular in some circles…But the big money is made selling appliances designed on the assumption that cooking skill matters less than shopping skill.”
Nary a mention of the rapidly growing range of green products and initiatives: cutting boards and accessories made of sustainable woods, more bamboo than ever before, water bottles and food-storage items made without BPA, insulating items made from recycled plastics, nonstick cookware made without PPFA or PFOA, improved manufacturing techniques that are cleaner and more energy efficient.
A lot of these trends weren’t around several years back but are now not only helping to increase sales but also positively impacting the manufacturing end as well.
As a long time attendee of the Housewares Show, I see this broad change as the trend. The fact is, small electrics have always thrived on wild gadgeteering and some unusual and even innovative developments. If it’s got an electrical cord, the profit margin is minuscule, perhaps even nonexistent. A basic item such as a microwave or a toaster is often the same despite its manufacturer. So segmentation is needed not only for the product but also for the mega-retailers that will be selling the nearly identical products to the consumer. It’s really more about product differentiation than product development. Hence the article’s featured toaster with built-in egg poacher.
It’s always been this way in small electrics and probably won’t change. From where I sit, it’s a nonstory.
Writing about tricked-out toasters, making snarky remarks about “the farm-to-table ethos,” and quoting Good Housekeeping and ConAgra is lazy journalism. Looking into the nonelectric categories that are definitely growing in this economy requires hard research and lots of questions. I submit that much of today’s preference for green products has been a bottom-to-top movement. One where consumers and independent store owners have made purchasing decisions that have pushed suppliers to make some real and significant changes. And if you walked the South building at McCormick it was all there to see.
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