Personalized Chocolates; Dressing Up Dinner; Better-for-you Ketchup

Personalized Chocolates
If you live in Switzerland or Liechtenstein, you can have specialty chocolates made just for you thanks to Nestlé S.A. Vevey, Switzerland. Nestlé has created a new luxury brand—Maison Cailler—that delivers fresh chocolates, tailor-made for individual tastes. Maison Cailler is a unique profiling system that consumers can use to discover their “chocolate personality” and share the result with their friends online. Within 48 hours of using the service, consumers will be sent a box of Maison Cailler chocolates that have been carefully selected to match their individual preferences.

To determine their chocolate personality, consumers first order a box of five “tasting” chocolates from the Maison Cailler website. The recipient tastes the chocolates, which contain hints of milk, caramel, nut, fruit, flowers, vanilla, and cocoa. Then they rate them online using a simple questionnaire. This allows Maison Cailler to handpick the perfect selection that suits their taste from an initial set of 12 different chocolates; all new recipes that have been developed for this luxury segment of the market.

Dressing Up Dinner
While home-cooked meals using favorite recipes offer comfort, they can also get boring after a while. Thus, many cooks are on the lookout for new ideas to dress up their chicken, pork, or fish.
Kraft Foods, Glenview, Ill., addresses this need with its launch of Kraft Fresh Take, a special blend of Kraft natural cheeses and seasoned breadcrumbs. Found in the dairy aisle, the new product creates a flavorful, crispy, and cheesy entree with just five minutes of prep time. At-home cooks can use one of six flavors and any meat or fish to quickly create a hot homemade meal.

Kraft Fresh Take is packaged in a compartmentalized bag that also serves as a “mixing bowl,” requiring minimal preparation and no-mess cleanup. Consumers open the bag to break the center seal, combine the cheese and seasoned breadcrumbs, coat the meat or fish, and bake to the proper temperature. Available in six varieties, each 6-oz package carries a suggested retail price of $2.99.

Better-for-you Ketchup
Ketchup marketers have been competing on taste and thickness for years. Protica, Whitehall, Pa., hopes to change all that with its introduction of Protein Ketchup. The all-natural, protein-fortified product contains less than half the sugar content as the leading ketchup brands. Protein Ketchup also contains two servings of vegetables and 15 g of protein per serving.

“When you eat French fries and ketchup, you are consuming fats and sugars, which results in high caloric intake and fat storing,” said Jim Duffy, Protica’s President and Founder. “But, if you eat  those same fries with ketchup that is low in sugar and high in protein, you are helping to reduce the insulin surge that leads to fat storage, and you’re balancing the carbohydrates and fat with high quality protein. The result is that your metabolism speeds up, and your body processes and burns the calories from those French fries more efficiently.”