Has Christmas food gone mad?
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Every year it feels like I can fill my shopping basket with ever more weird and wonderful festive foods. Salted caramel cream, chocolate pinecones, Christmas gone mad or welcome innovation. No, not for me.

I will buy the turkey flavour crisps and the sticky toffee pudding flavoured beer. I think it's Christmas gone mad. I think it tends to a lot of waste. Maybe like a strawberry lipkuf or something like that, I would try. This is The Food Chain from the BBC World Service with me, Ruth Alexander, and this week we're talking to the people behind the ever more inventive food that's in the shops at this time of year. It's kind of

Freeing your mind to let the bad ideas flow so that you can fish out the good ones. We had a gingerbread cheesecake, a cherry baked well pavlova, the chocolate and orange wreath. Bubblegum flavoured ham. We've also looked at candy cane sausages. Yes.

We'll find out about where they get their ideas from, the rarity of a hit and just what's at stake. If you get it wrong, then that could put that customer off that particular supermarket or the retailer forever.

Jojo Anastasiou is giving me a sneak peek behind the scenes at the Good Housekeeping Institute in London. It's a lifestyle company that specialises in product and services reviews for the consumer, and she's the senior food and drinks tester. We get

a lot of new exciting products, especially around Christmas time. It's very go, go, go. What else have you got then? Can you give me a tour? I can. So over here, the other thing we're testing this week is festive liqueurs. So we've got a lot of, oh, that's honey rum. Honey rum. Tiramisu rum. Tiramisu rum. Panettone liqueur, as well as...

Look, look at this. Salted caramel espresso martini cocktail box. Mm-hm. Yeah, that one is a really exciting idea of having the whole cocktail just ready to go. We actually do festive cocktails as well as a whole separate test to festive liqueurs because there's just so much going on in that category. What's the maddest thing you've had in here that's come in and you've thought, really, that combination? Well, do you know, one...

I was quite sceptical about but really, really impressed by is we were doing panettone's recently for Christmas and I think it was actually our winning one in the end was limoncello fizz panettone. What? Which was just, it was so delicious. Was it? It really was. I mean, that's again another big trend we're seeing at the moment, we're seeing this Christmas is alcohol infused into all sorts of products.

Is it Christmas when you have most of the food products coming in? Is this your busiest testing time? Christmas is absolutely our busiest testing time. We start properly testing for Christmas in May, June time. Christmas is probably at the forefront, as much as there are those other times of year when innovation is also high. Christmas is when people are...

maybe looking for something a bit more special, a bit more unusual or a treat that they could give someone and yeah a lot of brands and supermarkets are looking to fill that gap. Is there a particular flavour that's very in at the moment? I think the biggest trend we're seeing at the moment for Christmas is that kind of upscaled comfort food and where it's been made really easy for you so we've been seeing lots of

Yeah, slightly old-fashioned classics done well, like a prawn cocktail, but elevated with, instead of just prawns, like bits of chunks of lobster in it as well to bring it sort of up a notch. People are looking for something they know, but just done that bit more special to make it Christmassy.

Well, today, as luck would have it, it's Christmas dessert testing day. Oh, Christmas tree. And baubles on each desk. And I get to be part of the consumer panel coordinated by Jojo. And I'm going to walk you through how this test works and then we'll get started. It should be a pretty enjoyable one today as it is all desserts.

The idea is 20 or so members of the public try a number of sweet puddings from a range of supermarkets, score them, and then the results are published. The programme producer, Hannah Bewley, is holding the mic, and I'm holding the spoon.

And so we are going to be testing, well, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 little desserts, which I must admit, initially I was a little bit disappointed about the fact that we're just tasting a morsel of each dessert. But thinking about it, 11 morsels adds up to feeling quite sick. And I'm actually going to open the top of my jeans, just in preparation.

Oh dear, so you've done this before, you're a pro. I don't know what each one is, but there's something lovely, toffee, gooey, chocolatey looking there.

That looks... Oh, there's some white chocolate flakes on top of that white sponge. That looks a bit... You've got the pictures up there as well. Oh, yes. I'm very interested. There's one that's a big bowl of trifle. That's a very traditional Christmas dish there. Here come the hot desserts. Right, I've got to be quiet now, apparently. So, I've got some scone.

The taste testers are expected to take this seriously and not talk, though I couldn't resist a whispered running commentary. OK, appearance. A bit boring and brown. Say dislike slightly. I had to score and comment on appearance, smell, taste and texture, and this was a blind taste test. Which retailer each was from was top secret. A bit too sweet for me. Claggy. I mean, I said I don't like it, but I'm going to finish it.

Rude not to. It was surprisingly hard work, I'll have you know. It actually gets a bit exhausting. I'm only five in. And there's 11 to get through. So let's leave me scoffing for now and meet two of the people whose job it is to come up with the hot new festive food fashions.

Eric Newmolin and Mike Vahabi work for Heller Spice Food Manufacturing Canada. Mike heads up the creative team as well as technical sales, and Eric is director of sales, marketing and research development, putting Mike's ideas to food industry suppliers. We're having discussions on Christmas of 2025 right now. We usually operate 12 to 16 months ahead of the season.

If you're talking some major meat company, they have to do shelf-like studies. They have to do packaging development. They have to schedule the meat or the ingredients coming in in time. They have to set aside production time to actually make the products. And then they have to get labeling approval by the federal authorities. So it usually takes them a long time. And that's why I say this constantly is that everything that we're doing today is for 16 months from now.

Do they always come with a very specific idea of what they want? They know what the trend is. They know what they want to sell. Or do they sometimes come to you and say, look, we just need something new and different? Yeah, both, actually. Sometimes they come to us with specific ideas. And then sometimes they say to us, you know, we want to launch four new holiday items, let's say for 2025. Give us a list of 10 and we'll pick the four that we want.

And so that's where Mike and our R&D team work together on coming up. And I do it as well. Come up with a whole bunch of ideas. We make initial samples of the products. We supply them to the marketing teams at our customers and they make the decisions on which ones they want to go with. So, Mike, where do you get your ideas from?

Everywhere. It can come from anywhere and everywhere. Sometimes it's following trends. We do a great job here of kind of watching what's happening in the marketplace in North America, what's happening in restaurants, because oftentimes restaurants will start the trend and then it'll slowly filter down towards consumer packaged goods.

It can be what I'm interested in cooking that day or eating that day. There's a lot of gaps and white space within the grocery stores in Canada. And so it's really just about kind of identifying the white space and

and trying to find products that can fit there. One of the products that we're working on right now is a bubblegum-flavored ham. A lot. I know, I know, I know. But if you stop and think about what the base flavors that go into bubblegum is, there's cinnamon, and there's clove, and there's orange peel, and there can be other tropical fruits like pineapple that all contribute to the flavor that is bubblegum. All of those flavors apply really nicely towards ham.

And so it's kind of freeing your mind.

to let the bad ideas flow so that you can fish out the good ones a lot of the time. In recent years, there's been, especially in the North American market, there's been greater exploration of different cultures and their foods. And so that has become, you know, a wonderful place to kind of pull really interesting ideas. And you can kind of create those mashup flavors between the traditional and maybe something a little bit more Western to make a product that's more appealing to the Western consumer.

And so, Eric, Mike comes to you and says, I know, I've got it. I've got it. Bubblegum ham. We're going to call it tropical ham. What do you say? Do you remember the actual moment? I actually do, yes. I tend to be the voice of reason. I consider myself to be his conscience and try to keep him under control a little bit. You're the one who has to say no sometimes to your brilliant idea. I usually say, will this sell?

You know, are you going to be able to sell this to 60% of the North American consumer? And, you know, knowing that 60% of the North American consumer likes to eat hot dogs and burgers and chicken nuggets. When you first start in this industry, you have wonderful ideas. You have very, very creative ideas and very innovative ideas. And I don't want to say that gets knocked out of you.

But what happens is you very quickly realize your ideas are your ideas. And what you have to try to do is adapt them to what our customer and then their consumer would like to have. Have you put the idea of bubblegum ham to companies yet? Yes, I have actually. And I call it tropical ham. There's no way I'm going to call it bubblegum ham because everybody will have that exact same reaction. So if we call it like a festive tropical ham for next year,

you know what, you could get somebody biting on it and moving ahead. So tropical ham, maybe it will be on the shelves next Christmas. Yes, absolutely. Maybe. You're listening to The Food Chain from the BBC World...

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I'm Ruth Alexander, and this week we're finding out about the business of Christmas foods. So why are all these ever more fantastical festive food ideas being dreamed up for retailers? Because they really need to get your attention. Paul Stainton is a consultant for their suppliers, and for three decades was a buyer for German discount grocer Aldi in the UK.

We all call the period between, say, October and December the sort of golden period. It really is the main focus, really, of a buyer almost throughout the whole year, because if you get Christmas wrong, it really does affect the overall business's success. I would say within that last three months of the year, you probably would achieve 40% of your annual turnover.

But it's also really important that I think once a customer gets used to a particular supermarket to buy their main food for the main day of the year, Christmas Day and the Christmas period.

they really do have a little bit of loyalty to that retailer. So, yeah, if you get Christmas right, probably it's going to impact positively your business for the rest of the year. Wow. So if a customer likes what they put on the table at Christmas, those...

good feelings they got will stay with them for the rest of the year and they'll stay loyal to that supermarket. Absolutely but conversely if you get it wrong and they're disappointed with the quality then that could put that customer off that particular supermarket or the retailer forever. So you know get it wrong and it's a massive cost to your business. I've wondered whether retailers couldn't just concentrate on doing the classics well.

However, Paul says the supermarket he worked at tried that and found it was losing out to the competition with their fancier festive offerings. By the mid-2010s, it was time for a rethink. But what we then decided to do was try and push the boundaries a little bit. And I certainly remember around about that time, one of the buyers coming to me and saying, my supplier's come up with an amazing idea for our premium crisps for Christmas. And

And I said, OK, what's going to be different about it? Well, it's going to be the flavour. And the flavours that they're coming up with, one of them was Prosecco flavoured and the other one was gin and tonic flavoured. And...

If I'm honest, I think I'd heard at the time of someone else having a go at a Prosecco flavoured crisp, but the gin and tonic crisp, I hadn't heard about that at all. And what did you think? If I'm honest with you, it wasn't my preference in terms of a crisp taste. It was quite citrusy, actually. Anyway, it was OK and it was a great idea from a PR point of view.

So it maybe wasn't a taste sensation, but it was going to grab attention big time. Absolutely. You know, in terms of when did we start to nail a good Christmas, it was then. Paul admits it came at a cost, though. The problem with those, if I'm honest, is we had a limited amount of them.

They got a huge amount of PR and therefore initial purchases were very high. Therefore, we had to produce some more. But because the taste delivery wasn't great...

The follower purchases weren't there. Oh, no. So you ended up with a big pile of crisps no one actually wanted to buy. It's not a good look. Yeah, it's not a great look. And I think you do see that. I mean, I think you expect to see in January or certainly in between crisps and the new year, you see all of the supermarkets, the discounters, they are all clearing stock. There will always be some products which have been overordered and one or two new products which won't have been as successful as they would wish them to be.

If someone came to you and offered you bubblegum ham, a ham with a kind of rub that tasted like bubblegum, but perhaps they were marketing it as tropical ham, would you go for that?

We would definitely want to think about, OK, what's the flavour profile of that sort of glaze? And then does that taste harmonise with the taste of the gammon itself? How would it taste on the overall plate when, you know, you're going to have some vegetables and your potatoes as well? You can't just see it as its own right. But, you know, if it's something that could be marketed, then why not? Why not? Paul Stainton.

But for all the winning ideas, there will be many more fails, as Eric Neumelin and Mike Vahabi know only too well. We've also looked at candy cane sausages. Yes. LAUGHTER

Yeah, it was something that we were looking at. You know, we know how to make the product, but before I go ahead and tell our R&D team to go ahead and make products, you know, out of this, we have to go and approach a number of customers so I can find some kind of a threshold of customers that are interested in seeing it. At this point in time, we've had nobody actually jump on board. And I think that's also because last year we did candy cane jerky as a seasonal product.

that it actually tasted quite good, but people didn't want to take that step. So we're struggling a little bit right now to find somebody who'll jump on board and want to join up with us on that. It sounds like hard work. Harder than people perhaps realize when they're in the grocery aisle. Well, I can tell you that in our company right now, we average developing 150 new products a month. What? Yes. How many of those will make it to the shelves? Five. Five?

And so you can imagine that is on the mainstream side. So then when you're looking at a special season like Christmas, you know, you're really looking at producing maybe 50 products, 60 products that one might make it to the shelf. And then of those that do make it to the shelves, new products, how many of those will succeed or fail? Mike, you have that number.

Yeah, it's over 90% of new products fail within the first 16 months. Good thing. Yeah, it's a cutthroat industry. Before COVID time, it was like an arms race. You know, everybody had to come up with something new, something really, really creative. And after COVID, and then we went into a highly inflationary period, the actual consumer became a lot more conservative with their spend. You know, they're not willing to try things that are too risky.

At the moment, Mike and Eric are focused on Christmas 2025. But which ideas made it through to the shelves this year? Well, apparently in North America, 2024 is all about... Familiar flavours in different spaces. So it's kind of the familiarity and the comfort of knowing that flavour but applied into a different space. We're seeing it a lot within the snack aisle, so...

Salt and vinegar hummus is an example of something that's in the market right now. Yeah, it's interesting, right? Or, you know, taking those types of flavors and then moving them around the store. I think that's where innovation is right now. It's not in true new flavor innovation so much as it is creating new products with what flavors we've already got within the store. I wonder, do they ever think they take it too far? A colleague's creation came to mind.

I know it's the eggnog. I love the fact you're laughing. Yeah, the eggnog chicken. I'm sorry. You have to really convince me. I haven't even tried it yet. It's a little too far even for myself. I don't know, Mike, if you've tried it yet or... I haven't yet, no, but I will. I'll be picking that up this week, probably in my groceries. I don't know. Eggnog, an alcoholic drink with milk, cream, sugar, egg and nutmeg. I could see that going with chicken. Maybe. MUSIC

So who is it who actually buys these wacky new flavours? Reporter James Jackson's been asking shoppers in Berlin. I'm pretty picky when it comes to the Christmas food. I wouldn't be opposed to it, but I'm pretty, really just eat the same stuff every year. I'm from Sweden, so it's like the Swedish, like Christmas food is like meatballs and like sausage and potato. So what are your favourite Christmas food products or foods?

Actually what my family cooks for Christmas. So Italian food. What about stuff you buy? Like in Italy you eat panettone, right? Yes, that is a sweet, typical of Christmas. But I tried different with alcohol.

and also with other flavors like pistachio or peach marmalade. The one I tried, they were rotten, so we had to trash them. Yeah, I love Christmas food. Maybe like a strawberry lipkuchen or something like that, I would try. But I prefer Baumkuchen. And there are some special Baumkuchen, also with Jamaican rum.

which are very good. So, yeah, I'm open, but I'm kind of a traditional girl. And I've been gauging appetite in Manchester. I prefer the traditional flavours. I like to stick to them. There's traditional turkey, of course, and then the Christmas pudding and mince pies. I don't particularly like any of the fancy mince pie flavours. Some with extra alcohol in, like rum, and then you've got some with frangipane.

caramel type mince pies, topped mince pies. No, it's not for me. If he bumped into my partner, he'd probably tell you because that's the kind of thing he would just pick them up and bring them home. Much to our dismay. But he would come home with, if there was a strange crisp or if there was a yoghurt.

Because you do get Christmas-themed yoghurts, yep. He would come home with those sorts of things. Definitely anything in the sweet crisp snacks aisle would draw his attention. I think it's Christmas gone mad. I think it tends to a lot of waste. I really do.

Yeah, I do quite like Christmas food. I will buy the turkey flavour crisps and the sticky toffee pudding flavoured beer and all the different things like that. I think it's part of the celebration. And we mostly buy food gifts as presents as well. So we will buy those in little bundles to give to people. So it feels a bit less wasteful at Christmas that it's going to get eaten rather than plastic toys and things.

things that just get left in the house. So we do buy a lot of these foods as gifts. Well, love them or hate them, the proliferation of newfangled festive flavours is here to stay, according to product developer Mike Fahabi. There's always more ideas. Appetites are changing. Consumers are looking for different food products. Spicy has become...

Mike Fahaby

Meanwhile, in London, the Christmas dessert taste test is coming to an end. We've just got one more to go. Yeah, I feel a bit sick, but it was great.

As I recover from the 11 mysterious super sweet desserts, Jojo runs through what we've just eaten. We had one called a sticky cascade toffee pudding. So this had a sauce that rolled down the sides. It was quite pretty. The spiced gingerbread crown. Our winner, the cran brulee. We had a gingerbread cheesecake.

a cherry Bakewell pavlova, the chocolate and orange wreath. We had a foraged forest mirror-glazed dessert, a sherry trifle, another Christmas cake trifle, one called a golden forest, which I believe was another one of those moussey, caramelly ones, and one called the Polar Express train. MUSIC PLAYS

By the end, they'd all pretty much blended into one sticky sweet mass for me. I enjoyed it, of course, but by even number five, I was like... I wondered what my fellow taste testers thought. What do you think of the fact that there are so many new food products coming into the shops all the time? It feels like... It's a daunting choice, a really daunting choice because there are so many to choose from, so many.

We do always have something new that we've seen in various magazines. Generally, although they look great, we're usually disappointed. I feel a bit sick, do you? Yes. Too many things. No desserts tonight, for sure. Indeed.

Well, that's quite enough gluttony for this week. Thanks to everyone we spoke to for today's programme. Are you into fun, festive foods? And are there any you wish they'd bring back? Let us know by emailing thefoodchain at bbc.co.uk. From me and the rest of the team, Hannah Bewley and Craig Henderson, thanks for listening and join us again next week. When you're young, it feels like anything is possible. Maybe you're a little hot-headed, but your optimism lifts you up.

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