Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

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Pop a tea pill if you can't have a cuppa

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GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) – Feel like a cup of tea, but don’t have the time to brew one up? Pop a “tea pill” instead.

Indian tea scientists have produced a tea-flavoured pill that can be chewed or quickly dissolved in hot or cold water.

The brownish tablet weighs 0.3 grams and consists of 80 percent tea and 20 percent other flavours — a combination the inventors at the Tocklai tea research centre in Assam say peps you up just like a traditional cuppa.

“You can suck it, chew it or dissolve it in water the way you like to have it and still feel the taste of a real cup of tea,” said the centre’s director, Mridul Hazarika.

“As the liquid tea refreshes, this tea pill will also refresh the people because it contains pure tea ingredients.”

Hazarika said the centre had applied for a patent and the pill, with a bit more fine tuning, should hit the market in six months.

Indians drink a lot of tea but in recent years its tea business, the world’s largest, has faced growing competition from soft drinks.

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Family dinners, 24 at a time

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When it comes to dinner, consumers want it all: active, individual lifestyles AND sit-down family dinners, preferably combined with convenience AND authenticity. Which means the food and beverage world is forever coming up with innovative, wholesome yet effortless ways to feed busy singles and families; from healthy ready-to-heat meals to online grocers such as FreshDirect. Now, add to this equation services like Dream Dinners, Dinner Helpers and Let’s Dish

read moreSpringwise

VinoVenue: Wine Tasting Bar in San Francisco

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Part wine lounge, part tasting room and part retail shop, VinoVenue is The Place To Taste and experience wine. Over 100 wines are featured, all of which are personally chosen by the owners with an emphasis on small production, family-owned, high quality wines at varying price points.

VinoVenue stretches the traditional wine bar and retail store boundaries by offering guests a new, on-premise forum for tasting and buying wines. For the first time, guests can serve themselves by purchasing a VinoVenue tasting card, inserting it into the automated wine stations, selecting a wine and receiving a one-ounce  Individually priced pours of more than 100 wines sourced from wineries around the globe range from $1 to $28.

VinoVenue home page

Tossing pizzas on the road

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Really super-fast pizza

Wisconsin’s Super Fast Pizza has finally figured out how to deliver piping hot pizzas within 15 minutes. The secret? High-tech mobile kitchen vans, officially licensed as restaurants, are outfitted with custom ovens that can cook pizzas at 600 degrees. Fully powered and wifi-enabled, Super Fast Pizza’s kitchens on wheels take orders and cook pizzas while on their way to customers. To save time and make the best of the limited cooking space, all processes have been standardized: the menu only offers the seven most popular pizzas (think deluxe, sausage, sausage and pepperoni, five-cheese, four-meat, pepperoni, veggie, and a pizza of the month), all pizzas are uncut and medium sized, and all cost USD 10.99. Online ordering is encouraged.
Fuul article at SpringWise

Where in the World?

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Which global markets are ripe for quick-serve expansion in the next decade? Here’s a clue” Think emerging.

According to Dr. Ilon Alon, Ph.D., Associate Professor of International Business at the Crummer Graduate School of Business at Rollins College, 80 percent of the world’s population lives in so-called emerging markets. And, as he writes at www.franchise-chat.com, the U.S. Department of Commerce estimates that more than 75 percent of the expected growth in world trade over the next 20 years “will come from developing countries, particularly big emerging markets??

But where are these markets?QSR Magazine

Burger King in recovery mode?

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Ron Paul, an analyst at Technomic in Chicago, says the No. 2 hamburger chain (behind McDonald’s) saw sales grow 14 percent in January. In October, same-store sales were up 6.9 percent, compared with last year. In November, they were up 9.1 percent, and in December, 13.1 percent. Despite the closings of hundreds of stores due to bankruptcy, Paul says, “They appear to definitely be in recovery mode. Their poor times are behind them, and they’re hitting on all eight cylinders.”

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Chinese food market to reach number two global position by 2020

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Food makers and their suppliers will be wise to continue their drive into Asian markets, with a new report revealing the region will grow to achieve a 41 per cent slice of the global food retail market in 2020, a leap from 33 per cent in 2003.

Food Navigator

No Bull – Red Bull, is a raging success

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The first thing Dietrich Mateschitz did before launching Red Bull was to ignore the focus groups, reports Kerry A. Dolan in Forbes (5/28/05). “People didn’t believe the taste, the logo, the brand name,” he says. “I’d never before experienced such a disaster.” But like a true marketing hero he went ahead anyway, opened up offices just outside Salzburg, and deployed a six-person sales force to “retail outlets and bars across Australia.” Today, Red Bull, redbull.com, is a raging success: “In some countries (it) commands an 80 percent market share. In the U.S., where Red Bull enjoys a 47 percent share of the energy drink market, sales are growing at a 40 percent clip. Last year it sold 700 million cans in the U.S.; this year it hopes to sell 1 billion.” Yes, the brand’s U.S. market share has fallen some over the years, but there’s no denying that Dietrich Mateschitz created what is now a $1.7 billion category.