Rice industry squirming over cauliflower cousin
 

http://www.straitstimes.com/world/u...s-rice-industry


I greatly enjoyed reading this over my caulimash tonight. :lol:

Except it isn't. Not even a little bit. And if I can give the rice industry of the United States a spot of advice, it's this, DON'T TREAT YOUR CUSTOMERS LIKE MORONS, because they can easily tell the difference between cauliflower and rice.

"Ricing" as a process has been part of cuisine language forever.

What's their beef??

Besides, this is America. Any food fad will be over in a millisecond.

More Mashed Fauxtatoes for me! (As long as there's no cauliflower shortage, which recently drove the local price up to $6.99/head)

Of course some consumers are morons. Take, for example, this woman who is suing Jelly Belly claiming she didn't know that the Jelly Belly beans she bought contained sugar:

http://www.foodandwine.com/news/wom...s-contain-sugar

Jean

:lol: Oh dear. Yep, that one's a moron. I meant the average punter - or maybe I meant the members of Active Low Carber, or even low carbers in general, cos we iz a smart bunch.

Maybe those rice producers should look into growing cauliflower.

Since when did a business mission become "We will make you take our product! Give us money! Now shut up!"

There'd be a whole lotta lawsuits going on if more people mistook creative food names as being factual. Think sweetbreads, which are neither sweet, nor a type of bread. Or prairie oysters ... or spotted dick ... ;)

The "cake" in rice cake also suggests that a good time will be had by all. Not my experience.

The idea that consumers will be confused by nut or rice "milks" or cauliflower rice--the whole sales pitch is that these aren't the real thing, the producers go out of their way to make it clear that these are alternative products.

For the most part, that's very true.

On the other hand, the low fat fad seems to keep going on and on and on and on...

But really, I don't expect to see riced veggies widely available in the stores for very long. Working in a grocery store, it doesn't even look to me like the riced veggies are even selling very well (if the customer has a coupon they'll buy a bag, but not many other people will even try it), so I can't imagine what the rice industry is getting their panties all in a twist about, because I see far more customers buying 5-10-20 lb or larger bags of rice on a regular basis than I see buying one or two little 1 lb bags of frozen riced cauli, or even the little containers of fresh riced cauli from the produce dept.

The upshot is that even if the riced veggie fad continues for a while, it's not going to have more than a minuscule impact on the rice industry, and even that minuscule effect is certainly not going to last for very long.

Calianna, you must have the most interesting perspective on human behavior. Good luck with that!

Pre-chopped veggies have more surface area exposed to air and go bad faster. I'd never buy them unless they were cheaper than fresh or frozen cauliflower and I had a plan to use them all at once after opening the package.

I love the bags of frozen riced cauliflower. I have a bunch in my freezer right now!

Agree, and the ones I've seen recently are pricey. Guess they have to pay people to rice the veggies. I can do that at home. Rice what you need when you need it.

Sorry, I can't figure out how to quote more than one post at once, so this will be first in a series.



I work the self-scan attendant's desk - oh-my-goodness, talk about human MISbehavior! Those registers are inherently slow (the information needs to bounce back and forth to the servers several times for each item scanned, since when you scan it, it first looks up the barcode and sends back the name and price of the item to be added to your order. Then you MUST put the item in the bagging area long enough for the server to confirm the item's weight before it will allow you to scan the next item (this prevents double-scanning the same item). If customers would simply listen to the disembodied voice of the register, read the directions on the screen, or at least look at the helpful pictures, soooo many typical self scan problems could be avoided.

But as far as what people are eating, it's so weird to see so many people buying their breakfast, lunch and maybe some snacks on their way to work. There's more than a few who buy a couple of donuts and/or a mega-muffin, a tiny container of fat free yogurt, and a Lean Cuisine - and the same ones do this every day on the way to work, so you know that's the food for their workday.

Yeah, the waste with the riced veggies (as well as the spiralized veggies) from the produce dept has to be massive, because they don't keep well. I don't mean just to the customer who has to figure out how to use all those veggies before they go bad in a couple days, but also the store itself, because they can't sell it once it starts to appear to be deteriorating. So anyone who buys those packages of fresh riced or spiralized veggies is not only paying an exorbitant price for the convenience of pre-riced/spiralized veggies, the price they're paying is also covering the store's loss on the leftover ones which need to be thrown out.