Rancher's Reserve: Is Denise O'Neal a Real Food Columnist?

If she is, she's certainly an advertiser's dream. Just read this piece of dreck from today's Sun-Times Food section -- and I thought I was reading one of C. P. Pecoraro's legendary paid-article "restaurant reviews". Who ever knew select-grade meat could be like but-ah?
>>Brent

June 30, 2004

OUTTA THE BOX BY DENISE I. O'NEAL

Rancher's Reserve Beef

Suggested retail: Varies by weight and cut.

****

Safeway Inc., the parent company of Dominick's Finer Foods, has rounded up a branded beef guaranteed to satisfy customers.

Rancher's Reserve is hand-selected aged beef raised by a select group of beef suppliers for the company's private label. The beef has been put through a series of random tests to insure that each cut of beef meets Safeway Inc.'s standard of tenderness.

The products promise to deliver the most tender, juicy and delicious cut of beef you ever sank your teeth into, or the company will replace the product for free or refund your money.

In addition to branding its beef the most tender, Safeway is keeping its Rancher's Reserve meats at a cost-effective price.

The price of the premium beef varies by weight and cut, but with the company guarantee to refund money or replace the meat, you can't go wrong.

Armed with a Rancher's Reserve rib-eye steak (my personal favorite cut of beef) and my George Foreman grill, I got busy. Juicy, tender and without a doubt worth buying, the steak sliced like butter and oozed with juice.

I tried the rib-eye steak sliced and grilled with grilled onions and Mexican cheese on a guacamole-flavored tortilla. It was so outstanding that when my son asked to share, I told him I was testing it for a food column and couldn't. Naughty, naughty, shame on me. No, it was just too darn good to share.

Look for Rancher's Reserve beef in local Dominick's Finer Food stores.

Wow, you're right. That's awful. The Trib also praised the stuff in Good Eating today, but a much shorter, less effusive blurb.

I started taking this kind of thing with a major grain o' salt when the Trib food section had a root beer taste-off and the Jewel and Dominick's house brands came in first and second. I suppose it's possible that their cheap, fake taste (compared to, say, Sprecher's, which scored rather poorly) fit someone's childhood profile of what root beer is "supposed" to taste like, but whether corruption or merely stupidity was responsible, it didn't exactly speak well for their ability to taste intelligently and write honestly.

Mike G wrote:I suppose it's possible that their cheap, fake taste (compared to, say, Sprecher's, which scored rather poorly) fit someone's childhood profile of what root beer is "supposed" to taste like, but whether corruption or merely stupidity was responsible, it didn't exactly speak well for their ability to taste intelligently and write honestly.

Very well said.

A

I was stunned when I saw this blurb this morning. But don't blame Ms. O'Neal, this is on the editors at the Sun Times and they look really bad because of it.

For those who don't know or remember, it was this exact sort of issue which spurred Virginia Gerst's resignation from the Pioneer Press last year. She'd written a negative review of a restaurant which happened to advertise in the Pioneer Press. When the owner of the establishment called the paper to complain, they agreed to send another reviewer (a sales manager, IIRC) to do another review. Ms. Gerst resigned when the paper wouldn't refuse the owner. For a brief time after that, the Pioneer Press ran food pieces that were indistinguishable between advertisements and reviews. They were as shameful as the piece originally referenced in this thread. After a while, I stopped checking to see what they were doing. Then I let my subscription lapse.

Ironically, Ms. Gerst won a journalism ethics award recently (as a direct result of her resignation) and is still working as a journalist. She had an actual story run in the Chicago Tribune's Good Eating section today.

=R=

Mike G wrote:I started taking this kind of thing with a major grain o' salt when the Trib food section had a root beer taste-off and the Jewel and Dominick's house brands came in first and second. I suppose it's possible that their cheap, fake taste (compared to, say, Sprecher's, which scored rather poorly) fit someone's childhood profile of what root beer is "supposed" to taste like, but whether corruption or merely stupidity was responsible, it didn't exactly speak well for their ability to taste intelligently and write honestly.

On one hand, I can't disagree. On the other hand, reading Cook's Illustrated and watching their TV show, America's Test Kitchen, what has made an impression on me more than anything else is the results of the blind tastings, where people do consistently pick out the foods they've eaten since childhood. So, not to get all Proustian on your personal sitting region there, Mike, and not to defend the tasting crew who apparently couldn't deal with anything they didn't grow up with, but that really seems to be a stronger instinct than we sometimes give it credit for.

USDA Good is still USDA Good no matter what you call it or how you market it.

Bob S. wrote:On one hand, I can't disagree. On the other hand, reading Cook's Illustrated and watching their TV show, America's Test Kitchen, what has made an impression on me more than anything else is the results of the blind tastings, where people do consistently pick out the foods they've eaten since childhood.

My favorite example of this is from reading the Cook's Illustrated reviews/tastings of ketchups. One of their blind taste testers, when asked what the ideal ketchup should be like, replied, simply, "Heinz's".

It's inescapable.

Needless to say, Heinz won the taste test.

-ed

Has anyone heard the stories NPR stories (2 or three over the last year) relating to branding and brain chemistry? I don't fully trust my memory here, but as I recall the initial piece: studies were done on brain activity in whatever region corresponds to the "I gotta have it" sensation and they found that while blind taste tests on cola produced one result - a preference for something other than Coke - simply naming Coke, produced the opposite result, i.e. the branding of Coke is more powerful than the actual taste.

Mrbarolo,

I love the story about people thinking the "name" tasted better than the beverage actually did. I think when you "taste" a brand, sensations are activated in many other organs than the tongue (specifically, the brain, which conjures associations with all the commercials and marketing campaigns that relate to the brand).

It's tough to beat a good name, well marketed -- as you suggest, a powerful brand trumps all.

David

Re Heinz'

Maybe not a good example here. Some dominant brands also happen to represent superior products. I think Heinz is one.

I was surprised to see that Iron Chef Chinese uses the Pittsburgh product in his ace-in-the-hole "chile prawns" (the ridiculously simple dish he always pulls out when he's lazy and any shellfish is involved, never failing to wow the panel). Interesting especially for an essentially Chinese product like ketchup.