Make a meal of it

You don’t need me to tell you that the big restaurant trend of the year has been the arrival of the finish-at-home meal kit. Sorry, trend is the wrong word. That makes it sound like some fashionable little add-on, not the grim battleline in a deadly fight for survival that it really is.

Anyway, everyone is doing them now, from lowly burger joints to three-Michelin starred restaurants and my inbox flows over every week with releases about new offerings. So the question is, how do you make your client stand out from the others?

With great difficulty is the glib reply, I’m afraid. Certainly we are beyond the point where it is enough simply to say that they are doing it. In the early days, yes, that was news but now it needs something more.

The new Michelin announcement was an easy peg for me last week, when I wrote about Core and Helene Darroze at the Connaught, both of which won a third star, and I think there are still some legs in exploiting any recent ennoblement in the awards. After all, a delivery kit will be the only way a chef can show the silky skills that have just won them a star.

Beyond that, you are going to have to find something unique within your client’s offering. It’s back, in that way, to the very basics of PR: find a point of difference and shout about it loudly and clearly. Editorialise your release so the journalist can immediately see what the story will be.

Are they supplying ingredients you’d never be able to source on your own? Are they foraged on the chef’s walk to work? Does the kit deliver the biggest impact for the smallest effort? Does it represent the greatest hits of the restaurant’s most popular dishes? Will it teach home cooks skills they can apply to their own cooking?

I don’t have the answers, but as ever, I’ll know it when I see it.