Monday, February 07, 2011

Don't Blink! Field Roast cameo on Oprah

If you haven't heard of Oprah, surely you don't live in this world. Her voice is recognizable from a single noun, and her audiences are as attentive to her preferences as Seattlites nose for brewing coffee on these gray days of winter. In other words, the "Colbert bump" has nothing on the Oprah shove. And at this point Field Roast has had two near misses with this phenom.

A friend texted me last week..."Nice mention on Oprah!" Exactly like that. Exclamation point and all and I thought, that's it, we are going to get as busy as Beechers Cheese and sell out for the next millennia. I will spend the next six days fielding phone calls, my mind was racing. I forwarded the text to David, FR president, and set my DVR.

But as I watched the second showing of the "Oprah goes vegan" show that night, where she interviews Michael Pollan and Kathy "Veganist" Freston, I slowly became more and more jaded (and relieved?). We are clearly still the underdog in this veg eat veg world. If you blinked, you missed the words "Field Roast" on the bottom of a short list of meat alternatives that show while Kathy takes a Harpo employee, mother and wife, vegan grocery shopping at Whole Foods Market in Chicago. So the question is this. Had the family made italian bolognese with Field Roast Italian Sausage, would they be quite so negative in their response to keeping to a vegan diet? Would the husband have instead leaned into the camera and said "This is pretty amazing, is there really meat in here?" Of course they fully admonish the meat sub by having Kathy remake the dish, and it was then "delicious". But the first impression is made...vegan food is still a light joke. And the old myths are upheld, that you are sacrificing good tasting food by becoming vegan.

For this blog post, we dreamed of finding the shopping trip footage and slowing it down where FR is mentioned, so that you might actually notice our mention. But I couldn't find the footage online. If anyone knows where to find it, please let me know! For now, we will accept that we are a fan favorite, and a bit in the underground of the vegan food chain. See us next in any show footage sweeping the aisles of the vegetarian meats before they zoom in and show you one of our competitors and talk about all the great options out there.