Greek yogurt maker FAGE, which has manufacturing plants in Greece and in the United States (Central New York), has launched a new TV commercial stressing its Greek heritage in hopes of beating the competition and growing its business in the United Kingdom, according to Pappaspost.
The 40-second ad describes FAGE’s Greek yogurt as unchanged since 1926 when the company was founded by Father Filippou. He opened a small dairy in downtown Athens in September 1926. Thirty years later, the yogurt was being mass produced and distributed around the city. In 1964, FAGE opened Greece’s first yogurt factory.
The
Grocer, a British market leading magazine devoted to grocery sales, reported on July 7 that FAGE intends to mark out its Greek yogurt (which is made in Greece) as “the real deal in a world of Greek-style pretenders”.
“British consumers are becoming savvier when it comes to food transparency,” said marketing director Andrew Turton. “They want to know the story of their food – what’s in the product that they buy and where their food comes from.”
FAGE’s new TV commercial comes just two months after a
British high court ruled that only yogurt made in Greece can be called “Greek”, ending a legal battle between FAGE and its top competitor Chobani, which is the top selling Greek yogurt brand in the United States.
The UK high court in London granted FAGE a permanent injunction against Chobani, prohibiting the company from marketing its yogurt (which is made in upstate New York) as “Greek” in the United Kingdom. FAGE convinced the judges that consumers who bought Chobani’s “Greek” yogurt were being misled into thinking that it was produced in Greece.
Back in the United States, FAGE was the first brand of Greek yogurt introduced in the American market. FAGE arrived in 1998, nine years before Chobani hit supermarket shelves. But, according to Al Ries, chairman of Ries & Ries, an Atlanta-based marketing strategy, FAGE is losing the
Greek yogurt war in America. Did you ever hear of Greek yogurt before Chobani arrived?
Whey too much
In other news, a report about the “dark side” of the Greek yogurt boom (a $2 billion a year industry), which was recently published in the
Modern Farmer (a print quarterly and website devoted to the world of agriculture, based in Hudson, NY) is making newspaper headlines these days. According to the report, Greek yogurt manufacturers in the United States are producing millions of pounds of toxic waste.
For instance, one ounce of creamy Greek yogurt is made from about four ounces of milk. The rest becomes acid whey – a thin, runny waste product. If it’s dumped it could turn a waterway into a “dead sea”, destroying aquatic life over potentially large areas.
And we should mention that the new advert reflects the brand’s history, provenance and heritage.
The ad is set in Greece in what appears to be 1926, the year that founder, Athanassios Filippou first opened a small dairy in Athens. The opening scene shows a cheeky young boy encouraging a cow out of its field and through a gate, subsequently rescuing it so to be rewarded by his mother with a delicious bowl of TOTAL Greek Yoghurt. At the end of the advert, viewers will hear the ringtone of a mobile phone and realise that they have been taken on a journey through present-day, rural Greece which appears to be virtually unchanged for the past 90 years. The strapline will then be revealed to read ‘TOTAL Greek Yoghurt, unchanged since 1926.’
To give the footage a characteristically older and softer look, the Director of Photography filmed with 35mm film, using vintage lenses. Multiple prints from the 35mm negative were combined and then the team went through the painstaking process of isolating specific areas of colour to pick out, in order to create the finished vintage colour film look, with some scenes actually hand painted!
For more information and thousands of recipes, go to http://www.totalgreekyoghurt.com
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