A little dressing up can work. Bernell Dorrough, a 31-year-old web marketing coordinator in the Mobile, Ala., area, recently opted for the store brand lunchmeat at the local Publix supermarket in part because the slices came loosely packed in folds rather than in the traditional tight stacks where the meat is peeled off.
“It was folded as though someone held a bag under a machine,” he said. “I know it wasn’t hand sliced but something about the aesthetic quality appealed to me.”
Food companies are banking on customers like Dorrough.
It’s one reason why Wendy’s softened the edges of its famously square hamburger patties. The Dublin, Ohio-based says it changed the patty to a “natural square” with wavy edges because tasters said the straight edges looked processed.
At Kraft Foods Group Inc., executives took the quest for a turkey slice that looks home-cooked even further. A team at its Madison, Wis., research facility studied the way people carve meat in their kitchen, using the variety of knives they typically have at their disposal.
Instead of the traditional slicers found in delis, the goal was to build a machine that would hack at the meat as a person might, creating slabs with more ragged edges, said Morin, the Kraft engineer.
It wasn’t as easy as it sounds since the meat still needs to fit neatly into a package and add up to a certain weight. Morin declined to provide details of the process for competitive reasons but said that no two packages are exactly alike.
“We have a way of making sure that the blade cuts the piece of meat differently with each cut,” he said.