The other morning I felt all warm and glowy as I walked to the office.
It wasn’t because I was overdressed and it was a nice day: it was -29 with a wind and I wasn’t wearing long johns and I had more than four miles to go. In fact, it was so freakin’ cold that my Ipod went Idead halfway there, the battery apparently too weak to handle heroic Canadian conditions. And my knees were burning with cold that I thought might turn into frostbite and I wondered why I hadn’t put on long johns. And other bits of me were slowly beginning to gnaw with pain as I trudged along optimistically.
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I was cheery, I think, because in the midst of all the economic gloom and doom I had been witnessing that day on Bloomberg TV, on came a Cargill ad talking about how it had convinced some fast food chain to switch to its healthy oil products, and now people were eating healthier stuff. I heard this ad as I walked around my house in the early morning, stumbling from bedroom to bathroom and stubbing my toes and blundering about in the dark as I tried to not wake my wife and my daughters, so I didn’t get too many details from the ad, but it sounded to me like they were talking about high oleic canola oil. Golly, it’s made the big time, I thought.
The day before this I’d clicked on the New York Times button on my Blackberry and what do you think came up atop of the main front page story? That’s right – a print version of the same ad, telling me about Cargill and healthy oils. At the time I didn’t click too deeply into it, so I didn’t find out whether it was indeed canola this was all about, but I hoped. Front of the New York Times. During the Bloomberg TV morning show. That’s pretty good promo for the prairies’ best crop.
After I got to the office, warmed my knees, thawed other frozen anatomical bits and brought the Ipod back to life, I made a quick call to the Canola Council of Canada office, asking about whether the Cargill oil in the ad was canola. I left a message and ran off to cover the Keystone Agricultural Producers convention for the next two days. This was clever and cruel on my part, because an enquiring message left by a reporter for a diligent organization like the CCC tends to get them to do your job for you. And sure enough, they did my work for me, contacted Cargill and found out that the oil was indeed canola and this was all part of a larger campaign pushing high oleic canola oil. Thank you very much, Robert Hunter, for tracking that down for me.
It’s always nice to see canola getting promoted, especially in places like New York, where many people don’t know what the heck it is. A few years ago I went to NYC for a canola council convention, and while there I asked lots of New Yorkers what they thought about canola oil. Most had heard about it, maybe. Some thought it was good. But they all thought the “healthy oil” was olive oil. They didn’t see canola as particularly healthful. Obviously Cargill’s trying to spread canola’s heart-smart message and doesn’t mind spending a lot of cash doing it.
It’s also nice to see this campaign in the middle of an economic slump. Canola oil tends to be more expensive than soybean, palm and other less-healthy oils, but in good times many consumers have proven themselves willing to shell out the extra bucks to get it. But what about in a recession? Clearly, Cargill feels that consumers don’t stop caring about health just because times are bad. Across North America, consumers are cutting a lot of luxuries. Perhaps Cargill fears consumers will stop caring about healthier oils when they fear for their jobs, have lost the equity in their homes, have a stuck gas pedal, etc. and hopes to counter it with this campaign as a reminder. Or maybe it’s a totally optimistic attempt to sell health to the smart people who read the New York Times and watch Bloomberg TV. I don’t know which it is. I haven’t asked the company yet.
But in a world that seems to be getting taken over by armies of corn and hordes of soybeans, it’s nice to see our little crop getting its head raised in the big markets and portrayed as something worth paying attention to.
