Count On It food labels feature in Food & Drink Technology magazine

Count On It food labels (and myself) have just been featured in Food and Drink Technology International magazine - the article is as follows:-

LABELLED WITH LOVE
31 July 2009

Fed up with her family’s food wastage, Lyndsey Young was passionate about finding a solution…

As she tossed yet another jar of half-used pesto in the bin, Lyndsey Young decided enough was enough. Too many half-eaten jars of food had gone the same way. Yet she hated wasting food and only did so because she could never remember how long it had been languishing in the fridge.

“We all know that, once opened, most products have to be consumed within a certain amount of time,” says the mum-of-two from Bottesford in Leicestershire. “But there was always so much going on at home, I found it difficult to remember when something was first opened or stored.

“I was always throwing away half-used jars and leftovers because I was never sure how long they had been in my fridge. Rather than risk giving it to my young sons, I discarded it.”

But Lyndsey resented such wastefulness, and was sure others felt the same way. So she arranged for some market research to see if a cross-section of women also binned food for the same reason. The results of the research confirmed her suspicions. And so Lyndsey, 41, set about devising a solution and decided to fund her mission with the £15,000 she had won three years previously on TV quiz show Deal Or No Deal.

“Within days I had come up with the concept of stickers featuring scratch-off panels which allow consumers to mark on a jar or packet the date the product was first opened, stored or frozen,” she explains. “I had a name too – the Count On It (COI) label. Quite simply, it acts as a memory jogger, helping busy households safely track the life of their food.”

Feedback on trial samples led to the development of a prototype, and – with the support of government-funded business advisory group Business Link – just five months after she first came up with the idea in April last year, Lyndsey’s labels were in full-scale production.


“As the labels help to address the problem of food waste, which continues to be in the public eye due to the current economic climate and WRAP’s LoveFoodHateWaste campaign, and more and more people are rediscovering the joys and freshness that home cooking can bring, my initial marketing strategy was to target both the cookware and ‘foodie’ markets,” reveals Lyndsey.

“I exhibited the labels at a range of carefully selected regional food and drink festivals and it was demonstrated on stage alongside culinary experts such as James Martin and Anjum Anand.”

Lyndsey struck gold just three months after her idea went into production when kitchenware retailer Lakeland agreed to stock the labels.

“I sent them a speculative sample and they really liked it,” she explains. “Since then sales have continued to grow, and Lakeland has confirmed its placement for the foreseeable future.”

Another recent success for Lyndsey is a decision by homeware catalogue company Betterware to start selling her product later this year.

“As food safety is paramount to me as a mum, another strategy is to market COI to parents and mums-to-be as a time-saving, food safety product.”

The COI system recently received its first celebrity endorsement, too, in the shape of Amanda Holden, who said of the labels: “I’m beginning to wonder how I ever managed without them.”

As both food safety and wastage is clearly so close to Lyndsey’s heart, what does she think of recent government proposals to phase out ‘sell by’ and ‘best before’ dates?

“It is a step in the right direction but I believe it is equally important that consumers have a better understanding of what the labels on their food actually mean,” she says. “Too many households throw away perfectly good food because they are confused by food labelling. Simple advice on how best to store and use food in the home would help consumers manage their food in both a cost-effective and safety conscious manner.”

In the meantime, she is happy for her labelling system to lend a helping hand.

“The future for COI looks bright, with plans to expand the product lines to include the catering, food service and pharmaceutical industries, as well as private label producers,” she says. “I also truly believe that it will help both producers and consumers to reduce the millions of tons of waste that currently go into landfill in this country.”