Y right, it is a Jamaican recipe jerky sauce that has been put into supermarkets and failed - been relabelled and remarketed - put into supermarkets - and I bought a bottle reduced to clear in Tesco last week (o yez, I like it too).
It is all down to marketing and historic purchases. Frankly, I do not know why anybody buys HP sauce these days, it is made in Holland by people who don't know what it should taste like. But people still buy it ...
Supermarkets do not give a lot of new ideas sufficient time to really attack the market, the product gets one bite at the cherry, and if it does not take off, that's the producer's fault for not getting the advertising right. And in a way, that's the truth. People will buy all sorts of rubbish if it gets the right pitch on TV - remember Still Tango? Richard Clayderman records?
May the Lord's name be praised, a lot of these advertising hyped wonder products have not survived. When I was small, I wanted HP baked beans, mum, because of the pressure of advertising them at times when I was near a TV. Truth is, the things were laden with tartrazine, which made me hyperactive - Heinz were much better for me, but I couldn't tell that as a child.
There's a french chef called Joel Robuchon. You may not know his name (he doesn't do English TV much), but he was one of Gordon Ramsay's mentors (although Ramsay has said that working for Robuchon was like being in the SAS), and he is one of the two people that have more Michelin stars than Gordon Ramsay. Acksherly, Joel Robuchon has more Michelin stars than ANYONE in the Universe!
Joel Robuchon endorses a particular brand of coffee. You can buy it in almost all French supermarkets. About a dozen years ago, it was on sale in Waitrose, and nobody bought it. Why? No advertising.
I was selling coffee at the time, and that stuff sold if you gave people a taste of it, but the English prices for coffee were very high - when they dropped to levels comparable to France, I was beaten.
WTH the ground coffee they sell in IKEA is the best value buy! But Reggae Reggae sauce is going to be lost to the world for the second time because they didn't get the marketing right - again.
You can buy Hoe's chutney in a lot of Co-op stores in the NW. Do it now -
Biographical note: crabfoot, under the alias klypos, is actually the moderator of ask.recipelabs.com - not a lot of people know that!
