The Visible Hands Of The Supermarket

I don't watch Top Chef because I am wholly uninterested in fancy food, and I don't watch Shark Tank because I don't care about inventing stuff. And yet Supermarket Superstar, which is basically a combination of those two shows, has hooked me immediately and for the dumbest reason: I love grocery shopping.

This is a true fact. When debit-card point of sale technology was starting to appear in stores, I was in university, and living at home; because neither of my parents was that into shopping, they were happy to give me their ATM cards and send me to the store to buy the family's groceries, a chore I much preferred to doing dishes. Consequently, I was the first to know when crazy, weird new products showed up on shelves and delighted in them -- the more aggressively processed, the better. (The day Dare brought out Dino-Sours -- sour jujubes shaped like dinosaurs, which were somehow more delicious than the regular sour jujubes, I don't know how -- changed my family.) And my love for food-engineering technology, and the products that result, abides to this day. We never make it out of a supermarket without a reverent stop at the Oreo section to see which new iterations on the brand have appeared since our last visit (though I do not approve of this watermelon business), and my favourite thing about the Fourth of July, apart from AMERICA ITSELF, is seeing what foods will turn red, white, and blue and/or be injection-molded into stars. So finally, there is a food/competition show for people like me -- people who just buy food without having any interest whatsoever in cooking it.

Each week, Lifetime's Supermarket Superstar (hosted, competently enough, by recent George Clooney castoff Stacy Keibler) pits three contestants in the same food category against one another in a contest to see whose potential packaged food could be mass-produced and sold in supermarkets. This is a pretty budget-conscious affair: while watching the premiere last night, my impression was that the winner of each same-category round got $10,000, but apparently that only goes to the overall winner (the last food-packager standing across all categories) at the end of the competition. That person will also receive "$100,000 worth of product development from DINE Marketing and Mattson (the largest independent food and beverage innovation company in the country) to create professional samples of their products." So, in other words, even though the final judgment at the end of each episode, and presumably at the end of the competition, comes from an A&P product buyer, winning the competition doesn't actually guarantee that the victor's product will end up in stores.

But never mind that. Frankly, I plan to forget the low stakes entirely, the better to keep enjoying the show. The show's producers picked a good category to start with in cake; it's the kind of thing any of us would buy from a supermarket as a convenience, since no one really judges if your dessert is store-bought, and also something pretty much everyone enjoys. I'll be interested to see how future episodes deal with other food categories where the dishes in question have less of a likelihood to be universal crowd-pleasers.

Producers did equally well in the casting: from left in the photo above, there's Latrice, a gospel singer/recent divorcée from Atlanta; Melissa, a probable obvious acting washout who now makes her living hosting baking parties for kids in the guise of "Princess Baking Lady" (...going with keywords rather than a character? Okay); and Sean, the "cake bartender," whose product gimmick is that his desserts are absolutely loaded with booze. From the start, Latrice is the clear winner; the worst things the judges (the original Mrs. Fields, a chef, and a branding strategist) say about her dish, peach cobbler cupcakes, is that they're a little cumbersome to eat and that cupcakes are kind of played out, so when she moves on to the next phase, she ably incorporates their critiques and reinvents the recipe as peach cobbler loaf cakes she can sell six to a box. But even as Latrice (spoiler) sails to her easy victory, Melissa's and Sean's extremely obvious missteps are fascinating to watch. Sean basically ignores the judges' observations that most people don't want to bust out their IDs to buy cake -- which they would need to, since each of his cakes contains the equivalent of two shots of liquor, which he doesn't cook down to remove the alcohol -- and that, at $9 apiece, the price point is so high that no consumer would buy them. (He explains that he currently sells them at around $15 each in his home business but that he's not making much of a profit, so...I guess he knows everything about business? Bye, Sean, you dummy.) Meanwhile, Melissa runs with the judges' suggestion that instead of trying to market her finished product -- "cookie cupcakes," which are apparently cookies in the shape of mini-cupcakes, with frosting on them, and are apparently not very tasty -- she should come up with a make-at-home kit that replicates the fun of the baking parties she hosts. That part is smart. Where she's dumb is ignoring the note that chocolate is a more appealing flavour to consumers than butterscotch (what does she think this is, Canada?). Melissa, if you're against chocolate, it's fine. How about vanilla, dummy?

The best thing I can say about Supermarket Superstar is that it's the first TV show about food (other than My Food Obsession, but that was more about the freaks than the food) that I've watched all the way to the end, and here's why: other food shows try to interest you by showing people rhapsodizing over how delicious the food they're eating is, and you at home basically have to take their word for it. On Supermarket Superstar, the flavour of the dishes is really beside the point; branding, marketing, and the consumer experience are way more important, and those are the elements we can easily see and judge from the viewer perspective.

...Also, freaks. Sorry, Melissa, but that's what you are, and if you didn't want to come off that way, you should have left your fascinators at home.