Institute For The Future

Will Your Bacon be Caffeinated?

Far be it for me, as someone who is on a quest to find caffeinated breakfast food, to question the wisdom of fortifying anything with caffeine, but I have to say that I'm a bit skeptical though also intrigued by a product I read about recently: Perky Jerky. As the name suggests, Perky Jerky is beef jerky, fortified with the stimulant guarana, which, according to their website's marketing, "powers professional adults to keep them focused and alert all day long."

 

 

 

 

One of the things that interested me about Perky Jerky is that their target customer isn't college students or other younger people most likely to experiment with functional foods. Instead, they're going after professional adults, to the point that the banner on their homepage reads "Demand Perky Jerky... Get your boss to pay for it." I've spent more time than is probably reasonable trying to figure out what sort of office would want to bypass coffee for caffeinated meat, and thus far, I could imagine Perky Jerky doing well at something like a hedge fund, or at something like an offshore oil rig. Basically, an office heavily skewed toward men, where people work long hours. And yell a lot.

 

In any case, as silly as Perky Jerky seems, I think it's actually a pretty serious, and pretty brilliant idea at some level. And that level is, essentially, taste. Contrast Perky Jerky, for example, with a nutrition bar I stumbled across at a grocery store recently, Blisscuits.

 

 

 

 

While Blisscuits, interestingly, plays up its wholesomeness, and both products play up their taste, it's easier for me to imagine something like Perky Jerky portraying itself as functional and pleasant. For the record, I've never tasted either Perky Jerky or Blisscuits, but while Perky Jerky strikes me as something that would taste good, Blisscuits, or really, any food in bar form, strikes me as more akin to eating a gigantic vitamin. It is designed, first and foremost, as a means to deliver nutrients. Any bar type food, just looks disingenuous, and a bit silly, trying to portray itself as something that tastes good.

 

And this is what I think is so interesting, and potentially transformative, about products like Perky Jerky. It is food, designed with some added nutritional content, rather than nutrients reconfigured to resemble food. And that's actually a pretty big shift. We've spent the past decade growing accustomed to eating and drinking food-like things because they offer energy or relaxation or beauty and deal with the taste. But the products, like Perky Jerky, are pointing toward something slightly different--where food consumers will look for these sorts of benefits in forms that feel far more like food than they feel, or even look, like gigantic vitamins.

 

(* As I mentioned, I've never tried either of the foods I mentioned here, so it's entirely possible that my impression from their branding is totally off, and that the beef jerky is really what tastes bad.

 

** My thanks to my colleague Miriam Lueck-Avery, who initially found and told me about Perky Jerky.)