With food prices skyrocketing and no sign of landing, consumers who can afford it are buying premium-quality staples (eggs, bread, olive oil, butter, coffee, salt or sugar) to give a gourmet touch to your diet.
Trend observatories, such as Tasting and Table, already warned about this new trend at the end of last year when making their forecasts for the year 2023: in the absence of the best quality foie, shellfish, fish or meat, a part of consumers seems be adopting as a strategy to choose staple foods from a higher category.
Although the cost of these foods compared to the cheapest ones can be between 30 and 150% higher (so this trend is forbidden for those who have enough to continue acquiring the cheapest brands from distributors), a A good loaf of bread made in a family bakery with patience and quality flour, half a dozen eggs from free range organically fed chickens or a package of fine salt from the Kalahari desert costs less than five euros, and hence its vitola of affordable luxuries.
“This is a reaction to the crisis,” argues Toni Massanés, general director of the Alicia Foundation, a center dedicated to improving eating habits that claims the agri-food heritage of each place. According to this expert, although the general trend is exactly the opposite, that is, to buy more processed products and less fresh food, “an alternative to continue enjoying food is, instead of buying a sirloin steak, to eat an omelette with some eggs luxury,” he says.
“There is also –continues Massanés– a psychological component because there are those who think: ‘since it is not possible for me to grate truffle in the tortilla, then I put a little salt with lemon and I have that gourmet touchâ€, adds this food researcher. “In the end, it’s about waking up to continue enjoying the table. Seen like this, it seems to me something intelligent for those who can afford it, â€he says.
Massanés acknowledges applying this trend himself with some essential ingredients such as bread, extra virgin olive oil (“although it is more expensive, the two or three tablespoons that I put in the salad make a minimal economic difference in exchange for a huge pleasureâ€, he estimates) or the eggs. “I also buy seasonal fruitâ€, he reports to review that the true superfoods are not turmeric, maca tea or chia seeds, but the vegetables, legumes and fruits of each season that are grown near the place where a person lives.
Eggs are one of the emblematic foods of the new trend of buying staple products of a higher category. Although it is true that the economic crisis has made the most economical brands of distributors grow, it is no less true, remarks Agustà Roig, the general director of Huevos Dagu-Roig, the second largest producer company nationwide, “that we have registered growth sustained in the order of 7 or 8% of gourmet eggsâ€, he admits.
The highest quality eggs correspond to hens that are fed organically in the open air and whose feeders contain at least 65% cereals and legumes such as soybeans (in this category of eggs, corn accounts for 25% of the diet). ). According to Roig, proximity is as important as sustainability, so that the eggs can be on the shelf of the stall 24 or 48 hours after laying. For information purposes, the first digit of the code with which the eggs are labeled informs about their quality. The number 0, for example, designates the organically fed birds that live more widely, while the number 1 is the next best and names free-range or grazing hens.
In the case of Huevos Dagu-Roig, the company abandoned the concept of caged chickens in 2012 to bet on “happy chickens” and thus satisfy the growing demand of the eggxigent, as it calls on its website, playing with the English language, to consumers who demand eggs of the highest organoleptic and environmental quality.
Another of the brands that already in 2017 was selling “golden eggs” for chefs like MartÃn Berasategui is Galo Celta, a Galician company that raises slow-growing grazing hens whose diet includes chestnut flour, cabbage or potatoes. The result is eggs with less water and more oleic acid that have also managed to win over chefs like LucÃa Freitas or Marcelo Tejedor.
New winds have also blown in bread since confinement, when there was a boom in homemade bread, says Daniel Jordà , a third-generation baker who runs a family bakery and has just published Panes (Larousse).
The distinctive feature of this baker is that he graduated in Fine Arts, which has led him to make all kinds of creative breads. However, its main ingredient is the quality of the raw materials, which is why several Michelin-starred restaurants are its clients. However, most of the people who come to his artisan bakery come from Nous Barris (Barcelona), although there are also those who travel expressly from other areas to stock up on supplies during the week.
But… how to distinguish a good bread, at a time when many bakeries hang the “artisan” sign, even though their product is far from it? “Artisanal breads – answers Jordà – are never exactly the same sizeâ€. Other clues that allow us to differentiate a good bread from another that is not, even if it boasts of it, is that artisanal bread is cooked a little longer to enhance the flavor of the crust (so it tends to have a slightly darker color). dark), it has a cream-colored crumb instead of white (which is usually synonymous with very refined flours…), it can last several days (instead of being inedible the next day) and it usually has less volume (by taking less yeast and made with longer fermentations) than more puffy breads of an industrial nature.
His advice to sailors is to purchase pieces that contain, at least, 50% wholemeal flour and seeds inside. “I also recommend sourdough breads because they usually have less salt, as well as being more filling,” he adds.
“There is increasing interest in bread, although we currently have a major problem with costs,” he stresses. “But it is true that during the confinement many people began to make it at home and now they are looking for that taste of good bread that is not easy to find,” he adds. From what Jordà has observed, those who buy higher-quality breads tend to be people aged 45 and over and young married couples with small children.
The new trend of buying premium staples also affects coffee beans, the consumption of which is increasing across Europe relative to ground. The same is happening with sugar. However, it must be specified that, from the point of view of health, it is irrelevant to take brown or white sugar, since what is really important is to take more or less.
When it comes to butter, American company Minerva Dairy has started making fancy butters with sea salt and garlic herbs that are slowly churned Amish-style. Golden Steer has also embarked on marketing specialty butters (for around $24 a jar, mind you), such as De Jonghe (with a touch of mustard, nutmeg, anchovies, and tamarind extract).
Something similar is happening with boutique salt. To savor Sicily, Bona Furtuna has developed a line of salts that incorporate ingredients such as truffles, Sicilian lemon and basil. For its part, the Kalahari desert has become home to the coveted Oryx salt, harvested from an underground lake. As for Keep It Savory, they have specialized in small batch creative salts with, for example, Thai ginger, hops flower, and cremini and shiiatake mushrooms.
