I’ve been exploring a few of the themes I picked up on from the blogs and news stories about Gü a bit further...

Passion for puddings
I posted a photo of a homemade recreation of a Gü dessert previously.
And I’m not alone in posting photos of chocolate desserts – or discussing them on forums. The passion for these puddings is quite incredible!
So far, not too many people have actually tagged Gü on sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us, but in time I predict that ‘mmm’, ‘yum’ and ‘yummy’ will be big on the tag clouds!

Thinking about photographing food, I came across one site you certainly wouldn’t want to post photos of Gü desserts: myfoodphone.com. This is an online diet service where users send in pictures of what they're eating, creating a running nutrition diary. Once a week, a nutritionist advises the client on how they’re doing and what they need to improve.

Home-made
Another of the themes was consumers passing off high quality shop-bought dishes as their own. If people are keen on the idea of homemade food but find it too time consuming and too much hassle to cook, what could be done to make cooking more convenient? In the US, there are a number of ‘meal assembly’ brands (e.g. Dream Dinners, Supper Thyme and Dinner by Design). Customers schedule a session online, choosing meals to cook from a monthly menu. At the shop, there is a large professional standard kitchen and all of the ingredients are provided, chopped and prepared for customers to use to put together their meals. This means no time spent shopping for food, planning meals, prepping beforehand and cleaning up afterwards.

Gü: the name

"It's not a word at all," confesses Mr Averdieck, founder of Gu "But it sounds European and conjures up an image of lovely, gooey chocolate.
Similarly, the name Häagen-Dazs is simply two made-up words meant to look Scandinavian to American eyes.

Gü desserts

I used Netvibes and Google Alerts to keep an eye on Gü (and the luxury desserts market more generally).

The Gü brand doesn't make it in to the news much but a lot of people are blogging about their desserts.

A few interesting things I discovered about Gü and the market:
- Virgin Atlantic serves Gü desserts to 3.5m people a year
- Gu found that consumers like to keep the glass ramekins that their desserts come in but they didn't like the fact that they can't be stacked. So Gu are re having the necessary tool built exclusively for them to make stackable glass ramekin dishes.
- The Serious Food Company are upping their game with even more elaborate, re-usable dishes.
- Half of the women who took part in a survey for Marks and Spencer had passed off shop-bought cheesecake as home-made.
- According to Mintel (Chilled Pot Desserts – UK – July 2006), at one end of the market consumers are seeking out healthy yogurts but at the other end, it's pure indulgence they are after. Marks & Spencer believes that sales are being driven by "10 o' clock cheesecake girls" who sit in front of the news after a busy day and treat themselves.

a homemade effort