How Loblaw’s President’s Choice is taking marketing cues from the fashion industry

Supper is so last season.

"What you want to have is brunch – and we really do think that holiday brunch is one of the big trends, that brunch is the new dinner," says Uwe Stueckmann, senior vice-president of marketing at Loblaw Companies. Or as a fashion editor would say, brunch is having a moment.

If the vocabulary about what the au courant kitchen will be serving this season conjures memories of the catwalk, that's because the President's Choice brand, to create excitement around its seasonal new product launches, is now taking a few marketing cues from the fashion industry's approach.

Chic and eat are chatty tablemates these days. Adam Rapoport, the former style editor of GQ magazine, has been the editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit since 2010; Loblaw competitor Metro sponsors World MasterCard Fashion Week in Toronto and has an ongoing multi-platform campaign with a handful of Rogers Publishing titles. Flare, for instance, features designers and style insiders talking about food, and last month hosted a luncheon on the fashion week runway, with chef/designer food pairings inspired by Spring 2016 collections.

When the globe-trotting gourmand and pitchman Dave Nichol (arguably the originator of mainstream foodism in Canada) first launched the grocer's private label brand in 1983, he talked up the new products in TV ads and newsprint flyers that seemed folksy even by low-fi mass-medium supermarket standards. President's Choice became the country's largest packaged food brand, now shopped by 14 million Canadians weekly, but its long-running seasonal Insider's Report was quietly discontinued two years ago.

The process of re-thinking Insider's began soon after last year's Crave More "renovation" of the PC brand, Stueckmann said in an interview last week. Talks began close to home, getting advice from fashion siblings Joe Fresh and the Shoppers Drug Mart beauty department. Those conversations, he says, were about exploring a "more declarative way of helping consumers understand what is right for the season."

Jessica Milan, a Canadian model turned fashion photographer, is the founder of the popular recipe blog (turned cookbook) Lookbook Cookbook, which showcases food magazine-style shoots with model. She sees the two categories as a perfect fit. "Food and fashion are both such a big part of our lifestyle," she says. "They are both such a source of creativity and inspiration."

And like fashion, food is trendier now than it has ever been thanks in part to visuallydriven social platforms. "Looking at what other people eat or are wearing gives us inspiration and Instagram is a great tool to discover these things," Milan says.

Accordingly, Insider's is back this week with a major makeover. Now more designer lookbook than sales flyer, the group of 70 new products also has a new name: the PC Insiders Collection. And a new interactive PC website contextualizes products in editorial-style shoots that look like they could be from the pages of House & Home. Many are shot drone-style – the favoured overhead vantage point of food bloggers – and come layered with recipes, decorating and entertaining tips that speak to the central place of food in culture. "It's not separate anymore – it's lifestyle," says Stueckmann

To complement this new look, the grocery retailer opened a pop-up shop ("a lot more like something you'd see in fashion," he says) this week in downtown Toronto – a boutique of decorated concept rooms styled around product to reflect each major trend through the holiday season. And like a boldface front row at a fashion show, the celebrity factor is strong:

The opening night party on Nov. 12 was hosted by David Chang, the celebrated American chef and founder of Momofuku restaurant group, and ET Canada will be shooting segments on location, naturally.

Trend items in the new-and-now are organized as occasion-based Collections – Brunch, Gift, Dinner and Mingle – and the food development team is betting on a few key items to be hits (salted caramel popcorn, the butter chicken poutine fusion kits), though a sell-out waiting list is the opposite of Loblaw's goal: They want to keep shelves stocked.

"The 70 products are ones that we think will help you have a very successful cocktail party, but then the ability to change that up, to swap one or two things out of our curated set that make it uniquely you and yours. That again is very similar to the fashion industry," Stueckmann adds. "There may be a runway look that we say is the right look but you then accessorize or change it to make it your own." In fashion, they call that personal style.