How would that have gone, that brainstorming session of the marketing department at Aldi? Christmas is coming, boys, what do we do? A Christmas commercial, such a beautiful long one with a story, a smile and a tear? Mwa, all supermarkets already do something like that. Let’s think of something fun, something with a cooking show, a competition, something like Master chefsbut then we put people in the kitchen who can’t cook at all.
Two Teams! Let’s add two top chefs. In any case, the one, the clumsy one, with that Hague accent. Herman den Blijker? Yes that one. And then every episode we put another one who gets to gnaw his fingers off at the sight of so much ignorance in the kitchen. Yes Yes! Because we keep those chefs out of the kitchen, they are only allowed to watch behind a screen and give instructions. Not too much, because soon the dishes will taste.
We give them two minutes each to speak. Yes, hahaha. For three dishes. Before, head, after. And the team that made the least disgusting dish wins one star. And money! Three thousand euros per star.
Gourmets
It has become the Christmas commercial and a television program completely packed with Aldi products. Thursday night was the first episode of Cooking klutz. It might be nice to add that five ‘well-known Dutch gourmets’ formed the jury. Gordon flew over from Dubai for the presentation. Gordon hasn’t been a cooking klutz for a while, so he’s perfectly able to spice up this bland program idea, but he has to work hard for it. Make the jokes yourself, laugh a lot and hard yourself.
Of the six participants, we have to assume that they really can’t get anything done in the kitchen. Because how do you recruit klutz cooks? Do they say they are or do they pretend to be? But okay, before The worst driver in the Netherlands always manages to find candidates, so it is possible.
Team Herman den Blijker competed against that of two-star chef Onno Kokmeijer. Each kitchen received a plastic Aldi bag full of Aldi products containing all the ingredients to make a rouleau of smoked mackerel, venison steaks with pommes duchesse and an almond tart with cinnamon cream. This is not a product placement, but a product bombardment.
And if that wasn’t enough, Gordon takes a quiz in between with two candidates separately. Guess what the five Aldi products – each with a wooden Aldi bar in between – cost on a conveyor belt. Whether Aldi came up with the program or Talpa Concepts, ten points for ingenuity.
No French toast yet
The participants had already proven in an individual round that they cannot yet bake French toast. Now they can go wild on the products as a team. The vegetables are abused, the skin is roughly ripped off the smoked mackerel, the steak is pierced. For some, listening to directions can seem even more difficult than cooking. Or does Frits really not know what a cucumber is?
The end result is mashed on a plate and served to the jury by Gordon. They prick one fork from each plate and judge. At the risk of being too ‘woke’ for Gordon’s taste, I wondered: what happens to the leftovers? One judge put her plate on the floor after one bite and whistled at an imaginary dog. Everything else goes into the click?
Lovelessly pounding ingredients into a dish does not show much respect for foodstuffs, nor is it really a good message for consumers who are short of cash in these times. Aldi communicates in TV commercials that the products are “just as good, but cheaper”. But throwing them away because they’ve been turned into something that can’t be eaten anymore doesn’t seem like useful advertising to me.