This is what happened to minced meat with carrots

The store has a large selection of different minced meats. Joel Maisalmi

Popo, a combination minced meat of pork and carrot, entered the market eight years ago in 2017.

It was visible in the headlines and there was a lot of buzz about it, just like now about Snellmann’s new light beef and pea powder.

But what happened to Popo mincemeat?

Head of HKFoods Finnish meat business Mikko Järvinen says that the fall of 2016 was a time of wild vegetable craze, when vegetables started to be added to various products.

– Popo’s first year of sales was good, in the second year sales dropped considerably and in the third year the consumer returned to regular minced meat, Järvinen says.

At the beginning of 2020, the production of Popo was stopped. The Corona that started in the same year revolutionized the buying behavior of Finns anyway, then we went back to the familiar and safe. The more special ground meats remained in the store.

And Popo didn’t blow the bank even in his first year. There can be several reasons for this.

Järvinen reflects that Finns consume more ground beef than ground pork. Finns are a nation of mincemeat and they buy a lot of mincemeat, but many people in the store operate on autopilot, so to speak, that is, as usual, they always buy the same mincemeat without even thinking about the whole thing. Because of this, minced meat is a difficult category to introduce new products.

In addition to carrot mincemeat, HKFoods has also had mincemeat seasoned with tomato and basil and mincemeat seasoned with bacon.

Järvinen states that hybrid food is a bigger phenomenon that has been recognized in restaurants. Vegetable protein alternatives have developed a lot in recent years, so the taste and texture of the products are better than before.

Järvinen thinks that hybrid products will first gain a bigger foothold on the foodservice side, i.e. in professional kitchens. There, for example, nutritional recommendations are taken into account in more detail.