Peperami

Peperami
Product type Meat
Country United Kingdom
Introduced 1955 / 1982
Related brands BiFi
Ranger
Markets United Kingdom, Germany

Peperami is a pork sausage snack manufactured by Unilever in Germany. According to Unilever, it was first shipped to the UK by accident in a container which was supposed to be carrying pâté. The company decided to attempt to sell the shipment to the UK market under the brand name 'Peperami'. Several new varieties have been introduced over the years with varying degrees of success. Peperami may be interpreted as a portmanteau of the words "pepperoni" and "salami", but the company does not want the product to be misunderstood as a combination of these different meats. In the year 1955, Peperami was one of the products from Nabisco. When the mistake was made, the company tried the meat snack and enjoyed it. This resulted in Unilever relaunching the snack.[1]

In 2007, to try to retain appeal to an ever more health conscious market, the manufacturers of Peperami revised the formula to produce a product with a reduction in fat, saturated fat and salt content.[2]

In Germany, the snack is alternatively sold as BiFi and instead made out of beef. Some discontinued peperami products in Britain are still available under the BiFi brand in Germany. Another spin-off snack in Germany is the Ranger stick.

In 2011, Peperami released a series of dog toys featuring the familiar Animal character. Toys include the "Salami saucer", "salami screamer", "the little nipper", "the big one", "meaty muncher", "the football fetch toy", "sausage stretch" and "flaming finger"[3][4][5]

Unilever announced that on 21 February 2014, it had signed a definitive agreement for the sale of its meat snacks business to Jack Link’s, for an undisclosed amount.

The sale includes the brands Bifi, sold in Germany, Benelux, Austria and Switzerland, and Peperami, which retails in the UK and Ireland.

Main types

Current variants

Discontinued variants

Advertising

Since 1993 the brand has been advertised by a talking peperami known as "the Animal" ("That crazy wee fella"), who was voiced by Ade Edmondson until 2010 and since 2014 is voiced by Enn Reitel. The product is marketed as The Spicy Meat Snack with the slogan "Peperami: It's a Bit of an Animal".

Historically, each variant of Peperami has had a different version of the tagline depending on which variant is advertised. The Cheezie variant never had a slogan, instead the cheezie character DJ Cheezie (voiced by Lenny Henry) would normally say something (Usually Any Hotter, I'd be Fondue) next to an image of the snack and 'New!' banner. DJ Cheezie appeared in the first four advertisements for the snack. He resembled a yellow version of "the animal" with hair, and ran a fictional radio station. In the late 1980s, starting in 1987, before "the animal" was featured in the advertiments, a series of advertisements with the slogan "Get Your Teeth Into A Peperami" aired instead. One such advertisement from 1989 titled Venus Fly Trap saw a man feed a Venus flytrap a Peperami.

Unilever recently decided to drop its ad agency of 16 years, Lowe, and has turned to the crowdsourcing platform IdeaBounty to find creative ideas for its next Peperami TV campaign. Unilever had worked with Lowe on the snack food brand since 1993, but decided to crowdsource its brief and take “The Animal” to the public, rather than a small team of creatives.[6] The result was the advert for the latest product, Peperami Nibblers. Likewise, Unilever used integrated agency Billington Cartmell to tie into the 2010 Football World Cup, with the character – now transformed into the "Fanimal" – on posters (notably in pub's gents toilets with risque slogans), print ads, radio spots, an interactive website and even distributed in the form of a shouting rubber mascot.[7]

Other advertisements, in other media aside from television, include Animal, released in 1996 as an advergame,[8] and a notable ad, printed in magazines and on billboards, featured the "Animal" burning on a heater, as a launch for their new Firestick flavour. This ad was accompanied by a television advert titled Arson Fire (which was a remake of the ad for the Hot flavour).

Some of the television adverts appear on the Peperami website. These are Horror Movie (July 1993), Wimp (March 1994), Kebab (May 1994), Arson Fire (March 2004), Tender (September 2008) and Exfoliate (September 2008)

In May 2014, after a four-year break a new advert was launched featuring the Animal eating one of his hands as part of his five a day.

In April 2015 Jack Link's launched a new series of adverts for Peperami and BIFI, starring the original animal after a new and tasty CGI make-over. The ads were directed by Pierre Bertrand and produced by creative agency BSUR and production company Not To Scale Amsterdam.

Slogans

Meat content

Peperami Original is generally made with 37.5g of pork meat for every 25g of sausage and Peperami Wideboy is made from 60g of pork meat per 40g sausage. The discrepancy is due to weight loss when the meat is dried, from the loss of moisture in the meat.

Fat content

Notes

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Friday, April 22, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.