Grapes are a vines babies

A thought occurred to me yesterday while I was working with my operations team on a reasonably complex data issue. We were waiting for the results of a program to come back and I was nibbling at the grapes in the company fruit bowl. For those of you that don't have office based lives, the latest must have accessory is company provided fruit. Fresh fruit is delivered to the office every other day, and staff get to munch for free. It's a HR thing aimed at us all leading healthier lives. I'm all for it.

So I'm sitting there eating grapes, big fat juicy seedless grapes, the best sort. I felt a bit guilty that they'd come in from Kenya via Air freight, not so environmentally friendly, and I felt my carbon footprint flex ever so slightly.

I'm eating grapes and suddenly the thought occurs to me, that these grapes are the vines babies. Grapes are the equivalent of eggs surely. The plant-world equivalent of an unborn foetus.

I'm not a vegetarian. I eat meat and dairy, so really this shouldn't matter should it. Milk is not the innocent white-coloured water we pour over cereals, but the fluid used by a mother cow to feed baby calves. Eggs are unborn chicks.

If vegetarians don't eat meat and vegans don't eat meat or dairy. What do you call someone who doesn't eat meat, dairy or fruit and vegetables??

Answers on a postcard...

The True Cost of Cheap Food

A dispatches investigation into how the supermarkets are cashing in on the credit crunch by encouraging the trading down to own label value lines.


I find myself drawn naturally to programs that slag supermarkets off (we all know it's fashionable to be anti-supermarket). I've worked in retail for more than 15 years, including more than 11 years working for an international retailer, so as a retail expert, you could say it's part of my job to keep an eye on programmes like this. I find myself usually both agreeing and disagreeing to the various points in the show, and the degree to which this happens depends greatly on the quality of the show.


This particular program is better than many other 'supermarkets are really bad' type shows. It was full of stats, many of which I captured and I've documented at the end of the post, and it's main point was that cheap food can be improved very easily and very cheaply, usually for less than 1 pence per sausage/apple pie/cheese slice.


It suggested that supermarkets should improve the quality and take the hit on their own margin. I'm not sure I agree with that and given that we're only talking about increasing the price of a pack of 8 value sausages by 8 pence, why should they. However, since that 8 pence produces a significantly better product, I rather think the show should have stressed the point that supermarkets should wherever possible, provide the best quality product. They're allowed to make a profit out of it.


I'm toying with the idea of doing a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and raising a motion at the Tesco AGM to force them to improve the quality of their sausages. If enough people comment on this post in favour of this action I'll do it. Pass this on to your friends...


Now for the stats

Beef Burgers
How much protein is their in premium vs economy burgers?? grams protein per 100g

Asda - premium 23, economy 20
Tesco - premium 23, economy 19
Iceland - premium 25, economy 18

Tomatoes
How much of the anti-oxidant lycopene in premium vs economy tomatoes??

Tesco - premium 5.5, economy 3.4
Asda - premium 6.5, economy 3.6
Sainsburys - premium 5.2, economy 3.6
Morrisons - premium 5.1, economy 4.1
Aldi - premium 5.1, economy 3.4
Lidl - economy 3.8
Iceland - premium 5.5, economy 3.3

Chicken breasts
The percentage of meat in chicken breasts.

Asda - 82%
Iceland - 85%
Morrisons - 88%
Tesco - 84%

The remaining percentage is made up of varying combinations of the following water, salt, stabilisers, dextrose, polyphosphate and liquid glucose.

Sausages
The percentage of protein in a sausage. (protein is an indication of meat content)

Tesco - premium 15.8, economy 11.2
Asda - n/a
Morrisons - premium14.3, economy 9.0
Sainsburys - premium 15.3, economy 8.3
Iceland - premium 12.0, economy 11.6
Aldi - n/a
Lidl - premium 15.3, economy 12.9

Data Visualization Golden Rules

Last week I posted about a friend of mine, John Brookmyre, who blogged about getting started with cloud computing. It's a great post and John's blog is something that's definately worth keeping an eye on, because he understands and can communicate business intelligence very well in addition to being able to deliver technically in some 20+ platforms.



John's latest post, is about business intelligence data visualization, something that I've been very interested in for the 2 years, and have written about my experiences in the following;

• User Centred Design and Business Intelligence
• Business Intelligence Dashboards

Interestingly, Johns post has been commented on by Tableau Software, who are niche players in the BI market, but among the industry leaders in BI data visualisation. You can trial the software, which I did about 9 months ago when I was looking for alternatives to Microsoft Performance Point Server.



On that occasion the client purchased PPS instead, which we deployed via a customised sharepoint front end. We got round the limitations of both PPS and sharepoint with some clever visualisation tricks and the result was stunning. I'd been reading Stephen Few's blog for a while, (he's a modern day Edward Tufte) and also had some recent experience of heuristic evaluation, which meant I was well up to speed on usability and visualization. If your interested in getting into the subject then these are good places to start.



Back to Tableau though. It's a very interesting product and I wasn't able to get through it all in the 28 days. I managed some very pleasing visualisations involving multiple graphs in a grid formation. The advantages of this being you waste very little space on title's and legends as you benefit from a write once, use many policy. I managed to get 25 graphs on screen (5x5) in a layout that wasn't off-putting, and I could see it working for business users. I've pasted in below an example of the tableau website, that demonstrates the type of visualisation I'm describing. (I like to think that mine was better though!)