Stockholm, Sweden
Turning Old Dough Into Fresh Compost
The Green Box from Agrenco is a new machine designed to reduce the amount of restaurant waste going into landfills. At the end of each night, any remaining food in the restaurant can be tossed into the Green Box with a mix of 15% cardboard. About 12 to 14 hours later, the Green Box churns out fresh and sterile compost, which can be sold at the store, given away to customers as a marketing freebie or used in home gardens. The Green Box requires no additional materials to produce the compost, other than the regular cardboard from boxes found in any professional kitchen. An Agrenco rep also verified you could even add old pizza dough into the Green Box, as long as you add enough cardboard to the mix.
Bergamo, Italy
The Beauty of Black Venus
Black Venus is an aromatic rice that’s so enchanting, it was named after the goddess of love. Its natural ebony hue derives from a high concentration of fibers, minerals and antioxidants, making it a widely acclaimed supergrain. Italmill, a leading Italian flour company on the global market, has released its own mixture of traditional wheat flour mixed with Black Venus rice under the brand name Nostrano Riso Venere. Italmill says the new product is 100% Italian and grown without any chemicals along the river Po. “The beautiful color and scent of the rice flour has a novel appeal to customers while also creating a dough that is very healthy and contains less gluten,” says Oxana Bokta, a technical assistant at Italmill.
Paris, France
Pizza Toast
Look what’s popping up in Europe: The Italian company La Pizza +1 has just released Tostami, an Italian brand that brings ready-made focaccia with premelted cheese on top to toasters everywhere. This innovative pizza-toast product was spotted at the Parizza pizza show in Paris earlier this year. Now the people of France can enjoy warm pizza without even preheating their oven. Tostami is available in French and Italian grocery stores and gas stations.
Vologda, Russia
Oh, Pretty Woman!
How do you advertise a Bavarian-style pizza without a hearty helping of cleavage? That’s the question nine-store pizza chain Pizza Factory (ПиццаФабрика), located in Vologda, surely pondered while developing a new print ad for PMQ Russia. While alcohol and cigarette ads are strictly forbidden in Russia, no one, it seems, has a problem with sexual imagery. While the ad shocked my American sensibilities (while giving me a good chuckle), Elena Shirokova, PMQ Russia’s editor-in-chief, was “very surprised” to hear this ad probably wouldn’t fly in the U.S. edition. “We [celebrate] the sexuality of women,” Shirokova says, “and we presume it is normal for a woman to be sexy and attractive for a man. We advocate femininity and the natural beauty of women in advertising.”
