The Tom Anstey Column
www.parkworld-online.com
Enough with the puff
Are we creating new concepts for the sake of it rather than truly creating something new? Tom Anstey believes it’s time to stop pretending and start innovating…
THE NEXT EVOLUTION OF BREAKFAST: GLOBAL CULINARY LEADER UNVEILS THE CHRONOS BRAN V1. In a monumental leap forward for morning gastronomy, innovators have engineered a world- first, paradigm-shifting breakfast platform: the CHRONOS Bran V1™. Bypassing traditional culinary science, this
disruptive dining engine deploys a dual-core spread architecture. It begins with high- performance rustic brown bread toasted to precise thermal equilibrium. Upon this crunchy canvas, a melted dairy-lipid interface fuses flawlessly with a velvety, slow-roasted peanut butter matrix. The breakthrough culmination features an
ultra-premium, high-velocity strawberry compote, delivering unprecedented synergy. CHRONOS Bran V1™ fundamentally shatters
the boundaries of what a slice of toast can achieve. This is a radical, hyper-calibrated flavour event. So, just in case you’re wondering what word soup you’ve just swallowed, this is a fake press
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release I made up, complete with silly names and unnecessary capital letters that are supposedly ‘key’ to the brand. The innovation? Buttered toast with jam and
peanut butter.
The art of the technicality t’s a simple dish – dish probably being a bit of an exaggeration, in all honesty. Combining bread, jam and peanut butter isn’t fancy. It isn’t special. But throw enough PR puff at it and suddenly you
can present it as a global innovation capable of shaking up an entire genre. That’s how I feel about 99% of the ‘innovations’
and ‘world-firsts’ that fall into my inbox each week, most of them being the ‘best’ on some sort of technicality. I’ve seen so, SO many companies take two of
their own products, combine them into one and claim an ‘innovative world first’. I’ve seen rollercoaster manufacturers call their
latest product ‘revolutionary’ because it travels five miles an hour faster or is three feet taller than the one down the road.
Then there’s the ‘only product of its kind in
Europe’, knowing full well there are 50 across the rest of the world and three more opening in Europe – although, admittedly, two of those may not arrive until a fortnight after the first one. And don’t get me started on the trade show
reveals. Something is a ‘world first’ because it has
been themed around a niche IP. A ride vehicle is supposedly revolutionary because it has been designed to look like the Eiffel Tower. A celebrity turns up to endorse something that is essentially the same model already operating at 30 parks, but this one happens to have their signature red- and-yellow colour scheme. There’s a difference between finding a new
way to present something and actually creating something new.
The wheel doesn’t need reinventing I get it. You’ve got to hype up your products. You’ve got to sell them. And, of course, you’ve got to be able to say that you’re the best.
OCTOBER 2026
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