Quality, the icing on the cake

When it comes to good food, Switzerland has no reason to envy its French neighbours – despite their having elevated gastronomy to a veritable art form, no less! Large agri-food groups, small labels promoting local specialities, Michelin-starred chefs and the green shoots of foodtech start-ups focused on the food of tomorrow – they each have their own way of serving up Switzerland’s culinary heritage, yet all with the same special ingredient: quality.

Appetite for change

For the food industry, the past decade has brought no end of new challenges: sustainable development, fair-trade farming, food security, organic certification and the call to combat food waste, to name but a few. Aware of how dear these issues are to consumers, food brands are careful to emphasise them in their PR. Whether they are destined for packaging, labelling with strictly regulated nutritional information, or multichannel marketing campaigns (ads, posters, flyers, social media, radio or television commercials), the translations we provide for big names across the industry – from cheese, dairy products and chocolate to meat and wine – are our bread and butter. As for the public’s appetite for buying and ordering food online, which has become insatiable since the pandemic, it has only broadened our scope of activity.

Cooking up a storm with the latest linguistic trends

Every year, new words are added to the dictionary, reflecting changing behaviours (such as veganism or flexitarianism) and foodie trends (e.g. fakeaway – a DIY takeaway), not to mention the globalisation of our food culture with the widespread popularisation of vocabulary like chia, chimichurri, edamame, ghee, gomasio, gyoza, kimchi, kofta, matcha, mochi, naan, poké, spritz, tahini, teriyaki, wasabi and yuzu. You’ve probably just realised that you not only already speak fluent Cuisine 2.0, but you’ve also got what it takes to ace your next game of Scrabble! And with the explosion of cookery shows, our everyday vocabulary has been enriched with technical terms such as sous-vide or deglaze, that until very recently were the preserve of professional chefs.

The future, they say, lies in insect-based foods. No matter, we’ll be right here, pouring over the pages of entomological* tomes. But since – for the time being, at least – we’re more into crackers than crickets, it’s time to head off for after-work drinks… Given today’s topic, that’s verging on excessive!

*Term referring to the study of insects, as we all know, right? Yeah, me neither☻.