Just the other day I was having a discussion about how sometimes food doesn’t always come out the color you’d like on a bilboard. Like seeing one that’s been up a while and a red, juicy steak starts to look kind of purplish. Well this product is purple on purpose. It’s Hellers Purplo’s Honey Cocktail Sausages. They came out with them at the end of last year but I just noticed them on AdJab.

New Zealand award winning smallgoods manufacturer Heller Tasty has just launched a world first – a purple cocktail sausage called Purplo’s. Over a year in the making, Purplo’s were marketed tested at the New Zealand Kids Fair in July and the New Zealand Food Show in August.

Todd Heller, director of Heller Tasty, said the response from those shows vindicated the hard work that went into producing the Purplo’s. “We would have had at least 20 goes at getting the purple casing right. It was too brown, then too red, but in the end we succeeded, although there were times when we thought we would put the whole idea in the ‘too hard’ basket. In the end we had to import the natural food colouring from Germany to make sure we had it right,” he said.

This is why you always need to pay attention at those NAMA conventions. You might just hear about something that will give you a creative idea. That’s what happened to Todd.

Heller got the idea when at a marketing seminar earlier last year when there was a case study on Heinz introducing purple ketchup in the United States to appeal to young children and teenagers.

“I immediately thought, why can’t we do that with a sausage? And now we have, although we went about it differently. They just changed the colour of the sauce, but not the content. We have gone the extra step and made an entirely new product,” he said.