The fasting shelf

Walk a Cairo supermarket this week and read the small print. A great many packs carry a line saying the product is suitable for the fasting days.

That line is doing more work in the store than most campaigns in it.

The Coptic fasts run for a large part of the year, and while one is on, a household drops animal products. The current one ends this week, on the eve of Christmas on the seventh. For the weeks before that, whole categories move: the milk alternatives, the oil-based spreads, the biscuits made without butter, the frozen and tinned meals that were reformulated years ago so a family could keep the fast without cooking twice.

None of this is in a regional plan. I have read plenty of calendars for Egypt built somewhere else, and they carry Ramadan, Eid, the national days, a summer dip and a fourth quarter. The fasts are not on them. Not because anyone decided against them. Because the person drawing the calendar had never heard of them, and nobody in the market was asked.

So the demand gets served anyway, by the only marketing document ever written for it. A label. A short line, usually in a corner of the pack, decided by whoever handles packaging rather than by anyone in brand, and it is the first thing the shopper looks for.

A market can run a season the head office does not know exists. It still shows up in the sell-through, where it gets explained as noise, or as a competitor promotion, or as seasonality, which is the word a plan uses for a pattern it has not identified.

The shopper found the season without any help at all. The plan is still looking for it, in the wrong month, under another name.