23 Jan It’s time to shine! 15 years of Product of the Year
TODAY’S Product of the Year awards mark 15 years since we started celebrating the very best in innovation on supermarket shelves.
The talented teams behind Britain’s best-loved brands will gather at the Park Lane Sheraton Grand Hotel in London for the 2019 awards to recognise the top products bought to the market in the past 18 months.
When Product of the Year CEO Mike Nolan first brought Product of the Year to Britain in 2004, many of the people invited this Thursday would still have been at school.
But a lot can happen in a decade-and-a-half: Products come and go. Crazes explode then fizzle. Innovations change and grow. Costs go up and down (but usually up!). Fortunately, Product of the Year has remained a constant.
As a reminder of a few of the things our awards have outlived, here’s a snapshot of life in the UK back in 2004:
- Heinz Top Down Tomato Ketchup was one of our very first winners after its 2004 launch, turning the world upside down.
- Television was transformed. The X Factor hit our screens for the first time, along with Strictly Come Dancing, won by newsreader Natasha Kaplinsky.
- This was the year that “thefacebook” was registered for the first time. MySpace had been around for just a year.
- In May 2004 the last Friends episode was aired, watched by 8.6 million people, leaving a generation in mourning (and watching re-runs every since).
- Morrisons bought Safeway.
- Among our first winners were Gillette Mach 3 and Johnson’s Baby Wipes, which have been continuously innovated over the past 15 years and are still going strong.
- The average cost of a pint of milk was 35p. It’s gone up around 9p a pint since.
- We were mad for wraps, with the chicken caesar salad wrap knocking the egg and cress sandwich off the perch as the number one sandwich at Tesco.
- The Ford Focus was the year’s best-selling car.
- Is this all a bit of a foggy memory? That may be because 2004 was the year that alcohol sales peaked!
We’re proud that the past 15 years have seen Product of the Year go from strength to strength and look forward to celebrating that success at our awards ceremony this week.
If you can’t be there in person, keep watching #productoftheyear on social media where all the winners will be announced live.