Category Archives: food

December 20, 2013 · 9:55 am

Kitchens Without Garbage

It’s the last Foodie Friday before Christmas and this week  I want to talk about garbage.

Garbage

(Photo credit: Editor B)

It’s on my mind because last night I watched an interesting episode of Chopped, the Food Network’s show where cooks have to use a basket of ingredients that don’t seem to go with one another to make great dishes in 30 minutes.  The baskets last night all consisted of “garbage” – food that most home cooks often toss out.  Herb stems, bread ends, fish heads and other generally discarded items made up the ingredient lists.  The cooks did well and as food professionals they demonstrated the principle that nothing should be wasted by  a professional.  Or as The Dead would say, “one man gathers what another man spills.”

Jacques Pepin has said this for years on his TV shows – use everything, throw nothing out.  He even takes leftovers and turns them into new dishes.   Which of course is an excellent thought for all business professionals, especially as most businesses move into content creation (surely you’ve heard that everyone is a publisher, haven’t you!?).

Some of my clients fail to observe the immutable law that there is no garbage can on the internet.  While something shot for a TV commercial may not be usable in that 30-second format, the web has no such time constraints.  The speech given at a small conference to an interested audience of a hundred people can become a blog post and then summarized for inclusion in an email newsletter (talk about making something new out of the leftovers!). The audience of a hundred can now be thousands with very little extra effort.

Everything we create in our business lives has some value.  Perhaps that value isn’t to us in the moment but tossing anything of value out when there are so many ways to slice and dice it into something quite tasty is more than a waste.  License it out, recut it, format it for another channel.  The trash bin is the last place anything ought to go.  Agreed?

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December 13, 2013 · 11:45 am

Curating Frustration

I realize yesterday might have seemed as if it was Foodie Friday since the topic was food related.

English: Steacie Science and Engineering Libra...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, Foodie Friday the 13th is today, and I’m going to focus on an unlucky site’s marketing today. While I’m not going to mention their name, I’ll say upfront that it’s a site I generally find incredibly helpful. They curate recipes and do so with beautiful photos. Their emails are just as pretty and generally quite useful. Which is why I’m calling them out today and hopefully making a business point in the process.

This morning’s email was about side dishes which will “compliment your holiday spread.”  Of the 21 photos they used to tease me to click through, four were latkes, one was a noodle kugel, and two involved challah.  Since Hanukah has been over for a couple of weeks, that “holiday spread” is long gone.  In fact, many of the other recipes in the collection were not really appropriate for a winter holiday at all.  Grilled potatoes?

My point is this.  If you’re curating content, you’re supposed to be picking the best content that applies to a particular subject.  Relevance is a big deal, as is how the content is organized and presented.  This site generally gets high marks for the latter two but when a third of what you’re presenting is appropriate for a holiday that’s long gone, you’ve failed.

You might be thinking “well, this isn’t an issue for me since we don’t curate content.”  I’d be surprised if that was true, dear reader.  Almost every business is in the content creation and/or distribution business these days, either of your own content or that of others which you think might be useful to your audience.  Email, social channels, and your own website (not to mention advertising!) are all places where you’re publishing.  Being relevant and useful are critical.  Organizing it in such a way that readers can slice and dice it as they like is important.  It’s all part of listening to your customers and continuing the conversation.

Giving someone a great recipe for grilled anything while the grill is covered in snow not only isn’t useful, it’s frustrating.  Hitting them up with the right content at the right time in the right channel with an easy way to take action should they so choose is magnificent.  Which will you choose to do?

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December 12, 2013 · 12:07 pm

Stews Leonard’s And The Thumbtack In The Chowder

Today’s tale ended up providing a good business lesson but began as a potentially lethal bit of negligence.

Oyster crackers are better with this than thumbtacks!

Oyster crackers are better with this than thumbtacks!

I went to see my folks the other day and my Mom had something interesting to show me. On her counter was a container of clam chowder from the Stew Leonard’s store down the street from their house.  She had purchased the soup the day before.  On top of the container was a thumbtack as you can see in the photo.  I don’t know about you, but my Dad prefers crackers with his chowder and doesn’t ever consider thumbtacks as a condiment.  However, that is exactly what he found as he ate.

How the tack got in the chowder is a serious problem but not our focus today.  Obviously the commercial kitchen should not have small, sharp, unsterile objects anywhere near food but let’s put that aside and focus on what happened when I returned to the store.   Stew’s is known for great customer service.  At the front of the store here in Norwalk is a big stone that says:

We’ve been going to the Norwalk store for 30+ years and have always found that they practice what they preach.  However, we’ve never had an issue like this.  In any event, I took the tack and the chowder to customer service at the Danbury store and explained the problem.  The young woman didn’t ask for a receipt nor question me in any way.  She just apologized, asked me if I had other shopping to do and to please come back to see her when I had finished.  Upon my return she waved me to the front of the short line, asked for the new clam chowder I had picked up, tagged it as paid and refunded the price in cash.  I gave the soup to my folks along with their refund and they were happy.

We get opportunities in business to take bad experiences and make them worse or to make them better.  This was the latter which I think is a model about handling a customer problem.  Address it immediately, admit blame, tell the customer how you’re going to solve the problem, make restitution, and see if that resolves it.  I suppose if I had carried on about wanting gift cards or something more I might have got it but I wasn’t there to take advantage( I realize some customers are!).  They could have asked me for my parents’ email to send them an apology (about the only improvement I would have made).  They were being adult about it – I thought I’d reciprocate.

Many places would have denied there was a problem (that’s impossible, sir, maybe you dropped it in while you were heating it up).  Many would have demanded a receipt (maybe you were storing someone else’s chowder in one of our containers).  Some would have made me solve the problem (so what do you want me to do about it) instead of offering a solution themselves.  They did none of those things and so what could have been a series of horrible posts on social media are, instead, a blog post that praises them.

How would you have handled it had your customer found the tack?  Any differently?  Could this have been handled any better?

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