Category Archives: food

April 5, 2019 · 2:21 pm

What Kind Of Cold Cut Are You?

It’s Foodie Friday, which means that the weekend is upon us. Maybe you’ll use the downtime to catch up on your reading or non-work web activity. I’ll bet you might even fall into the trap of taking one of those online quizzes.

If you go on a site like Buzzfeed, you won’t have to read very far before you’ll encounter a food-related quiz of some sort. “We’ll Guess Your Exact Age If You Take This French Fry Quiz” or “Your Subway Order Will Determine Where You Should Live.” By the way. according to them, I’m a 23-year-old who should be living in Seattle…

Food quizzes and others are all meant to be good fun, or are they? When Facebook asks me what Harry Potter character I am, don’t I really want to know? Actually, no, I don’t. Let’s think about the “innocuous” quizzes cited above. Asking me about my preferences in fry style, favorite fast-food fry outlet or condiment provides a great deal of information both in the aggregate and about me personally when it comes to targeting me with ads. How can they do that when they don’t know who I am since I didn’t log in? Well, I really did sort of log in since both the Facebook pixel and Twitter pixels are active on the site. They can sell the aggregated information to producers of fries and condiments and fast food chains and they can sell my “pixel” to advertisers of the same.

Then there are the quizzes that ask you to give them an email to send you the results. They’re even more dangerous, as are the quizzes that ask you to answer questions that might be used as security questions (Where did you go to middle school or what was your first car?). We need to understand that since we’re living in the age of surveillance capitalism, everything we do is worth something to someone other than ourselves. Since we don’t have any control much of the time over who is collecting – and selling – our data, we need to be especially wary of every action we take. A “like” is a vote, a “share” is an endorsement. If you don’t believe me, go to your Facebook ad settings and check out what they think your interests and other tidbits are.

What kind of cold cut are you? The kind that gets sliced quite thinly and sold by the pound. Forewarned is forearmed!

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March 29, 2019 · 10:38 am

You Want Anonymity With That?

It’s Foodie Friday and today we have yet another example of how privacy is dead, this time from the food world. OK, I might be a little paranoid here but I think I can see the future in how McDonald’s sees the future and it scares me. Let me explain and then you can weigh in on my thinking.

What Mickey D has done is buy an Artifical Intelligence company. They intend to use the AI to adjust the menu in the drive-through as you pull up. The thinking is that these adjustments will cause you to buy more. You know – promoting cold drinks on hot days or suggesting items that are faster to prepare if the kitchen is in the weeds to keep food orders flowing. It gets scary when the menu changes as you order, suggesting sides after you order your burger.

Now you may see nothing wrong with this. After all, Amazon does this all the time. So does Netflix, suggesting things to you that you should find of interest based on your past behavior. That’s not scary until McDonald’s installs license plate readers and begins associating your food order with your vehicle. Of course, it’s also possible that they could obtain a listing of every device that was in their drive-through. By the hour. Cross-reference that to available phone directories and automobile registrations and NOW how do you feel?

It’s yet another step down the road to full surveillance capitalism, at least in my paranoid mind. There are benefits, no doubt, to McDonald’s, and I’m sure they will be followed by others (maybe even others buying their systems from McDonald’s AI company). Do you really think there are benefits to us, however? I think trust and privacy are going to become even bigger issues for consumers and regulators over the next 12 months and if you’re not thinking that way, you just might be making a mistake.

What happens when Mickey D sells their frequency of use data to the insurance company who then raises your rates because you eat fast food all the time? Sure, when you roll into The Golden Arches while you’re 250 miles from home, it might be nice that they already know what you’d like, but I’d rather have anonymity. You?

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March 15, 2019 · 3:45 pm

It’s Corned Beef Time!

I’m reposting last year’s Foodie Friday post from St. Patrick’s Day. If you’re not following the calendar, Sunday marks the annual celebration of all things Irish and Corned Beef and Cabbage is certainly one of them. As you’ll read below, that’s weird because it’s about as Irish as I am. In any event, I’ve had a busy day preceded by a busy week so I’m off to do something very appropriate to the holiday: hit my local watering hole. Enjoy the weekend, enjoy the holiday, and be safe and make good choices.

It’s Foodie Friday as well as St. Patrick’s Day! Most people in the U.S. associate the holiday with food (as well as with drink). Corned beef and cabbage is generally the food we think of here, and frankly, that’s a little weird since it isn’t really Irish. As the father of two lovely Irish-Jewish daughters, however, I can feel good about it since in many ways it represents the commingling of the Irish and Jewish immigrant communities.

English: Closeup view of A lady shoving a cabb...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After all, corned beef, and beef generally, wasn’t something widely available in Ireland, and you can’t go into a Jewish deli without seeing corned beef on the menu. One explanation is this:

Many maintain that the dish is simply not Irish at all. The close proximity of the Irish and Jewish communities at the time is said to be largely responsible for the popularity of corned beef among the Irish immigrants. According to thekitchenproject.com, when the Irish arrived in America, they couldn’t find a bacon joint like they had in Ireland so they gravitated toward the Jewish corned beef, which was very similar in texture.

I was shopping for my brisket to corn as well as a cabbage yesterday. Despite a huge swath of produce department space having been allocated to cabbages, there wasn’t single cabbage in stock due to a great sale price (I ended up paying 3x the price in the organic department!). The briskets were plentiful although they were packed in those cryovac bags that make it difficult to see through the printed graphics in order to assess the quality of the product.

What’s the business point for you today? First, if you’re running a sale or know that demand will be high due to a holiday, it’s imperative that you have product on hand. Nothing gets a consumer angrier than the lack of product availability. In this case, the store hadn’t procured enough stock to replenish the shelves, even though the item is evergreen, meaning it will still have its regular level of sale after the holiday. Next, make it easy for customers to examine the product. How often do you see an open box in a store where someone has tried to investigate the actual product as opposed to what’s displayed on the box? Frankly, I think one reason online shopping hasn’t completely obliterated the in-store experience is exactly that. People want to see, feel, and smell the product before taking it home. We need to help them! Finally, ask yourself how you can create an experience around the brand or product. It’s easy on a holiday such as this, but marketing needs a push the other 364 days too!

To my Irish friends and relatives, enjoy the day. I’m going to get my brisket going shortly, and I’m going to put bacon in the cabbage to make it a bit more Irish. After all, isn’t authenticity a key marketing asset as well?

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