Tag Archives: Food

March 1, 2013 · 11:53 am

Mobile meals

I’m delinquent in sharing today’s bit of Foodie Friday Fun since it revolves around a study done in January.  The IAB  and Viddle looked into how people are using their mobile devices to order food and the results are instructive for most businesses, not just restaurants.

English: This is actually Tom's Restaurant, NY...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to the “Mealtime Goes Mobile” survey, 60% of us order takeout food or delivery once a week (yes, even those of us who love to cook sometimes can’t make the time!).  In fact, 2% identify themselves as doing so every day, although I’m sure I good portion of that involves lunch.  As one might expect, pizza, chinese food, and sandwiches and burgers head the list of the types of food ordered most often.

This is where it gets instructive   44% of people use mobile devices to check phone numbers (“mobile devices” includes tablets and we know most tablet use is in the home).  Significant numbers also use them to find locations, check menus, and to find coupons.  Obviously, incentives such as coupons are a big driver of business, but so is ease of use.  In fact, over a third expressed an interest in an app that remembered past orders.

What’s instructive is this – any restaurant that hasn’t done a few things is clearly missing out on a huge potential market.  A website not optimized for mobile is a big problem.  Since half of consumers have installed at least one restaurant app and 15% have three or more installed, investing in app development is another factor that restaurants should be planning as part of their marketing budgets.  The same points probably apply to your business, but unless you’ve taken the time to check your analytics, how would you know?  Using the segmentation ability to check bounce rates and user habits within the mobile segment and comparing it to the web segment makes sense.  Integrating non-digital behaviors with those report is possible, although harder (and a much longer explanation than you or I would like on a Friday!).

As we all know, consumer behaviors are changing a lot.  Are we changing our businesses along with them?

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February 15, 2013 · 12:18 pm

The Saying Vs. Doing Conundrum

Foodie Friday! Today I want to build on something discovered by the folks at The Hartman Group.

English: A common variety of gorp (trail mix) ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They have a site called HartmanSalt (which is not a site about ways to increase your blood pressure). They conduct regular surveys about food and food consumption.  I was checking out something on snacking which triggered a business thought.

As the results show, Americans love to snack.  We consume 2.3 snacks per day on average.  This tends to happen later in the day and generally at home.  What triggered the business thought were the next two data points.  57% of the respondents in the survey said it is important or very important  for the food and/or beverages to be healthy.  However the two most often mentioned snack foods are chips and soda. What we say doesn’t always align with what we do and that’s an important thing to remember in business.

That dichotomy is one of the things we find in focus groups – the things in which people express interest are not necessarily the things they’ll buy. Having done a few of them as a part of designing and building web sites, how users tell you they’ll use something and what they actually do as you observe them can be very different.   It’s a point we see in management all the time.  How managers say they behave and how they actually do are often out of sync.  No manager, for example, will tell you that they mistreat employees and they say that they always are there for their staffs.  Ask the folks on the other end if that’s true.

I’ve had friends who couldn’t understand why they were fat.  They said they ate carefully and watched their portions.  When they started keeping a food log (and there are some great apps for that!) they found out that what they said vs. what they did was showing up in their larger pant size.  It’s something all of us in business need to think about – are we listening to what people say or are we verifying it against what they really do?  How are we handling the conundrum the difference between the two?  That solution is often the key to success.

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January 25, 2013 · 11:37 am

Garlic And Customers

Friday means time for our Foodie Fun screed.  Today, I want to talk about garlic.

An Ikea garlic press, with pressed garlic.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You’ve probably cooked with it and I’m dead certain you’ve eaten it.  One thing you’ve probably noticed as you’ve done either is that raw garlic can have an unpleasant, sharp, hotness about it.  If you turn up the heat and try to cook that out and aren’t careful you can burn it, which makes it incredibly bitter.  Even when you cook it carefully, if you do your prep work on the garlic too early and it sits, the flavor can be off.  Who thought something so small could be so difficult!

The root of the problem is something called allicin, which is a compound that forms when you cut into the cells and continues to build as it sits.  The way to handle the build-up is either not to let this happen in the first place, giving it immediate attention by cooking it or to put the chopped garlic into something acidic such as lemon juice to convert the allicin into a few more mellow compounds with long, hard to spell names that also form when the garlic is cooked (they’re sulfides for you chemists out there).  You’d do that for a salad dressing, for example, where you’re using raw garlic.

I realize this is a business blog so you’re probably wondering what the heck garlic has to do with your business.  What came to my mind was how we deal with other people – customers, clients, co-workers, and bosses.  Once something injures them – as when we cut garlic – the defense mechanisms spring into action – just as garlic forms allicin.  The longer we delay dealing with the situation, the more of what we don’t want builds up – allicin or anger, in the case of the humans.  We need to handle problems quickly, either by resolving them or by putting them into a context that allows us the time we need to formulate the solution.  Reacting with intense heat – burning the garlic – usually doesn’t work too well.  In the case of the aforementioned groups, letting them know you hear and understand their situation and that you are working to resolve it is the equivalent of the gentle heat needed to turn raw garlic into something fragrant and delicious.

I don’t advise mixing my metaphors here –  dealing with a teed-off person face to face after eating garlic isn’t going to help matters.  However, the lesson we can learn from the plant just might!

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