Tag Archives: Foodie

February 22, 2013 · 10:06 am

Immersion Blenders

Do you own an immersion blender? They’re the Foodie Friday Fun topic this week.

This is a wand blender (also known as a stick ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Maybe you call it a wand blender or a stick blender or maybe you call it the “boat motor” as do a few TV chefs. Whatever you call it, the tool is a sharp blade at the end of a stick that a cook uses to blend food in a pot or bowl. Soups, whipped cream, mayonnaise, and pesto are all things for which I’ve used mine.  Restaurants use much larger versions in their kitchens and they’re really useful to have in the home kitchen.

There was an article on them called “Bandages Not Included” in the NY Times two months ago.  One thing that happens fairly often in the home kitchen is that cooks try to clean food off of them while they’re still plugged in.  The blade is very sharp.  The on/off switch is under your thumb by design.  What could possibly go wrong?   While I’ve been fortunate never to have pureed a finger into a stew I was thickening, the article got me thinking about business.

A lot of firms use the business equivalent of an immersion blender: social media.  Like the stick blender, the tool seems very simple and is easy to use.  A business can also cut off a finger pretty easily.  In the last year, KitchenAid, McDonalds, StubHub and others have been in the spotlight for doing exactly that.  Personal tweets sent from a company account, commercial messages tied to trending topics without understanding why they were trending, and “set and forget” use of automated tools have caused brands massive headaches and public black eyes.

Companies perform the  social equivalent of cleaning off the blender blade without unplugging it first every day.  Simple tools often lull us into a sense of complacency and that’s dangerous whether we’re in the kitchen or on the Internet.  That’s why your business’ social media activity needs to be managed just as professionally as the rest of your business and not by an unsupervised intern or someone unfamiliar with each medium’s particular potential pitfalls.  These tools are dangerous even though they’re incredibly useful.  Like the immersion blender they can be the best way to accomplish a branding task.  Provided, of course, you do so and hang on to all your fingers.

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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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February 8, 2013 · 10:28 am

Finding Nemo

Foodie Friday Fun begins with a look out the window as Winter Storm Nemo approaches. That arrival seems to have spurred a rush to the supermarket by everyone in our town, at least according to my sister who found mostly bare shelves when she went this morning. I suppose we could talk today about what one can prepare when there might not be electricity to operate an oven, microwave or many stoves. We have a gas range but without electricity there is no range hood so we have to be careful about what we make. But that’s not really the food subject today.

Finding Nemo (video game)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Making sure that there’s ample food, water, and batteries is becoming a regular event in our area as we’ve been hit by massive storms a few times over the last two years.  The accuracy with which these events have been predicted, even down to the time when the storms arrive and depart, is pretty amazing.  What the forecasters can’t predict, however, is which trees will cause a power problem or block access to roads.  Even with much better tools, there are big uncertainties that will affect our specific situation.  That’s today’s business point.

The hardest part of your job as a leader to see over the horizon.  The next hardest part is convincing others that what you’re seeing is right and to take the appropriate action based on your forecast.  How angry would you be if you bought gallons of water and lots of food only to find out that the blizzard was a couple of inches of snow?  How dangerous is it when they predict a dusting of snow and you wake up to eighteen inches of heavy, wet slush?  Being able to assemble the known information into a cogent prediction of the future is a skill that comes only with time and experience (easy to say coming from an older guy, I know).  Take our friend Nemo, here.  There are a dozen computer models that disagreed a day or two ago about the storm’s impact.  A few even do so today.  Which of the models you choose to believe can have an impact, especially if you’re the person deciding to call in plow drivers or buy salt for the roads.

I think if I could wish for one thing in business it would be tomorrow’s newspaper.  I’d then have a perfect look over the horizon, at least for a day.  For now all we can do is to try to find the Nemos that will impact our business lives that are lurking out there.  Then we need to get to the store and make sure our team is prepared to hunker down and ride it out.

Now, where did I put the spare batteries?

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