Since Monday, I’ve been at FMI 2010, the Food Marketing Institute Show in Las Vegas. As with every industry, the economy has impacted grocery shopping, but unlike most other retail segments, we can’t stop eating. We’re just spending less.

In seminars, speakers focused on private label, defined value (not just by price) and demonstrated the importance of making an emotional connection with the consumer. Retailers and manufacturers are recognizing the need to deliver information using technology to reach target audiences with information they want, when they want it and in the way the want it. This includes mobile platforms to deliver recipes, online couponing, and presence on Twitter and Facebook. [more…]

No time to blog, tweet or keep up with Facebook. My son and I are launching a new business and we have been traveling to meet people to form alliances, vet our ideas, and do on-the-ground research. Now we’re finalizing executive summaries and business plans, and doing outreach for funding.

Despite our heads down, nose-to-the-grindstone mode, I have come up for air to mourn the loss of Gourmet and the kind of in-depth food knowledge that is now getting dissipated. In this brave new world where everyone who eats is a food expert, it was comforting to know that editors at Gourmet were respected and appreciated for their decades of experience. [more…]

Recently, I attended the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ conference in Denver. Attendance this year numbered 700, just half the usual expected for this major conference. The economy is taking its toll.

I was especially interested in a session called The Changing Food Section. With competition from blogs and Web sites, some newspaper food editors are going multi-media — producing their own videos, writing blogs and tweeting as a means of branding themselves. Imprinting a personality onto the community in multiple ways helps to make an editor a bit more indispensible to the newspaper. Imagine the uproar if the food editor who visibly and actively supports all community activities — even participating in a pancake eating contest (Flip videoed and linked to the newspaper’s Web site, of course) — is dismissed. Today’s food editors are covering the news and making themselves part of the story, 24/7. Good strategy for holding on to your job. [more…]

Okay, it’s not about basketball.

February and March are the busiest months of the year for me as the run-up to St. Patrick’s Day, the ideal time to promote Irish butter and cheeses for my client, the Irish Dairy Board.

It’s hard to get the food media to mention brand names without a good reason. St. Patrick’s Day provides that reason. If you want to make a genuine Irish feast, you need genuine Irish dairy products. And how do you know which ones are Irish unless you know which brands to buy? While the promotional effort is timed to use St. Patrick’s Day as the news “hook,” truth is, once consumers aquire a taste for Kerrygold butter and cheeses, there’s no reason to wait until another St. Patrick’s Day to buy them again. [more…]

My sons and I have been debating whether the “You!” identified as Time magazine’s person of the year includes me and other Baby Boomers or just refers to Generation Y/Millennials (those 12 to 29 years old in 2006). Unlike my sons, I don’t have a MySpace or Facebook page, I’m not in starring in a video on YouTube and I haven’t rated a seller on ebay.

But I beg to differ. I do blog (not as often as I intend to) and I have contributed to a travel wiki and I have added a book review to Amazon. So I am exhibiting a bit of personal control on the Information Age in my own modest way.

While it’s true that most of us who are computer literate aren’t taking advantage of all the ways we could imprint our opinions and personalities on the great world, we are making our thoughts, feelings and ideas known. Even in the area of food. [more…]