cyberculture

Online Auctions Make Fantasy Dinner Parties a Reality

Janice | May 10, 2013 - 1:21 pm

Pop Culture Last Supper via Adara Tiana

Last Supper with Dead Rock Stars by Misha Tyutunik

Physicists Last Supper by Nick Farrantello

Who’s on your fantasy dinner party guest list?

We’ve all played the parlor game: if you could invite anyone, living or dead, who would have at your dinner table?
As you go around the room and name your names, there are some predictable results. Jesus, the President, Steve Jobs, John Lennon, Einstein, or the Dalai Lama will make someone’s list. Maybe Warren Buffet would show up (who wouldn’t want some investment advice?), Gandhi (more meat for the rest of us), and Martin Luther King Jr. to say grace. So will someone’s sixth grade teacher and a great grandpa who died in a war. The rest of the table would probably be filled out with intellectuals and sex symbols, favorite writers, athletes, and Hollywood stars.

Online celebrity auction sites can pretty much fill your dream table, and the proceeds generally go to charity.
Currently you can arrange to have lunch with Gloria Steinem, cast members of the Big Bang Theory or The Simpsons, or with Francis Ford Coppola at the winery he owns in Napa Valley. You can dine with the former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, have cocktails with Quincy Jones, or go to tea with primatologist Jane Goodall.

Most of the sites operate with a standard auction model with the spoils awarded to the highest bidder. Omaze has a more raffle-like, and more democratic, process collecting thousands of small donations, usually under $10, and choosing the winner in a random lottery. The auctions donate from 80-100% of the proceeds to charitable organizations, usually chosen by the celebrities.

The hottest date right now—and it’s not even dinner but just for coffee—is with Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. The auction was first posted in April offering a cup of Joe and an hour of Mr. Cook’s time with an estimated value of $50,000. It reached $190,000 in the first day, and has since skyrocketed to $605,000 (placed by an anonymous bidder known only as J********n) with four days to go.

Check out Charity Buzz, EBay Celebrity, Hollywood Charity Auction, Charity Folks, and Omaze where you’ll see ongoing auctions for all kinds of social engagements with sports figures, politicians, artists, rappers, technology wizards, business leaders, and plenty of Hollywood stars. For the right price, or sometimes just a little luck, you can fill the dinner table of your dreams.

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Mobee Turns Smartphone Users Into Mystery Diners

Janice | May 9, 2013 - 4:03 pm

image via OC Review

If there’s one thing that unites us all as a people it’s a collective love of free food.
And of course everybody’s a critic. That’s why the life of an undercover mystery diner sounds so appealing. Mobee is offering it to all of us with a new app that rewards users who will visit retailers and restaurants incognito and provide feedback.

Mobee is looking to turn the secret shopper industry on its head with a social media twist.
Traditionally, secret shoppers are used by companies to keep tabs on the customer experience. Usually an outside consultant maintains a small army of shoppers and diners, some trained critics, some ordinary members of the public, and regularly dispatches them to client locations where they pose as customers. When it’s a restaurant, they’re there to report on everything from hostess greetings to over-salted soup to bathroom cleanliness. The visit may be tightly scripted, and there is usually a long and detailed questionnaire that the shopper completes after the experience. Discreet note-taking may be allowed, but the diner can’t bring the script or other paperwork to the table, and the turn-around time for the post-dining debriefing can be hours or days.

Mobee’s founder Prahar Shah looked at a multi-billion dollar industry that still runs on paper and pencil, and he saw an opportunity.
Research showed that each outlet of a dining chain like Panera or Starbucks can spend $200 a month for surveys from four or five mystery diner visits. Factor in the millions of customers who are already offering free feedback through recommendation sites like Yelp and Urban Spoon. Shah founded Mobee on the idea that a phone-based model enlisting an army of unpaid critics can gather more data for less money, and do so with greater accuracy and faster delivery than the standard industry practice.

Mobee slices up a full-length secret shopper assignment into bite-sized visits it calls missions. Each consists of 5 to 10 questions focusing on a specific aspect of the customer experience, and might request a photo. Since ordinary customers incessantly tap and snap with their phones, it can all performed in the open and transmitted in real time (the target restaurant market is casual and quick-serve— the behavior is basically standard rudeness). Users aren’t reimbursed for purchases but are paid in digital credits of generally $5 or $10 that can go into Amazon, iTunes, or PayPal accounts.

Mobee is live in Boston, where more than 30,000 missions have already been performed, and a national (and later international) roll-out is in the works.

The Mobee app is available for the iPhone, with an Android version coming soon.

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Online Wine Shopping: Let the Algorithm Do the Picking

Janice | May 3, 2013 - 6:10 pm

image by Jomphong via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Would you trust a computer to choose your wine?
There’s a new generation of wine sellers counting on it.

Wine has been a tough sale online.
Wine shopping is daunting even in a traditional, bricks and mortar wine shop, where most customers wander the aisles a while and then end up grabbing an old favorite, an eye-catching label, or whatever’s on sale, with finger’s crossed that it won’t disappoint. It can be even more overwhelming online where the selection is inexhaustible and you don’t have store displays to cue you. Add to that a regulatory maze of interstate shipping laws, and by 2007, online sales were a piddling 3% of retail wine sales.

In the last few years, the internet has blossomed into a virtual vineyard.
Wine has benefited enormously from the rise of social media. There are thousands of online wine groups sharing tasting notes, alerting members to flash sale sites like Lot 18, and holding virtual wine tastings where on the count of three everybody uncorks and sips the same bottle. You can order wine for your Facebook friends through that site’s birthday reminders, and even Amazon, twice burned by failed wine-selling ventures, has jumped back in.

To succeed online, wine sites have to be more than just digital catalogs. Wine is consumed experientially, and in that sense its purchase has more in common with music or movies than with, say, a pair of shoes. That’s why the new generation of wine sellers looked not to Zappo’s but to Netflix for their sales model. And the secret sauce of the wildly successful video service is in the predictive algorithms that fuel their recommendations.

Online shopping has always run on recommendation engines.
The innovation was pioneered by Amazon, where now you’ll find them integrated into every inch of the shopping experience. From the home page through to the last click at checkout, Amazon beseeches you to consider ‘Frequently Bought Together’ items, ‘Customers Who Bought this Item Also Bought,’ and the less persuasive ‘Customers Who Viewed this Item Also Viewed,’ as well as ‘Sponsored Links,’ ‘Product Ads from External Websites,’ and a sidebar of ’More Buying Choices.’ Amazon’s algorithms skew toward building recommendation lists from items ordered by similar customer profiles. All the come-ons feel a bit like a traveling salesman with a foot stuck in your front door telling you about the vacuum cleaner your neighbor just bought.

Wine, like DVDs, requires more finesse.
Using its peer-to-peer comparative algorithms, Amazon derives a reported 10% of its book sales through recommendations on the site, while at Netflix recommendations drive 75% of the video viewing. Netflix accomplishes this through its algorithms, which turn an infinite buffet of data into a highly personalized, user-friendly experience. Instead of comparative recommendations, it builds individual profiles based on each customer’s individual preferences. It’s constantly throwing DVD titles at you, always asking your opinion about what you watch both on the service and elsewhere. Like Netflix, the new wine recommendation engines run on ratings. They build taste a profile based on what you’ve enjoyed in the past, and continually tinker with the profile as you rate your new wine purchases. And unlike Netflix, where the queue can get clogged with the entire Toy Story oeuvre, you don’t have to share this with your kids.

I’ll have what the MacBook Pro is having.
Try one of the new digital sommeliers:

Wine start-up Taste Factor, which compares the complexity of its recommendation engine to NASA, is like a custom wine-of-the-month club. Sign up for the subscription service and you get a starter pack of wine to rate. Your feedback establishes a tasting baseline, which is refined after subsequent monthly shipments, each of which is uniquely chosen for you.

Instead of NASA, Club W feels more like an online dating service. You start with a questionnaire—not about wine but lifestyle questions and details like how you take your coffee. The screen fills with potential matches, and you choose the ones that look good to you.

WineSimple also starts with a quiz to build each individual consumer taste profile. The geo-servicing phone app doesn’t sell wine, but it lets you know when you’re in a shop or restaurant that carries one of your recommended bottles.

Posted in beer + wine + spirits, cyberculture, shopping | Leave a comment

Vine: The New Food Porn

Janice | May 1, 2013 - 5:02 pm

You’re looking at clips from Vine, Twitter’s 6-second looping video app that’s the latest social media phenomenon.

A lot can happen in 6 seconds.
There’s a widely held belief in internet marketing circles that you have less than 10 seconds to make an impression—hook ‘em fast or they’ve already moved on to the next site. Vine gives its creators 6 seconds of sound and video to amuse and entertain, share some knowledge, or tell a simple story. The brevity hobbles some and inspires others; you can end up with a frenetic unwatchable mess or a mini-masterpiece. Worst case, it’s still only 6 seconds.

Porn, lol cats, and food— the usual suspects take up residence.
Vine is a quick and dirty app that makes it incredibly easy to record brief video clips and share them on social networks. Within days of its launch, the porn hordes had jumped right in. Go figure. Pornographic video clips threatened to dominate the early content mix, nearly derailing Vine’s release, as they did with close cousin Chatroulette. Twitter and Vine’s guidelines don’t exclude pornography, but it does violate Apple’s terms of service for the App Store, and when a particularly nasty clip was featured as an ‘Editor’s Pick’ in the Vine app, Apple pulled the product from the App Store’s virtual shelves. Twitter quickly raised the minimum age limit to download the Vine app from 12 to 17; it shot to the top of the free app charts and has has stayed there ever since.

Vine has all the hallmarks of a lasting social media outlet. It’s easy to use and easy to unleash the results on Twitter and Facebook. The early flowering of porn has taken a backseat to the mainstream mainstays of bloopers, sports highlights, celebrity postings, the antics of cats and babies, teenaged girls showing off the contents of their closets, and food. Lots of food. There’s so much food porn on Vine that it’s been disparaged by some as ‘Chefroulette.’ Home cooks are showing off their knife skills, recipe sites are adding how-to segments, and the still-life of a dinner plate has given way to a video of clip of a meal’s progression of courses.

Vine’s video creation options are ON and OFF. You touch the screen to shoot and scroll to play. The app takes the raw footage and ambient sound, stitches together sequential shots, and loops them back on themselves. Its extreme limitations are seen as a challenge to unlock the creative potential of the 6-second snippet, and Vine has given rise to a new art form of imaginative visual arrangements, laugh-out-loud sight gags, and especially jaw-dropping stop-motion food animations that take advantage of Vine’s one and only, but surprising powerful, tool—the on-off switch.

There are lots of ways to explore Vine– even without the app:
Vinepeek is a live stream of un-moderated, newly-posted Vines. You’ve been warned.
All Around the Vines streams live but can be sorted by the hashtag #food.
Vinesmap shows geotagged Vines and plots them on a world map.
Vineroulette loads a full-screen collage of dozens of videos, sortable by subject.
VinesZap loads a preview grid of nine Vines. Click on what looks good.
Vinecats—because sometimes you need a break from all the food Vines.

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Oh Cap’n! My Cap’n!

Janice | April 26, 2013 - 12:47 pm

Does Cap’n Crunch have more lives than Tony the Tiger?

Back in 2011, the rumor mill started grinding with an article in AOL’s Daily Finance. A reporter noted that Cap’n Crunch cereal was nowhere to be found on the Quaker website. The article’s speculative title asked the question Is Cap’n Crunch Easing Quietly Into Retirement?
The piece was a rumination on the challenges facing the brand: its shrinking market share, public criticism of food companies that market to children, and White House pressure to make healthier products. It concluded that this is a pretty good time for the Cap’n to maintain a low profile.

The blogosphere then took that thread of speculation and ran with it:
Cap’n Crunch Retires (Seattle Post-Intelligencer); Cap’n Crunch sails into obscurity (Today on MSNBC); Cap’n Crunch Retirement (Yahoo! Buzz).
Fox News, as is its wont, took it a step further, fabricating a political angle: Food Police Kill Cap’n Crunch (Fox Nation), inspiring headlines in conservative blogs like Obama’s Soggies Force Cap’n Crunch Into Early Retirement (AsianConservatives.com), and Cap n’ Crunch: Michelle Obama Forces Captain Crunch’s Retirement?(Conservative BlogsCentral).

This spring Cap’n Crunch is sailing back from the brand equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.
Beginning May 7th he’ll be hosting his very own YouTube talk show set in a giant cereal bowl aboard his old ship, the S.S. Guppy. In the language of the Pepsico press release, the show’s content is described as a mix of ’interesting guests, topical banter, and comedy sketches.’ The Cap’n's faithful companion Sea Dog will serve as his on-set sidekick. The show’s official teaser can be viewed here. New videos will be added to the YouTube channel every other Tuesday through spring and summer.

Count Chocula could not be reached for comment.

Posted in cyberculture, diversions, Entertainment | 1 Comment

Restaurants Gear Up for the No-Show Season

Janice | April 9, 2013 - 12:07 pm

Dear Harvard grads who cancel your large party CONFIRMED reservations at the last minute ‘something just came up’, have fun ruling the world.

–tweet sent last May from the Twitter account of Cambridge, MA restaurant Rendezvous (@RendezvousCS)

It’s almost May, the month that brings warm weather, spring blooms, Mothers Day, and restaurant no-shows.
Fickle diners are a restaurateur’s worst nightmare at any time of the year, but the problem peaks in May with college graduation dinners.

Restaurants in cities with large student populations are thrilled at graduation time when families and friends descend on local venues for commencement celebrations. In cities like Boston and Philadelphia, the ceremonies at nearby colleges and universities can give restaurants their biggest nights of the whole year. The problem is, as J. Erin Reilley, general manager of Boston’s Bondir puts it: “Graduates and their families are notorious for flakiness regarding celebratory dinner reservations.”

There’s a penchant for multiple reservations. It can happen innocently when different family members don’t communicate about different bookings and they only learn of overlaps at the last minute. More often it’s intentional with someone trying to hedge their bets with the family’s taste buds. According to Bill Curry of Philadephia’s Cafe Nola: “[Students] will call five or six places and make reservations. Then when their parents get to town, they decide where they’ll go.”

The impact of even a single empty table can be significant in an industry where average profit margins run as low as 3% to 5%. Restaurateurs know that things can happen: a flight is delayed, someone gets sick, the babysitter cancels. But when research from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business tells of an average no-show rate of 20% for restaurants in large cities, they also know that the real problem is rudeness.

And no one is immune. On a recent evening, two groups of diners didn’t claim their reservations at Noma, the celebrated Copenhagen restaurant considered by many as the best in the world. With just 12 tables and a tab that hovers around $500 per person it took a real bite out of the night’s business. The next morning, chef and co-owner René Redzepi tweeted: ‘And now a message from the Noma staff: to the people of two different no-show tables last night,’ accompanied by a picture of staff members showing their middle fingers. It was quickly deleted by cooler heads, but of course the retweets carried the message for days.

After a similarly rough night, another fed up restaurateur, this one from Los Angeles’ Red Medicine, turned to Twitter to publicly call out the customers who failed to show up for their booked tables:

Restaurants are experimenting with cancellation fees, reservation deposits, mandatory telephone confirmations, and the Twitter ‘name and shame.’ Of course the only real solution is for diners to realize that a little courtesy goes a long way.

Posted in cyberculture, food business, restaurants | 3 Comments

The Best Twitter Feeds for Food Lovers

Janice | March 28, 2013 - 1:12 pm

[image courtesy of City Food Magazine]

The name Twitter was chosen by its founders because the dictionary defines it as “a short burst of inconsequential information.”
With a seven year history and a half a billion users no one’s calling Twitter inconsequential, but its tweets remain as relentlessly random and trivial as ever.
But Twitter opens a portal to the inner life of the food industry—the chefs, kitchens, patrons, and dishes—better than any other form of social media.

Twitter blurs the line between amateurs and professionals.
It gives a six-degrees-of-separation kind of connection to friends, strangers, and celebrities. It provides access, takes you behind the scenes, and invites you to join conversations that would be otherwise unavailable to you. The talk can be inane, aggravating, and inappropriate. It’s uncensored and often filled with more typos and grammatical incorrectness than you would think is possible in 140 characters. But there are also plenty of twitter feeds in the food world that are filled with focused, cogent, impassioned talk.

Time Magazine just released its annual roundup of the best Twitter feeds. 10 food feeds made this year’s list.

Time calls the cookbook author and New York Times food writer Mark Bittman Twitter’s most-followable food wonk (@markbittman)
We can always use a little more snark from the author and TV personality Anthony Bourdain (@Bourdain)
The former food critic for the New York Times, former Editor in Chief of the late, great Gourmet Magazine, Ruth Reichl has a way with words and food (@ruthreichl)
Combine Ruth Reichl’s stylings with Anthony Bourdain’s profanity and you get the parody mash-up Ruth Bourdain (@RuthBourdain)
Sure, he tweets about food, but celebrity chef and Top Chef judge Tom Colicchio is also passionate about ending hunger in America (@tomcolicchio)
Foodimentary’s fun facts and food trivia provide a daily dose of esoteric web weirdness (@Foodimentary)
Pioneering food critic Gael Greene keeps the legend alive (@GaelGreene)
Jordana Rothman is irreverent, irrepressible, and knows everything there is to know about eating and drinking in New York (@jordanarothman)
She’s Alice Waters. That’s reason enough, but now you can also follow the effort to rebuild Chez Panisse after its devastating fire (@AliceWaters)
Pete Wells brings imagination and quotability to his role as Dining Editor at the New York Times while regularly unleashing the critical hounds of hell on New York restaurants. He shares even more in short form on Twitter (@pete_wells)

Oops, they missed a few.
There’s plenty of expertise out there; a good Twitter feed informs and entertains. The author that can cloak knowledge in humor and personality is the one I want to read. And if they can regularly accomplish all of that in under 140 characters, that’s a Twitter feed I want to follow. Here’s a few feeds that were overlooked by Time but made the cut for Gigabiting:

You can’t talk west coast food without including the San Francisco Chronicle’s Michael Bauer. He’s in his third decade at the Chronicle where he heads the nation’s largest newspaper food and wine program, and he tweets great pics (@michaelbauer1)
Jonathan Gold is another essential part of that west coast conversation. He’s quick and quippy and relishes his role as the self-named ‘belly of Los Angeles’ (@thejgold)
Follow Food Curated’s Liza de Guia’s tweets like a trail of breadcrumbs through what’s new and happening in the Brooklyn artisan food scene (@SkeeterNYC)
I love you Amanda Hesser, and I feel like you love me too. That’s because the Food52 founder gets personal, accessible, and interactive with her feed (@amandahesser)
You’re on Twitter because you want to be connected. Nobody understands that better than Danielle Gould, the force behind Food+Tech Connect (@dhgisme)

You’ll find dozens more food-related feeds worth following among the Shorty Awards nominees. This is the fifth season for the awards recognizing the best in social media, and the food category leaders are jostling for the top prize. Winners will be announced in April, so there’s still time to nominate your personal favorite, cast a vote, or just look for some new folks to follow.

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The World’s Most Expensive ____________(fill in the blank)

Janice | March 21, 2013 - 10:40 pm

[image via TrustedHealthProducts.com]

Who else is fed up with the world’s most expensive food’ trend?
I’m talking about the $450 pizza (topped with lobster thermidor and black cod) or the $295 hamburger (made with white truffle butter-infused Japanese Wagyu beef and black truffles served on a gold-dusted roll capped with creme fraiche and caviar).
What a waste. Such fine ingredients are assembled but the goal is not to offer a magnificent dining experience but merely a budget-busting one. It’s doubtful that the dishes even originated with a chef. These are shameless stunts perpetrated by restaurant publicists, and most don’t even taste good.

The restaurateur as P.T. Barnum.
The more gimmicky and outrageous the stunt, the more it’s re-posted, re-pinned, and re-tweeted. And not just by the hype-hungry Buzzfeeds of the world: last December’s Most Expensive Christmas Dinner (a gold leaf-wrapped turkey served with 100-year old wine decanted through a filter of diamond dust) got plenty of column inches from traditional media like Time, ABC News, and the Washington Post. This kind of fleeting fame propels ever more short-sighted restaurant owners into the fray of culinary one-upsmanship.

There’s no question that the world of the one-percenters can be a fascinating place of lavish spending and culinary indulgence that the rest of us can only dream of. But this current fascination is not about elite and refined dining; it’s meals for one percenters with 99-percent tastes. It’s pub food like a $760 Scotch egg, a $1,565 rendition of the peasant chicken stew coq au vin, and even a $17 ‘Diva’ corn dog made with sweetbreads, bone marrow, truffle, and foie gras. And it’s impossible to keep up with the high-stakes most expensive hamburger category where there seems to be a revolving door to the title from all the jostling for preeminence.

Let’s say you want to set a new world’s record.
To make it official you need to go through the ‘Set a Record’ service on the Guinness World Records website. Once the category and methodology have been approved, verification of the feat requires signed statements from two witnesses plus photographic evidence, or the record-setter can pay for the presence of an official Guinness adjudicator. You can see the appeal from the restaurant’s standpoint: it’s a small investment, a quick and easy process, and if they hit it just right it’s a public relations bonanza.

These stunts have worn out their welcome.
Even at their best they’re one-offs based in novelty. Now, absent the novelty we’re left with a joyless can-you-top-this desperation. That plus a bad taste in the mouth from the realization that the world’s most expensive kebab costs as much as the per capita income of a Ugandan.

Posted in cyberculture, diversions, restaurants | Leave a comment

SXSW Makes Room at the Table for Food

Janice | March 7, 2013 - 3:13 pm

[image via bonappetit.com]

South By South West rolls into Austin this weekend.
The wildly influential set of film, technology, and music festivals and conferences will screen about 300 feature films and shorts; more than 2,000 musical acts will perform at showcases; and the biggest names and brightest minds in emerging technology will captivate audiences at hundreds of interactive sessions.
Care to guess what all those artists and thought leaders will be talking about?

At last year’s SXSW, the online media monitors at Meltwater Group identified around 300,000 Twitter conversations (the social network of choice for festival attendees) taking place in social spaces surrounding SXSW. According to Meltwater’s data, most of that social bandwidth was buzzing about food. Food tweets outnumbered tweets about performances, events, and panels at a rate of three to one.

In the early years of SXSW, food appeared mostly to help soak up all the free beer flowing at the festival. The interactive conference didn’t host its first panel on food blogging until 2009, but each year since has seen a steady increase in food-related topics. Food themes are scattered liberally throughout this year’s conference sessions tackling topics like the niche food blog, the culture of ‘pop-ups,’ product branding for artisan producers, and the ways that technology can enhance the food shopping experience. A strong line-up of keynote speakers includes the founders of Whole Foods and Panera, and the provocative New York restaurateur Eddie Huang who will headline a panel titled The Social Media Chef.

The food scene outside of the Austin Convention Center is also a major draw.
More than 18,000 attendees have already registered for this year’s inaugural food crawl, a self-guided walking tour through some of downtown Austin’s notable eateries. Food trucks show up from as far away as Los Angeles—that’s a 1,400 mile trek in a rolling kitchen—for a spot at the annual Street Food Fest. So many marketers are looking to put their wares in front of the SXSW crowd that there’s a guide to all the free food and drinks.

From apps to check the ingredients in your cereal box to online reservations and new payment methods, technology permeates the way we consume and experience food like never before. Follow the happenings at SXSW to see how industry stakeholders are leveraging technology to help the food system become more efficient, entertaining, healthy, just, and sustainable.

You can’t make it to Austin? No problem. Many of the showcases, speaker panels, and interactive keynotes will be streaming live at sxsw.com/live. You can also follow the festival via official SXSW social media:

Twitter: @SXSW
Facebook: SXSWFestival
Google+: +SXSW
Vimeo: OfficialSXSW
Instagram: @SXSW

Posted in cyberculture, media, Science/Technology | Leave a comment

Crowdsourcing: You Pick the Flavors

Janice | February 15, 2013 - 3:05 pm

Crowdsourcing is bigger than ever.
Pepsi, Lincoln, and Dannon all used it for their Super Bowl ads. We recently saw an indie music star crowdsource his tattoo, Yahoo’s CEO crowdsourced her baby’s name, and an online mob of Monopoly fans convinced Hasbro to dump the iron, a game piece since the beginning, and replace it with a cat.

The food world is especially cozy with crowdsourcing .
Everyone eats, and everyone has an opinion about what they eat—witness the ever-expanding online universe of food discussion boards, reviewing sites, dining guides, and food blogs. The target market is already doing the work; crowdsourcing campaigns are just a way for food marketers to tap into all that passion, creativity, and collective intelligence.

Crowdsourcing pioneer Ben & Jerry’s has always relied on customer input. Even before the world had taken to the internet the company was selling ice cream flavors born from customer suggestions. In 2009 Ben & Jerry’s made it official with a crowdsourcing contest called Do the World a Flavor. They were looking for the next Cherry Garcia, Chunky Monkey, or Chubby Hubby, bestselling flavors that were all suggested by customers, and highlighting the company’s use of fair trade ingredients in its ice cream. The winner was Almond Delight, a caramel ice cream with praline almonds and a caramel swirl (later renamed Dulce Almond due to trademark issues), chosen from 100,000 entries.

Beer is social by its very nature, but brewers haven’t quite figured out the fit with social media. The Boston Beer Company used virtual sampling to develop a new beer through its Sam Adams Crowd Craft Project. Budweiser, though, wanted true sensory feedback for its crowdsourced Black Crown brews and combined local tasting events with online feedback through Budweiser Project 12. Heineken clearly wants to engage online but doesn’t seem to want its customers anywhere near the beer. So far the company has turned to the crowd to create a pop-up nightclub and to design a commemorative anniversary bottle, but it hasn’t relinquished control over what’s in the bottle.

By contrast, Dunkin’ Donuts seems happy to hand over the keys to the donut shop. Their website and Facebook page periodically feature interactive donut-building tools that invite customers to get creative. Dunkin’ even paid $12,000 apiece to the online originators of Toffee For Your Coffee (glazed sour cream with Heath Bar chunks) and Monkey See Monkey Do-nut (banana filling, chocolate icing, and Reese’s Cup shavings).

Glaceau VitaminWater boasted of the first Facebook-created flavor. While not a purely virtual creation, the ‘Flavor Creator Lab’ monitored social media chatter on sites like Google, Twitter, Flickr, and Foodgawker. The application tabulated tweets, blog posts, images, and searches to create a list of the 10 most buzzed-about flavors, and then let its Facebook followers vote for their favorite. The winner was a caffeinated black cherry-lime blend that was aptly named Connect.

Facebook has spoken. It said Cheesy Garlic Bread, Sriracha, and Chicken & Waffles. What? No Cajun Squirrel?
It’s the final phase of the mother of all crowdsourcing campaigns.
Snack food giant Frito-Lay put out the call for a new potato chip flavor on its Lay’s Facebook page, offering a million dollar bounty for the winner. Within a matter of weeks there were nearly four million submissions; they were whittled down to the three finalists. This week bags of Cheesy Garlic Bread, Sriracha, and Chicken & Waffles chips began shipping to stores nationwide.

From now until May 4th you can vote for your favorite flavor to become a permanent addition to the Lay’s product line. The two runners-up will each get $50,000, and the inventor of the top vote-getter will win the $1,000,000 prize or 1% of this year’s sales of the flavor. So far, Sriracha is looking like the odds-on favorite. You can vote via Facebook, Twitter (with hashtags #SaveGarlicBread, #SaveSriracha, and #SaveChickenWaffles), or by texting VOTE to 24477.

The Lay’s campaign is new to the U.S., but in 2008 Frito-Lay held the first of it chip flavor competitions in the United Kingdom for its Walkers brand. Finalists Chilli & Chocolate and the aforementioned Cajun Squirrel were bested by the winning Builder’s Breakfast, tasting of bacon, sausage, and eggs. A 2009 Australian campaign produced the winning Caesar Salad-flavored potato chips, India went for Mango-flavored chips in 2010, and in 2011 Serbians chose Pickled Cucumber.

You can see all the global chip flavor winners at Ad Age.

Posted in cyberculture, diversions, food business, snack foods | Leave a comment

Foodie Dating Hits the Million Mark

Janice | January 10, 2013 - 10:11 am

Heart-shaped sugar cubes via Prima Donna Bride

Foodies need love too.

Could you date someone who’s a vegan? What if that potentially special someone doesn’t like Chinese food? Or chocolate? Or pasta? You could be chevre on a crusty baguette and they’re Velveeta on white. Or you’re gluten-free and they’re all about pancake breakfasts.
Forget about personality types, pheromones, and horoscope signs; true compatibility is all about the food.

It’s been a year since the Eater blog hooked up with HowAboutWe to launch its foodie matchmaking service.
Instead of matching singles by their online profiles, daters pair up by filling in the blank: How about we…
Proposals tend toward …shop for sea salt and make our own caramels …try every grilled cheese sandwich on the menu of the new food truck ...load up on charcuterie and have a picnic…

On the Gen X dating giant OK Cupid, you can’t just call yourself a foodie, you have to prove your bona fides with a foodie test. The flavors and spices section asks daters to name an herb that’s described as ‘woody.’ The plating section of the test goes multiple choice with the question of appropriate garnish for a gin-brined pork tenderloin (would it be fresh parsley, creme fraiche, lemon twist and juniper berries, or a swirl of basil emulsion?).

If you want something more low-key with fewer strings attached than traditional one-to-one dating, there’s the pre-arranged double dates of Tandem and group dining sites like GrubWithUs and BlendAbout. These are services that facilitate something like a smörgåsbord of blind dates bringing together a dinner party’s-worth of singles— typically a table of four or eight with some pre-screened interests and compatibility. Still too much of a commitment? Try meeting someone Over Coffee.

There’s dating for vegetarians and vegans, Singles With Food Allergies, special dieters, and a site that matches couples based on refrigerator contents. Non-cooks can also look for their own Single Chefs to date.

On the occasion of enabling its one-millionth date, HowAboutWe looks at how all their foodie daters filled in the blank. The One Million Date infographic tallies up the pour-over coffee dates, shared house made pickle plates, and thousands of artisan bitters-infused cocktail meet ups for a revealing look at the dating habits of food-obsessed singles.

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Who Knew? Chefs Have Their Own Version of Yelp.

Janice | January 2, 2013 - 1:17 pm

image via Merton Parrish

There’s one question we all want to ask our favorite chefs: Where do you go out to eat?

A chef’s recommendation is the ultimate stamp of approval. Chefs know restaurants from the inside out, and they know their local dining scene as only an insider can. With so much time spent in their own kitchens, when a chef turns the tables and chooses a restaurant to experience from the diner’s side, you know it’s got to be good.

Their secret weapon is Chefs Feed.
Chefs Feed is a Yelp-like restaurant discovery and recommendation site that we civilians can peruse, but the only people contributing reviews are chefs and other hand-picked culinary professionals.

Chefs Feed covers 15 U.S. cities plus London with a current lineup of 600 working chef-contributors, all respected professionals in their own circles and some outright celebrities like Thomas Keller, Mario Batali, and Wolfgang Puck. While just the chefs can add photos and reviews, anyone with the app can submit questions and comments, creating an interactive dialogue between the professionals and the rest of us.

Chefs look to the top of the food chain for inspiration, but they’re as likely to eschew the haute for the offbeat. So while all the big guns of city dining are represented, Chefs Feed also reveals the universal appeal of dumplings and Asian noodle houses, and unravels the mysteries of some lesser-known ethnic cuisines like Ethiopian and Peruvian. Given the hours they keep, it’s no surprise that chefs also display a soft spot for late-night joints and all-day breakfasts.

600 chefs vs. the collective wisdom of the mob
Yelp is commendably democratic with fresh voices and plenty of knowledgeable citizen journalists. But Yelpers also bring their quirks, biases, grudges, and ignorance (along with unchecked spelling and grammar); and the ratings are notoriously easy to game. Unscrupulous business owners compensate diners for positive reviews, greedy customers extort freebies with threats of negative reviews, and the site itself has been willing to tip the ratings scale to favor paid advertisers.

By contrast, there’s nothing democratic about Chefs Feed. Its roster of contributors is drawn from the elite and exclusive club of successful, professional chefs. You might not always share their dining druthers, but you can trust their discernment. After all, it’s Mario Batali; not some random guy with a smartphone.

Chefs Feed is offered as a free download from iTunes.

Then there are the restaurants where chefs go to blow off steam after a long shift in the kitchen. Read Gigabiting’s Marijuana and Food to learn how chefs feed their munchies.

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Another Epic Twitter Fail – This Time It’s Starbucks’ Turn

Janice | December 18, 2012 - 2:20 pm

cursing twitter via ClaudiaChez

When good tweets go bad
Twitter is a powerful tool for brands to interact with their fans. It’s an inexpensive and immediate way for restaurants to build relationships and create a buzz. It builds customer engagement and loyalty. But when something goes wrong, things can go downhill in a hurry.

The followers, and the followers’ followers, and the followers’ followers’ followers….
We’ve seen blunders and over-sharing, humor that backfires, restaurants that tweet their own gaffes, and Twitter campaigns hijacked by disgruntled customers. When it happens, the company’s own narrative is in the hands of the masses. Starbucks is the latest in a string of restaurants to lose control and see their Twitter campaign blow up.

They spread it, all right.
Starbucks created the hashtag #SpreadTheCheer and invited its customers in the United Kingdom to tweet out some holiday cheer. The feed was displayed on a giant screen at London’s Natural History museum where the company sponsors the ice rink. But cheerful quickly turned to sneerful.

Unfortunately, Starbucks has a reputation as a bit of a Scrooge in Britain where the company has been in the news for its plans to cut paid lunch breaks, sick leave, and maternity benefits for thousands of employees. It had also recently emerged that the coffee chain, with 700 locations across the U.K., had circumvented the British tax system with some financial-sleight-of-hand involving its division in Switzerland, and had paid less than 1% in corporate taxes over 14 years. The tweeter feed was flooded with profanity-laced sentiments blasting Starbucks as economy-busting tax dodgers who push overpriced milky coffee drowned in sugar syrup. And all was displayed on a giant screen at a central London landmark.

For the non-twitterers out there, hashtags are words or phrases preceded by a hash (#) symbol. They’re used to organize tweets into a topic or dialogue, and make them searchable. The hottest hashtags appear as trending topics on the right side of Twitter’s homepage, the most coveted spot in the twitterverse, seen by millions of users. This happens organically when a newsworthy event dominates the conversation, like #HurricaneSandy or #JustinBieberHaircut, or for about $120,000 a hashtag can be purchased and promoted as a trending topic, as Starbucks did with #SpreadTheCheer.

This is not the first restaurant twitter campaign gone wild.
McDonald’s began promoting the sponsored hashtag #McDStories with the idea of getting people talking about their experiences with the fast food giant. The company started the conversation with a few innocuous tweets: Meet some of the hard-working people dedicated to providing McDs with quality food every day and When u make something w/pride, people can taste it. As hoped, people shared their #McDStories by the thousands. There were stories about diabetes and diarrhea, a video posted of a mouse working its way through a bag of hamburger buns, and a heated back-and-forth with PETA over the inhumane use of mechanically-separated chickens. Apparently some McDStories are better left untold.

Wendy’s had a similar experience with a Twitter campaign built around its 25-year old TV commercial with the little old lady crying out “Where’s the Beef? When the chain promoted its hashtag #HerestheBeef, plenty of users responded with their pornographic versions of Here it is! and another segment responded with less bawdy but equally graphic imagery of cruelly penned, industrially-raised livestock.

There have been some obvious missteps: Taco Bell was justifiably slammed for its utterly offensive tweet on Martin Luther King Day asking Have you ever dreamed of eating @Taco Bell and then woke up and made that dream come true? And Denny’s printed its menus with an invitation to Join the conversation! that directed its customers to the Twitter account of a Taiwanese gentlemen named Denny Hsieh whose Twitter handle is @Dennys. The menus were used for four months in 1,500 locations before they were corrected.

For Starbucks, this was a rare stumble in cyberspace. The company has topped virtually every list of social media winners since such things were tracked: industry, media, and marketing firms have all singled out Starbucks as the most socially engaged company, the best loved online brand, and the top restaurant presence online. That’s what makes this bush league Twitter fail all the more surprising. A publicly displayed, unmoderated, real-time feed? They should have known better.

Posted in coffee, cyberculture, food business, Web 2.0 | Leave a comment

SPAM vs. Spam

Janice | December 13, 2012 - 10:04 am

image via Happy Trails Computer Club

What’s in a name?
SPAM: a gelatinous block of porky luncheon meat.
Spam: a steady e-mail assault of erectile dysfunction ads, entreaties from Nigerian princes, and replica watch offers.
It’s hard to imagine a brand surviving this kind of association, but Hormel SPAM is doing just fine, thank you very much, not just surviving but thriving.

Hormel can get awfully touchy about the name.
It’s been a sore subject since the mid 1990′s when they watched their once-proud brand become synonymous with a detestable digital menace, and were powerless to stop it. Over the years they’ve repeatedly singled out technology companies with ‘spam’ in their company names and sued them for trademark infringement. After a decade of legal debate, the judges of the Trademark Board ruled against Hormel, asserting that the brand wasn’t truly damaged because no one confuses the internet applications with a canned meat product.

In 2001 their worst fears were realized.
A Hormel spokesman explained the company’s struggle with a statement on their website: “We are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, ‘why would Hormel foods name its product after junk e-mail?’” Indeed, ‘spam’ has become ubiquitous throughout the world to describe the flood of unsolicited e-mail and in 2001 the term entered the Oxford English Dictionary not as a luncheon meat but as “The practice of sending irrelevant, inappropriate, or unsolicited postings or e-mails over the Internet, esp. indiscriminately and in very large numbers.”

But for all of Hormel’s anguish, SPAM remains unmarred by the negative association.
Born in the Great Depression, SPAM is an emblematic food in America’s hard-times pantry—so much so that it’s been suggested that the Federal Reserve Bank should track SPAM sales as an economic benchmark. We’ve turned to it again in the recent downturn. Hormel has seen steadily rising sales and profits for the past four years.

In 2012 SPAM makes peace with the internet.
Looking to grow its online presence, this year SPAM redesigned its website, added a YouTube channel, and stepped up its customer engagement through Twitter and Facebook. The brand also introduced its first-ever spokescharacter, Sir Can-A-Lot, a little tin can of a knight who’s on a crusade to rescue your meals by infusing them with some pink processed meat. This year, SPAM’s U.S. consumption reached an all-time high of more than 120 million cans.

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Surprise: Pinterest is Tops Online for Recipes

Janice | December 4, 2012 - 3:25 pm

image via Someecards

Pinterest was the breakout social network of 2012.
It might feel like you blinked and missed this one, but clearly a lot of food lovers didn’t— 90% of online recipe sharing is happening on Pinterest.

Two year-old Pinterest flew under the tech radar for much of its early life. Silicon Valley found it easy to ignore the start-up of yet another social media channel, and especially one that lacked technological innovation and was founded by a Valley outsider with a humanities background. But it struck a chord with home cooks.

Mom’s old recipe cards meet food porn.
The Pinterest combination of social sharing plus a visual scrapbook feels right at home in the kitchen. Home cooks have been clipping and swapping recipes forever, and now they’re taking them to Pinterest’s web-based pinboards where food fans trump all other interest groups. Food is by far the fastest-growing, most popular, most re-pinned category on the site.

The top spot on Pinterest is no small potatoes.
Pinterest is now the third largest social network behind only Facebook and Twitter, and is closing in on number two. The site has around 30 million monthly visitors and is the third-largest source of referral traffic on the Internet. 70% of Pinterest users cite recipes as their most pinned items.

Pinterest has staying power.
Pinterest is the rare social network that seems to have cracked the code for monetization. Pinned images are like glowing recommendations for products that convert Pinterest browsers into shoppers at astounding rates. According to PriceGrabber 21% of users have purchased something they saw on the site and foodies again led the way, accounting for a third of those purchases. The site collects affiliate fees by attaching links that take you from a pin you like to the store that sells the item, and last month Pinterest launched its business accounts that will surely lead to advertising and other revenue.

Learn to love Pinterest.
There’s never been a shortage of places to go for pretty pictures of food and stuff to buy. And does anybody really need another online social network? But if it’s where the food is, it’s where we’ll want to be.
I’m trying: http://pinterest.com/gigabiting/

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Gingerbread Houses 2012

Janice | November 14, 2012 - 1:59 pm

image via Petit Plat

What’s up with gingerbread houses in 2012? Plenty, it seems.
Gingerbread houses have gone green and sustainable, mid-century modern, and gluten-free. They’re big enough to walk through and small enough to dangle on the rim of a mug of cocoa. And we’ve finally had enough of gingerbread houses made of cupcakes.

Here’s a sampling of what’s online this holiday season:

Learn how to make a gingerbread house with a YouTube cooking lesson.

Visit our nation’s official gingerbread White House during the month of December at ObamaFoodorama.

View a time-lapse video of the construction of a life-sized gingerbread house (that’s 600 pounds of powdered sugar you’re watching!).

Peruse the gingerbread house picture gallery or upload a photo of your own creation at the Pinterest board for Gingerbread House Heaven.

Enter a gingerbread house-building contest. A national competition is held annually in Asheville, NC, but there are plenty of local events for both amateur and professional bakers.

Order a gingerbread replica of your home from custom baker Rebecca Russell.

Disneyland always pulls out the stops for its life-size gingerbread house at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort. This year’s house is based on the Haunted Mansion from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and features a special-effects laden see-through ghost train that travels around the base of the house while ghosts chase a gingerbread man on a push car.

Choose between an A-frame, a Colonial, or a Saltbox with gingerbread house blueprints from BobVila.com.

Shop for kits, pans, and decorating tools at the Wilton Christmas Gingerbread Shop.

Play the online Home Sweet Home and decorate a virtual gingerbread house.

And yes, there’s an app for that.
Download Gingerbread House Maker for Android and Apple gadgets.

Posted in Christmas, cyberculture, diversions | Leave a comment

Vegan Men Come Out of the Closet

Janice | November 8, 2012 - 12:18 pm

[image via The Vegan Soapbox]

The tell-tale signs
Does the man in your life know the proper pronunciation of quinoa?
Has he ever come home with a guilty look and the smell of wheat grass on his breath?
Does he think it’s cute when you refer to lentils as legumes (Silly girl, they’re pulses!) and get hot and bothered when you wear your organic cotton t shirt?
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but your man is a vegan.

The cultural cliché that just won’t die
Real men are supposed to eat meat. Those who eschew animal-sourced foods are, if not exactly girlie, compromised as manly men. Even vegetarians rate their own kind as less masculine.

Meat is the food of men. In ancient societies, a successful hunt was an emblem of manhood, bringing status and signaling readiness to marry. Meat-eating suggests power, vitality, and virility. Nearly every language with gendered pronouns assigns maleness to meaty words.

By contrast a meatless regimen seems mild and anemic. And worst of all, it speaks of compassion. Vegans are tagged as sensitive souls—hugging trees, cuddling bunnies, awash in emotionalism. In other words, feminine.

Finally, vegan men are coming out of the closet.
Bloomberg Businessweek profiled heavyweight, alpha-male vegans like Bill Clinton, Russell Simmons, and Steve Wynn in The Rise of the Power Vegans, and a group called Vegans in Vegas held a first-of-its kind event mixing bachelor party hijinks with vegan-themed presentations in fields like nutrition, fitness, and environmentalism. The online, pro-vegan lifestyle magazine The Discerning Brute calls its content fashion, food, and etiquette for the ethically handsome man, and The Ethical Man recently became the first 100% vegan apparel shop for men.

Beefcake; hold the beef
40 Sexy Vegan Men shares photos and video of celebrity vegans from the fields of film, music, professional sports, and television. 10 Brawny and Buff Vegan Men gives us exactly that from the chest-thumping world of boxers, wrestlers, and martial artists. And then there was the wildly-popular Vegan Ryan Gosling internet meme (sample entry: Hey Girl, sorry my shirt is off but we’re out of cheesecloth and I needed to drain some tofu).

Do your part to help change perceptions
Encourage your man to come out of the shadows and practice his veganism in the light of day.
Take him on a date to the bulk foods aisle. Start dropping phrases like bioavailability and meat analog into conversations. Learn to love a splash of almond milk in your coffee.
Real men do eat plants; they just need our love and support to do it in public.

Posted in cyberculture, funny, vegetarian | Leave a comment

Audible Edibles: The Best Online Radio Food Shows

Janice | October 11, 2012 - 2:39 pm

There’s something about listening to a food show on the radio.

Of course I am endlessly entertained by TV cooking shows: a little pseudo-cooking from a well-coiffed celebrity host in a pristine, Sub-Zero-sponsored kitchen; or maybe the high drama of competitive cooking looking all too easy with flashy knife skills and careful editing. It’s performance television, and most of us view it with the same slack-jawed passivity we assume when watching a CSI marathon.

But there’s just something about listening to a food show.
There’s an intimacy and immediacy to the disembodied voice in your ear, a connection that is rarely found through the high-gloss visuals of television. Fans of the genre claim that at its best, radio taps deep into their memories, pulling imagery from their brains in a way that video never does.

Radio is accessible just about anytime, anywhere: you can tune in the local station through the FM dial, subscribe via satellite service, stream shows live online, or download podcasts to numerous devices. There are shows for every taste from the big city polish of Los Angeles’ Good Food and Eastern Iowa’s recipe-swapping Open Line, with its repertoire of icebox cookies and new uses for canned cream of mushroom soup. Niche podcasters play to cultish audiences with the practical, the edgy, and the strange like the dairy discourse of Cutting the Curd, school cafeteria reports from the Renegade Lunch Lady, and Mike and Tom Eat Snacks, known by its legions of fans as MATES, in which comedian Michael Ian Black and actor Tom Cavanagh riff on snack food, combining wildly improvisational comedy and surprisingly solid food reviews.

Tune in here, my friend; you look hungry:

Cooking Issues brings one of our favorite blogs to life. Dave Arnold, the Director of Culinary Technology of The French Culinary Institute at The International Culinary Center, tinkers with the newest kitchen technologies, techniques, and ingredients.
The BBC’s The Food Programme produces thoughtful, in depth explorations of a broad range of culinary topics.
Dare we call it hipster radio? Snacky Tunes is a weekly Brooklyn-based happening hosted by identical twins Greg and Darin Bresnitz, a duo better-known as Finger on the Pulse, bringing together chefs, DJs, farmers, bands, DJs, restaurateurs, and record label owners for a discussion of things culinary and musical.
The Menu comes from The Monacle, a global affairs magazine that’s become essential reading for the young, stylish, and moneyed, as well as those who aspire to a global jet setter lifestyle. The weekly radio show is a fascinating peek at that crowd’s need-to-know hotspots and personalities.
American Public Media is still at the top of its game with the long-running classic The Splendid Table, combining recipes, cooking tips, chef interviews, and lifestyle segments.

You can keep the food talk streaming with a pair of food-focused radio networks:

The Food Radio Network is a far cry from the cluster of food shows found on the lower end of the dial at public radio stations. Brazenly commercial, it can feel at times like ‘QVC Radio’ with sponsored segments like Pillsbury Makes It With Love, but in between the promos you’ll find some quality programming like the global kitchen of One World One Table and the totally tea-centric Steeping Around.
The non-profit Heritage Radio Network presents an eclectic lineup of live webcasts aimed at a hip, green-leaning listener. Hot Grease follows the local food movement; Let’s Get Real sniffs out everything fake in food from empty health claims to self-righteous foodiness; The Speakeasy examines contemporary cocktail culture; and there’s a whole slew of shows for everyone from culinary do-it-yourselfers, to craft beer lovers, and culinary world insiders.

Posted in cyberculture, Entertainment | 1 Comment

The Rise of Subscription Commerce

Janice | September 11, 2012 - 1:44 pm

Just like the flash sales and daily deal sites that clog your inbox, monthly subscription services want to fill your mailbox.

Here’s how they work:
The subscriber pays a monthly fee, usually around $10 or $20, to receive some type of box each month. The box can be filled with samples or full-size products, household names or new product introductions—you don’t know just what’s inside until you open it. Each service targets a narrowly defined customer niche, and products are carefully selected by authorities in the category. Some of the more successful services have hundreds of thousands of paid subscriptions and can charge a slotting fee to the manufacturers for the privilege of inclusion, while others pay the wholesale price to get a product in their boxes. There’s Bark Box for dog owners, Mystery Tackle Box for fishing enthusiasts, his-and-hers underwear (Manpacks and Panty by Post), and the very crowded beauty field (Test Tube, Birch Box, Beauty Bar).

Food makers have flocked to subscription commerce.
It’s a natural fit. There’s a constant parade of small, independent food artisans, and food lovers have insatiable appetites for new and different tastes. The producers gain access to specialized consumer niches, getting their products in the right hands, and consumers get the thrill of discovery with little effort or expense.

The return on investment to the food producers is a little murky; it’s not clear that subscription boxes convert enough samplers into customers. But it feels like a pure win for food lovers.
Here are some of the more interesting food subscriptions out there:

Love With Food sends out 8+ samples in each $10 (shipping included) monthly box, skewed heavily toward high-quality snacks and treats like granola, hand-made marshmallows, herbal teas, and salsas.

KnoshBox is also heavy on the snacks. Monthly boxes are themed (Autumn Harvest, Wine Trails), and focused on small, regional American producers. The $30 boxes (shipping included) are filled with full-sized jam jars and biscotti bags.

Sometimes it seems like all the interesting food artisans live in Brooklyn or the Bay Area. Gotham Box taps into foodie envy by curating a monthly selection of new treats out of either New York or San Francisco ($20 including shipping).

Mantry‘s subscription boxes are designed to stock what they call the’ modern man’s pantry.’ The focus, they say, is on the rare, the exotic, and the functional (cuz Babes recognize a man with taste), which seems to mean a lot of hot sauce, jerky, and chocolate. If you want in, you can add your name to the waiting list.

The Turntable Kitchen offers a monthly ‘curated food and music discovery experience delivered to your door’. Each $25 (including shipping) pairing box brings a couple of old favorites on 7-inch vinyl plus a digital mix-tape of carefully chosen new artists; a recipe collection, tasting notes, and a few exotic ingredients to pair with the music.

Subscription boxes are a boon to special dieters.
Pick your allergens, singly or in combination (dairy, egg, soy, wheat, tree nuts…) and Tasterie will compile a monthly selection that’s been subjected to a rigorous screening and verification process to ensure allergen-free ingredients and processes ($20 including shipping). Paleo Pax is for followers of the fad diet that aspires to mimic the 10,000 year-old regimen of hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic era before the advent of agriculture and domesticated animals. For a monthly $18 (plus shipping), expect to see lots of nuts, dried berries, and foods made from sea kelp.

Lost Crates is the meta-curator of curated boxes. They have assembled a lineup of online lifestyle curators and create proprietary boxes (prices vary) for Joy the Baker, the Shiksa in the Kitchen, EcoSalon, and others. A clever quiz guides you to your ‘soulmate crate.’

My Subscription Addiction is a review site for the expanding universe of subscription commerce.

Posted in cyberculture, shopping | Leave a comment

Bad tippers take note. They’re naming names.

Janice | August 7, 2012 - 1:25 pm

image via The Snarky Souffle

Do you tip a straight 15%? Do you bump it up to 20% or more for really good service? Not to worry; you should be in the clear.

If you are rude, if you are demanding, if you totally stiff your server, you just might find your name making the rounds in cyberspace on a list of bad tippers. Waiters, bartenders, even pizza delivery guys all have their go-to websites for rants and revenge, pulling transaction details from credit card receipts and posting them anonymously. The tweets could be flying before you get your car back from the valet parker (and yes, they have their own site).

Find out what your servers really think of you.

Waiter Rant has made an industry of tipping tales with a popular blog and a best-selling book, Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip – Confessions of a Cynical Waiter. Here you’ll learn how the car you drive tells the world what kind of tipper you are, and why the check for your table of 6 included a gratuity charge.

Bitter Waitress pulls no punches with posts like Man and Fat Wife’s Anniversary, and Stop Coddling the Whiny, Bitchy People.

Is your name among the thousands of entries in the Lousy Tippers Database? With the ominous subtitle ‘There is a Consequence,’ let’s hope not.

Another place that servers go to share is the Facebook page Bad Tippers Suck! where they like to remind you that there is no such things as over-tipping.

Celebrity Tipping: the stuff of legend.

All eyes are on them as they stride in with entourage and attitude. They are fully aware of the scrutiny, the flash of cell phone cameras, the gossip that moves at the speed of light. But still, they engage in heinous acts of tip stiffing. Such hubris! Of course their servers are only too happy to share sordid tales of rude behavior and lousy tips.

Sullen, petulant Russell Crowe appears on the list of the 10 best celebrity tippers while perpetually cheery Rachael Ray is one of the 10 worst. Go figure.

Stained Apron identifies celebrities as ‘Saints’ and ‘Scum,’ claiming that tipping habits are the true test of inner peace and civility. We could have guessed about Uma Thurman, but it’s nice to know that the former members of the Village People wear the halo. It seems that most members of Congress are going to hell, but we already knew that.

Here’s a tip: don’t wait until you see your name on a bad tippers’ database to give a jolt to your conscience. From sommeliers to tattoo artists, find out the appropriate gratuity for all the service workers in your life with these tipping guidelines.

Did you know that servers cover the tip’s fees on credit cards? Read Gigabiting’s Credit Card Fees on the Tip: Who Pays?

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