Your posts make us thirsty, laugh and feel hopeful
This week, we loved your posts about inspiring industry professionals, cartoon robot chefs and cocktail contests. Hey, we can’t make this stuff up. (Plus, as journalists, that’s highly frowned upon.)
Truth is indeed stranger/cooler than fiction sometimes.
While many of us love a good before-and-after photo collage, John Toner took it to the next level during the 2020 Viva Fresh Clean Eating Challenge by the Texas International Produce Association.
He was one of the featured participants who documented their progress during the six-month challenge and used it as a springboard for a total overhaul of his lifestyle. The premise is for produce industry members to “walk the talk” of eating healthy, and to make some positive long-lasting changes, whatever that means for each participant.
Toner, vice president of conventions and industry collaborations for United Fresh Produce Association, is obviously going through a lot of change at work too, as his association merges with Produce Marketing Association.
One year after he started his clean eating journey, Toner has shed a visibly significant amount of weight with several strategies, including exercise, healthy diet and sobriety for a full year, as he celebrated in another LinkedIn post.
Toner’s blog posts during the challenge felt warm and sincere, and this post continues to inspire us to walk the talk of the produce industry as well.
Find him on Linkedin at LinkedIn.com/in/jtonerv/.
We were sucked in by the idea of a cartoon chef robot solving our weeknight dinner problems.
Kroger supermarkets has a social media Chefbot to help shoppers figure out what to make for dinner with up to three ingredients they have in the kitchen. Genius.
We tested it, typing “linguine, ground beef, zucchini” in the comment section.
Less than five minutes later, we received a reply: “Your food + my ‘brain’ = YUM. Here’s what I found for you to make: [kroger.com/recipes/search].”
The link took us to the retailer’s recipe page, saying the search didn’t return any results. The website instead offered some chicken and poultry dinner recipes, plus vegetarian dinner recipes.
We tried it again, tweaking the ingredients, using ground turkey instead: A different fun reply with a link that also didn’t find our specific results. For our final try, we sent: bananas, peanut butter and zucchini. Same reply.
This is an absolutely great, possibly useful, totally fun idea that needs work on the execution. But it did engage us and make Kroger top of mind for a while.
Find them on Twitter at @Kroger and @KrogerChefbot.
Don’t know what to cook now that the seasons are changing?? Ask @KrogerChefbot! His fresh skills are better than ever ? pic.twitter.com/aavmAVOGuG — Kroger (@kroger) October 7, 2021
We focus more on the struggles of the restaurant industry when it comes to foodservice during the pandemic, but bars have struggled too.
Pom Wonderful, which grows and sells whole pomegranates, arils and juice, conducted a cocktail contest on Instagram to benefit bars. The winning recipe creator’s chosen bar will receive $10,000.
Based on Pom Wonderful’s Instagram page, it looks like there are at least a dozen participants, if not many more, with delicious, professional-looking photos of creative beverage concoctions.
We chose to feature what may be the second-place winner with 457 likes at press time, because the image shows a whole pomegranate, a half, the arils nestled on an ice cube floating in the drink and the bottled juice. Plus, the recipe sounds delicious, with tequila, orgeat syrup,
ginger syrup and walnut bitters — and pomegranate juice, of course.
This is a classic way to promote on social media: a contest using visuals, creating engagement focused on your product, to benefit a good cause.
We look forward to seeing who the winner is on Instagram at @PomWonderful.
