Local Food Dinner at the Greenfield Village

We are looking forward to attending a local food dinner on Tuesday, August 12 at the Greenfield Village Pavilion at The Henry Ford. If you are in the area, come for an evening of great food, music and the unique ambience of the world-famous Greenfield Village. The Henry Ford’s Executive Chef Nick Seccia, a leader in the Slow Food Movement, has designed a special menu of local foods just for the occasion. Here's a sample of menu items: Heirloom Tomato Tasting, Springport, Michigan FFA Chicken Satay, Grilled Summer Squash Pizza, Wine Braised Grass Fed Beef and a Local Melon Martini.

This special dinner is part of “Choices: The Conference that Celebrates Food and Health”. Go to http://mnn.fcs.msue.msu.edu/ for more information on the conference. Eat Local Food will be an exhibitor at the conference, and we've also designed the promotional postcard, conference brochures and a keepsake bookmark for the event. Please stop to visit if you attend the conference.

Dinner guests will travel by carriage from the gates of Greenfield Village to the Pavilion for the evening’s festivities. Dinner tickets may be purchased at http://mnn.fcs.msue.msu.edu/ or contact Diane Drago at (517) 643-0266. A cash bar will be offered during the dinner. Reservations are requested to be made by Wednesday, August 6. Go to http://www.thehenryford.org/ for more information on The Henry Ford and Greenfield Village.

Hope to see you there!

Your Marketing Message: Are You Authentic?

Hi All,
Authenticity in local food marketing is a topic that continues to interest me. According to the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary, authenticity means being actually and exactly what is claimed, and being fully trustworthy. In Michigan we are well into farmers’ market season, with lots of choices being presented to shoppers. If you are a vendor at a farmers market, make sure your message is authentic. Are you a grower or a reseller? If you are a grower, are you a USDA Certified Organic Grower, a Conventional Grower or are you Certified Naturally Grown? Is your produce labelled correctly? If you are honest and authentic with your customers, they will remember it and choose you over other vendors. At Eat Local Food, we make sure our products are made in the USA, because we feel that we can’t promote eating local food and import our products from China or India. It just doesn't make sense. We make sure we are authentic in our artwork, our products and our representations to customers.

Earlier this year, I snapped this photo while shopping at a large Michigan based grocery store. It’s obviously a signage error, but doesn’t add to their authenticity one bit.

So take some time and self-assess your whole marketing message – from your labeling right down to your packaging. Making sure you are authentic takes effort and time but will pay off with loyal repeat customers.

Limiting fructose may boost weight loss.

A recent study has shown that limiting fructose may boost weight loss. It looks like science is finally catching up to what is obvious to the eye. For over 20 years, the average American diet has had fructose substituted for sucrose and in that time obesity has shot up. If you read the study and think about the seasons, it makes a lot of sense. Fruit is generally available in the late summer and early fall and most mammals are laying on fat to get ready for a long winter. It would be a survival advantage to convert fructose to fat in as few steps as possible.

We had a great weekend, the highlight was watching the start of the Ausable River Race Marathon. Over 50 two-person teams canoed non-stop for 120 miles. The first team finished in a little over 14 hours. The race began Saturday night at 9:00 PM in Grayling, Michigan. So navigating a river at night makes it all the more amazing. The start of the race is a 4 block sprint and then a plunge into the river. It is very exciting, especially the part where we ran through back yards to see the teams paddling the first stretch of the river after seeing them running pell-mell down the streets of Grayling.

Shelf Talkers and a Day at the Market

Hi,
Just got back from a day at the Dearborn Farmer's and Artisan Market. We have had the same neighbor, Tim, for two weeks at the market. Tim is from Hickory Hill Farm. Last week, I showed him our shelf talkers and he immediately "got it" and asked us to bring two dozen cards this week. The cards looked great in his booth and Tim said two things struck him about the shelf talkers. 1. Fewer customers were asking him "how much does this cost". 2. He would no longer have to haul around the big dry erase board he had been using.

We also met Andrea Stevens this week. Very nice woman. Andrea told us about http://www.holisticmoms.org/. She is starting a local chapter and they are having an open house on Thursday, August 7, 2008 at 6:30 PM at the Plymouth District Library, 223 S. Main St., Plymouth, MI. I told her I would pass along the information in my next post. If interested, check it out.

Have a great weekend and enjoy the summer weather!

Hello from Washington State!

Hello to all local food supporters!
My name is Teresa Skye, and I live in Winthrop ,WA. I am a lover of local food and support local products whenever I can. I am a biased lover of Eat Local Food as a company because Joan, the owner, is my sister, and that obviously makes Chris, the fabulous artist, my sister as well. I've been working as a Northwest rep for Eat Local Food for several months now. Getting to know the farmers and small orchardists in the area has been an enriching experience. They are all such hardworking, dedicated folks who are trying to preserve an important institution-the smaller American farm. I hope to blog once in awhile here to let the rest of the country know what's happening in my corner of the country with local marketing ideas.
Recently I attended a conference called "Farm to Table" sponsored by Washington State University. It was intended to get together local growers with restaurants and markets that might use their produce. One presenter talked about the Okanogan Producers Marketing Association (OPMA), which is a group of 6 small farms who got together as a cooperative to market their produce on the "other side" (here in Washington that's across the mountains, to the bigger markets on the western side of the state). They are able to share one ordering phone call, one truck, one invoice, and one check. They might have a truck full of everyone's produce and fruit go to the west once a week, delivering to now established clients. The concept tripled their sales in the second year, and they're developing new business daily. This is an example of allowing small growers deliver fresh produce in a feasible way.
Gotta go-my tomatoes need watering!

Detroit Eastern Market

Joan and I went down to the Detroit Eastern Market on Saturday. Part of the trip was to check out the banners we sold to the MSU Product Center who is operating a stall in Shed 2. We used the new image Chris created, you can check it out on the webstore under Banners/Buy Local Products. I love this image and it marks an additional direction for Eat Local Food into marketing of value-added products. I know I'm a little biased, but the new banners absolutely blew away every other banner in the place. We also provided shelf-talkers using the same image, they aren't in the store yet, but if your interested send us a note at info@eatlocalfood.com.

If you haven't been to the Detroit Eastern Market in a while, you're really missing out on a bit of a renaissance . Check out this link for more information. They recently rehabilitated Shed 2. It was not without controversy, and did result in the loss of some beautiful murals at each of the four entrances, but the end result has a clean, open aesthetic that can be appreciated even while missing the building's former look.

Dearborn Farmers & Artisans Market

We'll be selling tote-bags at the Dearborn Farmer's & Artisan Market from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM, each Friday at the West Village Commons in Dearborn, Michigan. Come join us and support local food. Also, we get our box of food from our CSA, Maple Creek Farm on Friday, so we always look forward to the end of the week.

Joan participated in a promotional advertisement with the City of Dearborn TV for the Dearborn Farmers Market, you can check it out here.

First Post for Eat Local Food

Hi, I've been entertaining the idea of starting a blog, and now I've gone ahead and done it. Join us as we talk about a subject my wife, Joan, and I have a lot of passion about: local food. About 3 years ago, while on vacation, we came up with the idea of using fine art to market local food. It didn't hurt that we were sitting in an artist's house at the time. The artist was none other than Chris Witkowski, world famous food artist and even more importantly, Joan's sister. The business has grown steadily and we are excited to be able to use blogspot to keep you informed.

The company we created is called Eat Local Food and it is a local food marketing and art design company. Products and services include customized marketing merchandise, logo, business card and brochure design, and marketing tips for food retailers, cooperative grocers, farmers markets, CSAs (community supported agriculture), agricultural destinations (wineries, farms, orchards), restaurants, schools and hospitals.