I have a confession to make: I am a Food Network junkie. My love and admiration go beyond simple foodie pleasures. Sure I’d love to learn how to perfect my turkey brining process; however, what really melts my butter is why I need to brine the turkey in the first place.
I am knowledge hungry, particularly when it comes to the food I’m putting in my mouth. How did it get from one person’s idea to a product in my local grocery store? Why do they use that packaging? How do they get the cream in a Ho-Ho? And for goodness sakes, why can’t we get a dustless Cheeto? I suppose you could say I am a wanna-be food scientist.
The love and admiration for all things food process doesn’t stop with me. Both of my kids, 13 and 8, love to watch shows like Unwrapped and Alton Brown. We can usually tell just by looking at a food processing plant when we’re going to see an extruder versus a mixer. I credit shows like Unwrapped for making my job as the FoodProcessing.com web editor extraordinarily cool to my kids. (If you’d like to earn the love and admiration of my kids as well by giving us a tour of your plant, please inquire within).
I remember coming on board at FoodProcessing.com. I was nervous about understanding the processing side of industry. But Dave and Diane have made me feel right at home as have you – our loyal readers.
Recently I did an Unwrapped-like project of my own. I was interested in “unwrapping” our electronic newsletters and what our subscribers though of them. They responses were eye-opening:
- 90 percent of you subscribe to FoodProcessing.com E-News
- 60 percent of you prefer to receive your e-newsletters in the morning
- 59 percent of you would prefer we include more trend-related articles
- 59 percent of you also would like to see us break the e-newsletters down into more niche-specific categories
- A lot of you would like to see more original online content
Like an R&D person, I found the responses enlightening. As for the development portion of this exercise, I promise I’ll do my best to deliver an e-newsletter you’ll want to read as soon as it hits your in-box. Until then, please do me a favor and drop me a line if you have any suggestions or ideas for how we can improve.
Until then, you can find me on the couch with my kids, watching Unwrapped, still trying to figure out how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.
