donderdag 21 april 2011

STUDENT FOOD

Homemade meals delivered directly to students’ doors

Having recently written about the gourmet dining available from Air France’s roving New York truck, we now turn our attention to the other end of the food quality scale: student dining. Not known for being high on nutritional value, University student meals often pale in comparison to those once cooked at home. Hoping to bring a little of that home comfort and healthy eating back onto campus, we’ve now discovered US-based GW Bites.
The brainchild of George Washington University student Cristina Roman, GW Bites currently offers two different services. The first is the delivery of meals which have been handmade by a fellow GW student. Every Monday an email is sent out to GW Bites' subscribers with details of that week’s menu. If the subscriber chooses to “opt in” on the meal, they will then see it delivered between 5 and 7 pm that Wednesday. The meal itself consists of an an entrée, a main and a dessert, costing a total of USD 11, according to a report on D.C Diners. The second service offered comes in the form of “Meals in a Jar”. Often students will look to make a one-off meal, but will be dissuaded by the cost of the ingredients — the majority of which they won’t use in their recipe. The “Meals in a Jar” service hopes to overcome this by selling just the right amount of ingredients for one meal — resulting in reduced costs. The jars retail for USD 5 for German chocolate cupcakes, to USD 10 for rainbow vegetable chilli. GW Bites claim that these meals would have cost USD 15 and USD 30 respectively if bought from a retailer before being portioned.
Hoping to build with the participation of fellow students, GW Bites is currently welcoming help from others willing to be involved as chefs, marketers or as part of the delivery service. Indeed, GW Bites seems to hold a sense of community spirit at its core, with recipe suggestions readily welcomed from other students (in exchange for a 50% discount off a meal), and 20% reductions available when a student refers a friend.
The primary aim of GW Bites may be to provide home cooked meals, but the fact that all these meals are cooked by fellow students helps create a sense of community. We wouldn't bet against this being the magic ingredient! (Related:Dining insperiences, Parisian style.)
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dinsdag 19 april 2011

URBAN GARDENING

Five new business ideas for urban gardening

More than half of humanity now lives in cities, according to the United Nations Population Fund. This rapid and ongoing change presents a raft of new challenges, many of which create opportunities for resourceful entrepreneurs. Here are five concepts that target consumers' increasing interest in growing their own food in the city:
1. REEL GARDENING — Simplifying the process of starting a domestic garden, South Africa's Reel Gardening provides a strip of biodegradable paper carrying correctly spaced, pre-fertilised seeds. The strips are colour coded (e.g. red for tomatoes, purple for beetroot) and carry instructions for how deep they should be planted in your soil. Just add water!
2. THE WIKI GARDEN — Urban gardeners who haven't even got a bed of soil may be interested in the Wiki Garden from Hawaii. It's a metre-long "growing medium" (i.e. sack) containing compost, worm castings, bat guano and more, plus a built-in irrigation system with a hose attachment. The bags can be connected, allowing for an easily scalable system.
3. CLICK AND GROW — Another alternative is to do without soil at all. Estonia's Click and Grow is a hi-tech growing system deploying aeroponics: the plant's lower stem and roots are contained in an air or mist environment, regulated by sensors and electronics to ensure the plant is fed and watered correctly. The pots even feature a USB port to upload new growing instructions.
4. WINDOWFARMS — Rather than selling a particular product, the Window Farms project in New York promotes the production of hydroponic food gardens in homes and offices, using recycled or locally-sourced materials. The founders aim to build a community to share ideas and engender a DIY approach to solving environmental problems.
5. OOOOBY — Based in New Zealand, Ooooby, short for Out Of Our Own Back Yard, is a social networking community dedicated to connecting local food producers and consumers for trade, networking, and sharing ideas. Ooooby also organises stalls at farmers' markets and other locations through which people can buy, sell and barter local produce and small-scale farming supplies.
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HYPER LOCAL PRODUCTION

If Fortnum's can keep bees on its roof and sell the hyperlocal honey they produce, it stands to reason that other purveyors of food should be able to make the most of their rooftops in a similar way. Enter London grocerThornton's Budgens, which just began selling organic produce grown in a rooftop garden of its very own.
Dubbed Food from the Sky, the rooftop garden project is a collaboration between Thornton’s Budgens, The Positive Earth Project and the local community. In late May, a crane lifted up the necessary materials onto the roof of Budgens' Crouch End store, including 10 tonnes of compost, fencing, trees and over 100 pallets. The project is collaborating with the heritage seed library to grow a number of endangered species of food; it also plans to run food growing workshops on the roof and provide seeds from the harvest free of charge to residents and schools. The garden's first organic fruits and vegetables just went on sale in Budgens, all grown and harvested by volunteers. All proceeds from the not-for-profit venture will be put back into the project; plans for the future include the addition of chickens and top bar bee hives.
As urban areas continue to sharpen their focus on sustainable and local production, it's not hard to imagine food retailers large and small setting up rooftop farms of their own, buoyed also by consumers' love for a good still-made-here story. Other grocers around the globe: what about you?
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WEB 2.0 IN AGRICULTURE

Connecting buyers and sellers of agricultural goods & services

We've featured countless online exchanges over the years that connect buyers and sellers of a wide variety of goods. Zeroing in on the agricultural domain there's been Eggzy, for example, targeting home chicken farmers, as well asVeggie Trader and Local Dirt, to name just a few. The latest spotting, however, is an international agricultural marketplace based in Russia that aims to help both companies and individuals around the world market their agricultural goods.
Whether it's livestock feed, forage crops, timber, land, livestock, produce, personnel or equipment, Farmbook gives buyers and sellers of such items a way to find each other and connect, regardless of where they live. Participants begin by registering with the free site and then posting the details of the products or services they want to buy or sell, including any photos or videos. Companies can also simply create and post an electronic business card. Once registered, users of Farmbook can search for ads based within a certain distance of their own location, by map, or by product category. When they find a match, buyers and sellers can contact each other directly.
Given today's renewed interest in gardening and local agriculture, the need for a means of easy connection seems fairly clear. One to emulate locally for the growing numbers of gardeners and farmers near you? (Related: Design portal for buyers and sellers of sustainable fabrics — Matching buyers and sellers of cardboard boxes.)
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URBAN FARMING AT SCHOOL

Urban farming expands onto school grounds

Community-supported agriculture is not an unfamiliar concept for regular Springwise readers, nor are the often-associated add-ons of bicycle-based produce delivery and compost services. Canadian Fresh Roots Urban Farm offers all of these; what sets it apart, however, is a series of partnerships it's formed with local schools in the Vancouver area to create urban farms on school land.
Fresh Roots produces and distributes organically grown food through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program as well as pocket markets and restaurant sales in the Vancouver area. Much of the produce for that program is grown by local urban farmers and in participating neighborhood gardens, but of particular interest are the organization's new partnerships with local schools to use school land. At Queen Alexandra Elementary, for example, the relationship began last year when the Vancouver School Board bought a share from Fresh Roots' CSA for its cafeteria salad bar program. Since then, however, the partnership has expanded to include a model urban farm on school land, thereby adding to Fresh Roots' production capabilities while creating an outdoor, hands-on, experiential classroom for the school community. Similar partnerships have since been forged with two other local schools, and Fresh Roots invites the participation of others as well.
Urban farming and CSA offer countless benefits in their own right for community nutrition and sustainability, but the addition of educational and nutritional benefits for schoolkids makes for a stellar win indeed. Green-minded entrepreneurs: one to emulate! (Related: Helping home chicken farmers manage & share their eggs — More bicycle-delivered farm produce, now in Minnesota — Now in Toronto, more homegrown veggies without the work.)
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FOOD SELLS

Whiskey and espresso for shoppers at Sydney shirt store

If consumers can drink coffee or eat pizza while they shop for books, then why not let them sip whiskey or java while they contemplate a rack of shirts? That, indeed, is much the premise behind Shirt Bar, an Australian venture that offers an assortment of dark spirits and fresh espresso drinks for the pleasure of its visiting customers.
Some 17 whiskeys are on hand at Sydney's Shirt Bar — 12 single-malts among them — as well as an array of other spirits, including rums, wines, champagne and signature cocktails. Then, too, there's the store's FAT coffee line, provided by the Australian brand by the same name. All that on top of Shirt Bar's selection of bespoke and designer shirts, which are oriented primarily toward men.
Shirt Bar has created an experience with the potential to recapture the imagination of shoppers. With retailers around the world striving for ways to keep consumers offline, we think that a healthy dose of innovation is the best way forward!
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STREET FOOD IN THE MOUNTAINS

Roving snow vehicles bring fresh-made snacks to skiers

No end in sight to the Twitter-powered food trucks! After featuring several examples of such tech-fueled curbside cuisine in recent years — including LA's Kogi Korean BBQ and Coolhaus — we recently learned of a brand-new example on California's Mammoth Mountain. Dubbed the Roving Mammoth, the new service brings snacks both savory and sweet to assuage the hunger of on-slope skiers.
Launched in December, Roving Mammoth's two state-of-the-art snowcats have each been equipped with a small kitchen on the back, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, enabling them to deliver refreshments to ski runs with limited restaurant availability. One vehicle features burritos, while the other features fresh-baked calzones; either way, churros and a variety of non-alcoholic drinks are also available. As with several of the previous efforts we've seen, the snowcats' whereabouts are trackable via Twitter.
If consumers are accustomed to artfully crafted food whenever the mood hits them on the streets of LA, why shouldn't they expect the same on the slopes — or wherever they happen to be? And why shouldn't some enterprising soul like you be ready to deliver it? (Related: Balloon-enabled pizza picnic delivery — Picnics on the slopes.)
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FREE FOOD Marketing

Gourmet airline food served for free from roving New York truck

We’ve seen food trucks experience a surge in popularity over recent years, usually using Twitter or Facebook to keep potential diners updated on their whereabouts. Just recently we saw the Roving Mammoth putting an alpine twist on the concept, and now we’ve discovered Air France putting another new spin on the food truck: free food!
The Air France food truck toured Manhattan for five days in March, with menus created by Michelin-starred chef Joël Robuchon. The truck’s location was announced each day on the Air France Facebook and Twitter streams, along with invitations to photograph the truck for entry into a competition for Air France travel goods. Patrons of the food truck could arrive for breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert, with meals such as “grilled beef filet with wine truffle sauce and potatoes a gratin” and “smoked salmon shrimp rondelle” all available for free. Whilst sampling the culinary delights of the truck, diners could also enter to win a pair of Air France tickets to Paris, and were encouraged to donate to City Harvest to feed the hungry and less fortunate in the city. According to a report on airlinetrends.com, an estimated 600 meals were given away during the promotion.
Convincing the public that airline food can be gourmet is a tough task for any marketing team. But if you have the goods to back up the claim, then confident tryvertising strategies such as these are a sure fire way to win hearts and minds. A ploy to try out yourself? (Related: Balloon-enabled pizza picnic delivery.)
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