Tocquigny

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the app now for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

No, not that Farmville. I’m talking about the new visibility of family farms in our responsible eating marketplace and how social media can be a great solution for keen farmers looking to seize this unique opportunity and build brand equity.

Picture the last time you were at a restaurant. Did the menu note that the food was fresh or organic? Maybe you saw a sign, trumpeting the restaurant’s locally sourced produce. These future artifacts are signs of the time. More and more consumers care about what they consume: Where did it come from? How was it made? Were the people who made it treated fairly How did it get to my plate?

Sustainability and social responsibility are no longer buzz terms - but market demands. According to a Deloitte study [PDF], 54% of consumers now enter stores actively considering sustainability attributes in their purchase decision. That said, only 22% actually buy based upon those attributes alone. For some reason, the 32% lost have changed their minds at the point of purchase.


For restaurants, that means selling the sustainability value proposition at their point of purchase: the table, check-out counter, or drive-thru. Consumers expect transparency, and that’s why restaurants (especially in Austin) are starting to list the local farms where they purchase their meat and produce.

In today’s digital world, it’s almost expected behavior to pick up our mobile devices and Google after being exposed to something of interest. Then, it’s no wonder why I’ve been perusing many a family farm website over the past year while nibbling on my non-GMO, grass-fed bison hamburger.

 
But, really - farm websites are admittedly a bit behind the times. And, that’s understandable: Farmers probably prefer to do what they do best - farm - and probably have very few resources to actually invest in such a labor-intensive communications medium. So, how can we save the family farm?

Easy: Social media! These websites clearly have great content: Stories about the family, why pastured eggs are better than factory eggs, pictures of the well-kept livestock, and more.

What better way to easily share that content than through Facebook photo albums or regular status updates? Or a quick Flipcam-produced YouTube video? Or check-ins on Foursquare at the Farmers’ Market?

Some farms are already catching on. And, while their audience may be small now, they’ll be well-positioned as the responsible eating marketplace continues to expand and this sort of restaurant transparency becomes an insurmountable barrier to entry.

Then, social media really will be dominated by Farmville. No, not that Farmville. 

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the app now for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

It would be much easier to write about how technology hasn’t changed food – nearly everything has felt the impact of mobile apps, social, and the deluge of data. Whether it’s start-ups turning data from something mysterious to something fun (Gojee, Food Genius, Punchfork), food bloggers whose style and recipies I love (Homesick Texan, What Katie Ate, Cannelle et Vanille), online communities creating new local experiences (Grubly, Housefed, Dinevore), or apps that recommend jumping off I-10 in Jennings, LA to have lunch at Boudin King - technology’s impact on how and what we eat can’t be understated.

Our biggest challenge? Cutting through the noise! More than 5500 iPhone apps pop up when you search for “food” in the App Store.  Searching “food blog” on Google returns about 728,000,000 results. It’s like drinking from a fire hose - and the information will just keep on coming.  Once you hook up nutrition info with FourSquare and Nike+ I’ll know exactly how far I have to run to work off last night’s burger.  Or when you connect a smart fridge to the geo-location on a phone, I won’t forget to drop in and get cornichons when I’m near Central Market.

If you’re interested in food and technology, I love foodandtechconnect.com. For geeks like me it’s a great way to find out what’s new - from the latest start-up to new ways to think about all this data. New voices and new technologies will continue to teach us more about food and help us enjoy it. There are great fun problems to solve and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

But even as I think about all this innovation, the most important thing about food is what what tech hasn’t changed - it’s still all about coming together to enjoy a good meal with great people.

The How We Love Food series celebrates the iPad launch of How We Love Food, an annual collection of recipes from Yvonne Tocquigny, founder and CEO of Tocquigny, and focuses on the convergence of food, marketing, and technology. Download the app now for just $1.99, and all proceeds will be donated to nonprofit Urban Roots.

In looking at the evolution of user-generated content and the power and influence of social media, it is interesting to note the effect it has on restaurants, large and small. In fact, eating establishments now look to social media as one of the primary sources to learn what today’s restaurant goers want.

On Facebook, chefs post pictures of new creations to share with friends, and more importantly, learn what the public likes and how to improve upon their already existing menus. In turn, this generates substantial buzz for the restaurant. And this isn’t just happening on restaurant Facebook pages or Twitter feeds. It’s all over chef profiles, as their personal pages become more intertwined with where they work and their networks become brand advocates, posting and sharing the content as well. According to the McKinsey Quarterly, word-of-mouth marketing and reviews can have a profound influence on consumers, as they are actively seeking the required information to finalize their decision to use a product or service.

From reviews in the newspaper, to Yelp and UrbanSpoon, to social media, the evolution of what is a restaurant review has blurred. And that’s ok with me. Honestly, I think the more involvement the public can have in the creative and marketing process of restaurants, the better. 

To add some flash to a recent new business pitch, we decided to utilize one of the first concepts that we toyed with in Tocquigny Labs.

Projection mapping, as it’s commonly called, is the process of projecting images onto 3D geometry.  It’s been used quite frequently on a large scale to transform buildings into massive canvases, like with Coca Cola’s 125th Anniversary Celebration, but the idea itself is quite scalable.

For our presentation, instead of just creating a PowerPoint, we decided to bring projection mapping to the conference room. We designed an arrangement of four white canvases at different aspect ratios and then wrote custom software that allows us to map different images and videos to each surface using only one projector, all while being able to control the presentation like a normal PowerPoint.

Just the small element of depth introduced by the physical canvases makes the presentation feel strikingly different, and despite the fact that the light actually comes from one projector, it often seems as if the canvases are self-illuminating.

Finding ways such as this to introduce some tactility to the digital world can be a great way to create engaging, memorable experiences. In fact, many recent tech trends such as augmented reality, multi-touch screens and natural user interfaces all deal with the merging of digital information and physical interaction. Projection mapping is just another tool in the technologist’s arsenal, but the results can be quite compelling.

On Sunday, during the dramatic end to the women’s world cup final in Germany, as Japan tied with the U.S. with three minutes remaining and went on to win on penalties, an all-time Twitter record of 7,196 tweets per second (TPS) was set. This moment surpassed the previous record, set on New Years Eve in Japan in 2010, which hit 6,939 TPS, the earthquake and tsunami which hit Japan in March (5,530 TPS), the death of Osama bin laden (5,106 TPS), the 2011 Super Bowl (4,064 TPS) and the Royal Wedding in April (3,966 TPS).

The record-breaking numbers on Sunday, of course, reflect a rise in Twitter usage. Currently, Twitter users send 200 million tweets per day, compared to 10 million two years ago. What’s more, 600,000 new users are signing up daily. We should all expect upcoming noteworthy events are clearly going to lead to a greater number of tweets as well as new record breakers, but what else can we take away from this?

While the record is arbitrary and will most certainly be broken sooner than later, it is a small indication that there are more ways to judge the worthiness of cultural events beyond the traditional measuring sticks like television ratings. In the past, television ratings were always the single barometer for measuring the significance and popularity of current events. All the common-man chatter and hype that was built up around big events happened strictly in private conversations. Today, people have their entertainment attention divided, the individual has the power to choose how and when they consume their entertainment and events, and everyone has a voice that is very public and available worldwide in real-time. Decidedly, tweets-per-second isn’t a perfect gage for establishing cultural significance, and it is not going to take the place of TV ratings altogether, but it is like seeing the water cooler chatter on a worldwide level as it happens, not just what our personal friends and colleagues think. I predict, pretty soon, we will be inventing all sorts of new metrics, outside of TV ratings, to determine social impact and status.