Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

Mike Hohnen

Max Brenner chocolate bars

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The centre of this new chocolate culture, Max Brenner chocolate bars are open from morning til late, changing throughout the day. In the mornings, soft jazz music plays while people hug hot chocolate in their hands; in the evenings, the mood becomes more sensual as the music changes, candles are lit and the crowd becomes more intimate.

The brand is heavy on storytelling, and on ceremony. Brenner wants to change the way people experience chocolate, turning consumption into a ceremony, with its own special utensils, textures and tastes, much like wine and coffee. The chocolate drinks menu spans four pages, including chocolate granitas and frozen chocolate cocktails for hot summer days. Special cups were created for different ways of drinking chocolate. Shown above are the Hug Mug, shaped for hugging in both hands; Alice, the ‘ultimate’ milkshake cup; and the Suckao, a special cup with a metal straw and candle underneath designed for preparing thick hot chocolate from hot milk and flakes of chocolate.

More on this at Springwise

Illy Comes to Your Corner

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Illy

A few years ago, Illy defined a handful of Illy Bar Concepts: the Core Bar is situated in historic centers, and functions as a meeting point that expresses the culture and the daily life of its location. Landscape Bars are set in busier areas, such as shopping malls or museums, and are meant to provide a restorative break. Transit Bars are spacious bars for travellers, in stations or airports; Community Bars serve regular customers in residential or semi-central areas; and Corner Bars are stylish, open-plan affairs offering fast service for quick consumption.

Last year, Illy announced that its line of concept bars would continue to expand under a new brand: Espressamente. Over a hundred cafes have opened everywhere from Rome, Munich and Oslo to Sydney, Tokyo and Shanghai, all under Italian design, led by architects Luca Trazzi, Claudio Silvestrin, and Paola Navone. Fast growth countries are France and China. The United States, home of the Banana Coconut Frappuccino, isn’t on the roll-out list. Yet. Its first careful forays are temporary ‘Illy Gallerias’ in New York City: SoHo last fall, and the Time Warner Center this fall.

Unlike Starbucks, Illy is focusing purely on high quality coffee. Forget being spaces, where consumers can park themselves with their MacBooks and Venti Lattes — Espressamente is all about a perfect shot of dark elixir. With rapid expansion plans, this means plenty of opportunity for franchise-minded entrepreneurs. It also shows that innovation never stops: next up, how about the inevitable uber premium coffee chain that will get away with charging 12 dollar for out of this world lattes? It’s all about upgrading the experience these days, not to mention upgraded margins. One to watch.

Website: https://www.illy.com
Contact: exportcs@illy.it

Business Week

Meals That Moms Can Almost Call Their Own

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Americans, pinched for time and increasingly uncomfortable in their kitchens, have been on a 50-year slide away from home cooking. Now, at almost 700 meal assembly centers around the country, families like the Robbinses prepare two weeks’ worth of dinners they can call their own with little more effort than it takes to buy a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad.

The centers are opening at a rate of about 40 a month, mostly in strip malls and office parks in the nation’s suburbs and smaller cities, and are projected to earn $270 million this year, according to the Easy Meal Prep Association, the industry’s trade group.

“It’s been keeping us from ordering pizza all the time,” Ms. Robbins said. “And you still feel like you’re cooking.”

The prototype, a kind of elevated cooking session among friends in a commercial kitchen, popped up in the Northwest in 1999. The concept did not take off until 2002, when two Seattle-area women streamlined the process so customers could make 12 dinners for six in two hours for under $200. That company became Dream Dinners, which opened a year later and now has 112 franchise stores, with 64 under construction.

Super Suppers, which opened a year later in Fort Worth, is the largest chain, with 121 franchise stores and 77 more under construction. For people with few cooking skills, the centers keep things simple with a rotating menu of mostly stews and casseroles designed to be assembled in freezer bags or aluminum trays, then taken home to be baked or simmered in a single pot.

NYT

Consumers use a "Coke Cam" to take a photo of themselves

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Coca-Cola said trials of new vending machines that allow users to take digital photos and download ringtones for mobile phones could be replicated worldwide as the soft drinks company seeks to interact more directly with consumers.

The Cokefridge machine, on display at the CIES world food business conference in Paris last week, has an interactive screen that runs advertisements, and allows users to obtain free photos, games, logos and ringtones after they have bought a drink.

Users type a numerical code inscribed inside the cap of the drink into the interactive screen to get access to the photos and games.

The interactive screen says: “Available here: Cool mobile logos. SMS and ringtones and exciting mobile games. Every Coke and every Code is an experience!” Drinks available for purchase include bottled water as well as soft drinks.

Consumers can use a “Coke Cam” to take a photo of themselves in a frame that contains a Coke logo, and send the photo to an e-mail address or to a mobile phone. They can also interact with a website, www.cokefridge.de

MSNBC

A space for mobile warriors

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Miss that Airport lounge when in the city?

The Coffee Office is built for business – meeting spaces, workstations, conference rooms and caf� are combined into a centre for mobile professionals.

Based in Windsor, Ontario, The Coffee Office was founded to offer business professionals everything they need to stay productive outside a traditional office, in what trendwatching.com calls a being space. A caf� section is open to everyone, and like the rest of the building, offers free high-speed wireless internet and plenty of power points.

Springwise

Functional beer for women

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German brewer Karlsberg (not to be confused with Danish Carlsberg), is convinced that it can get more women to drink beer. In countries such as the UK and Spain, roughly equal percentages of men and women drink beer (around 40%). Surprisingly, this isn’t the case in Germany, where women view beer as unhealthy, fattening, or unsophisticated.

Springwise

Karlsberg

Why are Danish companies better places to work?

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Why are Danish companies better places to work?

Financial times recently published a special supplement on Europe’s best places to work. Despite the fact that Denmark has less than two per cent of the workforce in Europe, six out of about 25 companies featured in the supplement are Danish. Danish companies are highlighted for two main reasons:

There is a different relationship between employees and management. In many companies, employees are co-owners and they consider themselves as partners in the business rather than employees.

The workplace is open and communication is direct and informal. Danish supermarket group Irma is praised for its direct and straightforward communication, which includes a weblog where CEO Alfred Josefsen shares his thoughts on the business with all staff.
Values play a more important role, often more improtant than pure profit. Middelfart Sparekasse – a regional savings bank – defines itself primarily as a positive force in local society rather than a profit making enterprise. By doing the right things in the local community, they actually end up making a lot of money! I personally experienced the same in the hearing aid business: The more we put people and patients first, the more money did we end up making.

Although these points do not correspond exactly to the criteria for success as outlined in “The Second cycle”, they however encompass most of them: Meaning, partnership, collaborative organization and value-based leadership.

So maybe there is a reason why Danish companies are better places to work?

The Second Cycle