Starbucks gets bookishIf Barnes & Noble can sell coffee, it stands to reason Starbucks can sell books. And that’s just what chairman Howard Schultz aims to do by the end of the year. While short on details, he said the work of popular authors would be featured, in much the same way the company has been selling selected CDs. Add a plan to make proprietary content downloadable to customers through the in-store WiFi network, and you’ve got even more reasons to go to Starbucks. Fast Company wonders if Schultz will now anoint bestsellers, as Oprah does.
Blog Page
Table Service — In Your Kitchen
Bridging the gap between personal chef and home cooking, a growing number of high-end restaurants and chefs are offering custom-meal delivery. Six-month-old Solar Harvest in Beverly Hills, which sends meals to Mr. Bronson, charges about $150 a week for five days of meals, including bison burgers on Napa cabbage. In March, Daniele Baliani, most recently executive chef at Boston’s Pignoli, launched My Befana in New York. The prepared-foods shop offers delivery of a snack and three meals, like braised short-rib stew bourguignon, for $40 a day.
Wall Street Journal (subscription required)
Welcome to Fuze Beverages: Refreshingly Smart
Worth checking out
Put Better Beer in Your Belly
The making of beer has changed dramatically over the centuries — particularly during the last one. The beverage has shifted from a rich, locally produced staple to a blanched, sanitized drink. But in recent years, the pendulum has swung back again, and flavorful brews are widely available; you just need to know how to choose them. And we don’t mean simply picking up a six-pack of snazzy-looking “microbrewed” or imported beer. (See Forbes’ refreshing Coolest Beers slide show.
Wired Magazine
Indian Pret a Manger?
British Tiffinbites is a chain of Indian food outlets, which might well be the first real Indian fast food brand.
The company gets its name from the classic stacked metal boxes that are used to carry home-cooked Indian lunches. Tiffinbites has replaced tin with plastic, but aims to keep the traditional, home-cooked quality. Food is centrally prepared in North-London, using fresh ingredients and with a much lower fat and oil content than regular Indian take-outs.
Tiffinbites offers seated dining, but their neatly packed and stacked boxes are also practical for office workers, who can heat them in office microwaves. Tiffinbites currently has three outlets in London, all of which are attractively designed.
Springwise
Tiffinbites
mix your own flavors of ice cream in less than a minute
Moobella is part of the whole web 2.0 craze hitting the net like crack in the 80’s but the only difference is that Moobella is not on the web, it’s a vending machine. Based out of Massachusetts, Moobella has made new technology in there vending machines that allows you to mix your own flavors of ice cream in less than a minute. The machine itself has a touch screen display that shows an assortment of flavors and mix ins available at that time. When a flavor runs out its taken down off the menu and the onboard computer sends a message to Moobella’s headquarters telling them that machine needs to be re-stocked with that particular flavor. The machine also sends sales data back to the headquarters wirelessly.
Seen on PFSK
Nando's Limited Coca Cola Bottle for Freedom Day
It is seldom that Coca Cola allows any agency the freedom to design outside the usual brand parameters, so when Nando’s was given the go ahead to brand a Coke bottle sleeve for this special occasion, their design agency Cross Colours was briefed to interpret Freedom Day, Coca Cola and Nando’s on the bottle sleeve.
adland
4 Steps to Spectacular Customer Service
Most towns have at least one “flashpoint” business–a place that’s famous for its turbo-charged workers and lines of eager customers. These are the local hot spots that are “always jumping,” places in which employee motivation and customer satisfaction fuel each other in a flashpoint of contagious enthusiasm.
But flashpoint businesses don’t just happen by lucky accident. They have to be made to happen. If there aren’t many such businesses, it can only be because so few owners and managers understand the simple four-step process for creating a flashpoint culture in their own workplaces.
msnbc.msn