Hey you, eat this: the challenges of food sampling campaigns

FOOD & CATERING, MOBILE MEDIA

Couple of years back, Decibel took to the road for Doubletree by Hilton, managing their Cookie CAREavan sampling campaign. You know what we found out? Everyone loves free noms, and the stats back us up on that. According to a 2015 study by the Event Marketing Institute, consumers are 78{04d9822e7d95da125d508d8e1efbcf2edc79acd8aec1f0bbdcbd6a6f684f9bb3} more likely to purchase a product if they re given the opportunity to try it out first. But if they have a negative experience, you might lose that customer for good.

Event Production Blog: Event Planning Mobile Media Roadshow

Doubletree by Hilton Cookie CAREavan

Sampling campaigns, whether run indoors in a single location (think supermarket sampling stations) or on the road out of the back of a truck, feature their own unique challenges. Here are some of the crucial considerations when planning :

Sample Consistency

If every sample is a little different from the last, you won t be able to trust any feedback you might receive from tasters. If your sampling campaign is dispersed across multiple locations and your samples aren t served in individual packages, you ll need to write up a strict guide outlining the right way to complete preparation. That guide should detail any necessary recipes, serving sizes, ideal serving temperatures, serving containers and utensils.

Preparation Simplicity

It s much harder to maintain consistency if the preparation and service team has to jump through a dozen hoops to get those samples on the trays. If you can t afford a professional chef to accompany your team, keep sample preparation as easy as possible.

Environmental Temperature & Humidity

Taking your food on the road? Passing out sorbet in an Alabama summer? You ll need refrigeration. If you re stationary, this is less of a problem, but if you re going mobile, refrigerator-equipped trucks can increase campaign budgets significantly.

Serving Times

Sample food at an appropriate time of day. An ice-cream sampling campaign shouldn t launch in the morning, and you shouldn t be sampling waffles at 8pm.

Reporting

If you don t know what worked and what didn t, your sampling campaign loses effectiveness. Your team should ideally be able to provide post-campaign day-by-day reporting, which should include basic numbers (how many samples given, etc.), average dwell times (how long people hang around stand), and notes of any verbal feedback received.

Six Killer Margarita Recipes for Cinco de Mayo Events

FOOD & CATERING

Man, come on science: get it together. You guys can t agree on anything. You don t know if red wine s good for me, you don t know where life comes from, and you ve got no idea who invented the margarita. Not that someone hasn t taken stabs at solving that mystery, though: the big brains over at the Smithsonian have narrowed it down to a few likely candidates:

One of the most prevalent stories is that Carlos Danny Herrera developed the drink at his Tijuana-area restaurant, Rancho La Gloria, around 1938. As the legend goes, Herrera dreamed up the cocktail for one of his customers, an aspiring actress named Marjorie King who was allergic to all hard alcohol other than tequila. To make the liquor more palatable to his fussy client, he combined the elements of a traditional tequila shot a lick of salt and a wedge of lime and turned them into a refreshing drink.

Another top contender for the inventor title is Margarita Sames, a wealthy Dallas socialite who claimed she whipped up the drink for friends at her Acapulco vacation home in 1948. Among her well-connected guests was Tommy Hilton, who eventually added the drink to the bar menu at his hotel chain.

Not that anyone at the party will care where they came from after knocking back a couple of these babies:

Event Producer Blog: Best Cinco de Mayo Recipes

The Cuervo Margarita

No, it s not hand-squeezed and yes, it s branded as all get-out, but this is the alcoholic equivalent of the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe, and it is sacrosanct.

Event Producer Blog: Best Cocktail Catering Options

Smoky Watermelon Jalapeno Margarita

Who doesn t like a margarita with a little nuance? A little kick? Here s a fantastic drink from the Bolder Locavore blog. The recipe calls for hickory smoked salt for rimming the glass and in the end I used alderwood smoked salt for the finer grind.

Event Production Blog: Mojito Margaritas

The Mojitarita

Besides being delicious, drink is way up there on the fun-to-say scale, right alongside words like ballyhoo and brouhaha .

Event Management Blog: Catering Cocktails Cinco de Mayo

Beer Margaritas

Oh, I m sorry did you need me to say something about this? Because I m not sure what there is to say. It s a margarita, but it also has beer in it. It is a heavenly gift, and you should have one. And then you should serve them to your guests.

Event Production Blog: Grapefruit Margarita Recipes

Grilled Grapefruit Margarita

This recipe s been floating around the net for a while, but if you re a fan of hard citrus, this thing takes the gold. A word of warning: this drink has a strong personality and will not please everyone, so you re gonna serve this sucker, you should probably have at least a few alternatives on the menu.

Event Production Blog: Pomegranate Margarita Recipes

Pomegranate Frozen Margarita

Serving to a crowd of well-heeled upper crust, are we? This is a classy twist on a typically rowdy cocktail. Frozen margaritas can be problematic to make on a larger scale, so do ensure you ll have the freezer space available, or better yet, a margarita machine on hand.

Fantastic Buffet Layout Ideas from Around the Web

FOOD & CATERING

We ve been seeing a lot of catering pics recently, and with outdoor snacking season upon us, I realized we hadn t done a food post in a while. Or hey, maybe I m just hungry. Here are five inspiring buffet layout designs from smart and creative decorators around the internet.

Dangling in Mid-Air

There s something kinda Neverland about plucking your food out of the air, and definitely something whimsical about eating it off a swing. If you ve got some scaffolding to work with, you can create a gorgeous gardens-of-Babylon or country backyard feel, like this one from Elizabeth Anne Designs:

Event Production Blog

Rustic Piles

Three cheers for abundance psychology, that cornucopia effect that wipes away attendee inhibitions and encourages high-piled plates. Plus, something about a big ol mess speaks to the joyful anarchist within us all. Doesn t this pic by Inspired by Charm make you wanna break every diet you ve ever been on?

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Or how about this gorgeous mess by Seven Layer Charlotte:

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Chalkboard & Slate Labeling

Nothing goes quite as well with modern-vintage as scrawled-on-a-slate food labeling. I know, I know, it s trendy. But we re not sick of it yet. We snagged this pretty thing over at Brit + Co, in their nifty post about creative food stations:

Event Production Blog: Creative Food Station Ideas 2015

Lifestyle blogger Ramsey nails it:

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OCD Flat & Square

Gotta love hyper-organization, and all that food really pops on stark serving dishes. Here s a gem from Colin Cowie Weddings photo inspiration finder, an ultra Type-A table layout that does everything right:

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A French country take on the same idea from Bright Bold Beautiful:

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Food in a Cabinet

This idea from Austen & Carissa s wedding over on Wedding Chicks would be rough to pull off for anything large-scale unless you ve got the capability to fabricate your own furniture installations, but with a guest list under 500, this is gorgeous:

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Same sitch with the Murphy Bar over at Thisoldhouse.com, a small-scale idea that would be fun to convert for a larger event. We re thinking several dozen of these, or a much bigger one:

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Got buffet layout ideas? Tell us in the comments.

Five Candy-Inspired Cocktails for Halloween

FOOD & CATERING

Nothing makes for a better Halloween event than combining childhood thrills and chills with grown-up delights. Because let s face it even if your guests have outgrown trick-or-treating, everyone still loves dressing up and digging into their favorite sugary treats, whether that means Reese s peanut butter cups (delicious) or Necco wafers (barf). The best way to do that? Inventive Halloween cocktails that satisfy everyone s sweet tooth while channeling the holiday s spooky fun. Here are five imaginative tipples that are perfect for your next Halloween event.

1. Candy Corn Cocktail

Event Production Blog: Halloween 2015 Cocktail Ideas

Candy corn may not have the panache of, say, tropical flavored Skittles or king-sized candy bars, but it s an old faithful in terms of Halloween loot. Tasty, festive and inscrutable (seriously, how is this tri-colored traffic cone supposed to represent corn?), candy corn offers a perfect theme for Halloween cocktails. This boozy take on the classic candy, created by The Food Network, is based on a candy-corn infused vodka, which combines with citrus-based cordials for some brightness and lift, along with egg white to give it a velvety froth. Get the full recipe here. Who would ve thought candy corn could be so classy?

2. Syringe Shooters

Event Production Blog: Halloween Cocktails

On the other side of the cocktail spectrum are syringe shooters, a distinctly un-classy, but incredibly fun take on spooky Halloween drinks. Simply mix up a batch of Jello shots (strawberry makes for a nice bloody hue) and then draw the liquid into a syringe before chilling. According to Myscienceproject.org, 60ml syringes are ideal just remember to take out the needles.

3. Zombie Brain Jello Shots

Event Production Blog: Halloween Cocktails 2015 Recipes

For a slightly more gruesome take on jello shots, try out these zombie brain monstrosities, which combine vodka, liqueurs, jello and condensed milk to create a jiggly, gray brain exterior. The inside is filled with a raspberry concoction to add a bit of delicious, delicious gore. While this may not be practical for large-scale batches, they re a nice option if you re looking to add a creative twist to your Halloween cocktail list.

4. Bleeding Heart Martini

Best Event Production Blog: Halloween Catering and Drinks 2015

Most Halloween cocktail garnishes range from the disgusting (brain hemorrhages courtesy of curdled Bailey s) to the playful (vodka-soaked gummy worms, anyone?). Which is what makes this one so special it s grotesque while still creative and classy; in other words, exactly what you d expect of Martha Stewart. Simply make a martini as usual, and then, instead of an olive, top it off with a skewered pickled baby beet to resemble a recently harvested heart. See what we mean? Frightful but low-key.

5. Reese s Martini

Event Production Blog 2015: Halloween Martini Recipes

Consistently voted as Americans favorite Halloween candy, Reese s peanut butter cups remain one of the holiday s most beloved confections. While the idea of transforming that peanut-butter-chocolatey goodness into an evening tipple may sound a bit, shall we say, over the top, several enterprising mixologists have figured out a way to do it. This recipe calls for Van Gogh Dutch Chocolate Vodka, Castries Cr me Peanut Rum and chocolate liqueur or, you could take a slightly cruder approach and simply blend a Reese s peanut cup with vodka. We re not judging! However you re able to pair the goodness of Reese s with some booze is ok by us.

Good Read: How Food is Creating a Sense of Place

EVERYTHING ELSE, FOOD & CATERING

There s plenty of great info out there on factors to consider when creating immersive experiences in events or activations. Lighting, spatial design, audio, emotional connection and story, all of these things matter, all contribute to the experience. But what about food?

Event Production Blog: Spatial Design and Experiential Design Food

We just stumbled across this interesting thought in a piece from the February 2016 issue of the Moodie Report, an industry intelligence eZine focusing on travel retail, in which we discover how airports and retailers are rising to the challenge of creating Sense of Place by providing a variety of local tastes and flavours in their food offerings. The Design Solution Founder and Director Robbie Gill believes it is through food that the true heart of a location is defined, and in the latest edition of our regular Sense of Place series he provides an overview of how a compelling food offering can enhance local identity and presents some of the very best examples from around the world.

Airports are, in many senses, the ultimate experiential challenge. Your attendees are often tired or hungry or homesick, and food is indeed a universal panacea strongly tied to a sense of security, stability and pleasant memories. The Moodie Report will be running future editions of this column, so stay tuned for features highlighting retailers that are knocking it out of the park in this area.

7 Buzz-Worthy Cocktail Presentation Ideas

FOOD & CATERING

Confession: this post was inspired by a Bizbash gallery that highlighted the drink service at electric utility company ComEd s training center opening party. The caterers (The Entertaining Company) served cocktails in cups shaped like light bulbs. Cute.

Look, we re not in the catering business. But we are in the touches that matter business. That extra layer of give-a-shit matters. This kind of minor wow-factor is a good return on investment: not much harder to execute than your basic Gin & Tonic, and people like taking selfies with em. Anyway, none of these ideas are graded on flavor, just on buzz-factor, so you ll need to do your own taste testing before you serve these up.

Event Production Blog: Cocktail Ideas Wow-Factor

Fancy Pants Jell-O Shots

You re never too old for oh wait, no, you are. You are too old for Jell-O shots. Maybe if you hide them in a classy gelatin dessert? Get the recipe on Jelly Shot Test Kitchen.

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Disappearing Sugar Puffs

Oh, look: there s a martini where my cotton candy used to be.

Event Production Blog: Cocktails Gradients

Gradients

Man, this is some weapons-grade visual eye candy. You can t just pull this out whenever. Only reach for this one when you ve gotta impress the French Ambassador and it turns out his daughter is an art director at Pantone and his wife Chloe keeps the finest nasturtium garden in Paris.

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Gradients II: Coconut Lavender Lemonade

Oh, wait, his wife s name is Violet? Got you covered.

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Edible Glitter

They call this one the Golden Girl . I call it The Passive Aggression grapefruit juice, prosecco, and a teaspoon of sparkly frustration. Maybe the cleanup crew can just lick this off the floor?

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LED Ice Cubes

These decorative LED ice cubes are battery powered and glow in several colors. They re not only functional, but also water submersible. $9 from the Gadget Flow.

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Dry Ice

The Cookie Rookie serves up a reminder that too often, dry ice gets filed under kid s Halloween cauldron when it can also pull off 30 shades of satin in the form of this smoking triple berry martini.

DOUBLETREE BY HILTON REVEALS OFFICIAL CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE RECIPE ?

FOOD & CATERING, TIPS & TRICKS

For those of you concerned you re not putting on enough weight over these past few weeks, we offer some exciting news:

Our team at Decibel Events had the awesome privilege to be one of the experiential event producers on the DoubleTree by Hilton Cookie CAREavan, and Little Things tours a few years back. Last week we posted a Throwback Thursday photo on our Instagram which included the following quote: Hilton, I think the world is gonna need another cookie after this. What do you say?

Well, yesterday, they just made public their official chocolate chip cookie recipe!

We re not saying you need to thank us, but it sure is quite a coincidence, don t you think? You can download the recipe here:

? Download the Recipe here. ?

We ll share a little fun fact we picked up while on tour: We fielded a lot of questions about why the choice to include walnuts, especially with the potential allergy issues. Apparently, they actually absorb some butter and fats which makes a difference in the structure of the final product.

A Virtual Abundance of Holiday Cheer

EVERYTHING ELSE, FOOD & CATERING, TIPS & TRICKS, VIRTUAL EVENTS

Dig deep, friends.  

As we rally the last vestiges of 2020, it s important to focus on the valuable life skills we ve unintentionally mastered this year: adaptability, resilience, responsibility and tolerance (and more fucking virtual meetings than we have ever had in our entire lives). Whether it s been free-range children wandering in on Zoom calls, barking dogs overpowering important presentations, or Wi-Fi outages bringing your day to a screeching halt we ve all been there. And somehow, we ve all found unconventional ways to make it work.      

The holidays should be no different. If necessity truly is the mother of invention, then finding ways to share special holiday memories with loved ones amid this year s socially distant reality should be mankind s modern-day Creativity Revolution. Plenty of options still exist for creating holiday moments just as special as those we had when we could simply show up at each other s homes. 

We all started 2020 the same enjoying the novelty of online Happy Hours with family and friends but the freshness of that blue-lit facetime quickly wore out as digital fatigue sunk in. But that doesn t mean we should completely rule out the ripe opportunity that virtual experiences can provide for maintaining vital connections with each other. After all, your face + my face still equals face-to-face (only now with the added benefit of a mute button to silence anyone who gets too far out of line). 

Like everything else in life, a little ingenuity can go a long way to break through the boredom. The winning ingredient for digital socialization is to center your meetup around a specific activity. Get fancy and hire a professional to facilitate an organized evening, or go as simple as creating your own private group on Facebook or Zoom and inviting friends and family to gather online. 

Need a nudge? Here are a few starters:  

1. Curated Cocktail Hour

(Wait, didn t we already establish that going online and drinking got boring months ago?) 

Well, yes, but there are ways around this. We recommend curating an experience. I absolutely love a shared experience where everyone can focus on something you are all doing together. Throw out a quick poll, or suggest a cocktail for everyone. Make it something new and novel, and instruct your attendees to get the ingredients ahead of time. I am a big fan of mise-en-place when I cook, and making craft cocktails is no different. Order the components online, get them all ready, and then the host can give a mixology lesson to the group. At the end of the evening, everyone will have added to their personal repertoire of tried-and-true drink recipes perfect to resurrect when we re all able to gather in person again.

My favorite craft cocktail that I have found this year is a recipe for the Aviation. This is a great pre-prohibition cocktail that deserves some respect. We had the great fun of making this during a cooking class with the team from Truffle Shuffle and being virtually connected with my parents in the audience, as well. I ll go into more detail about them below, but the short version is that they are former French Laundry-trained chefs that have started a virtual cooking class company. Think Michelin-Star Hello Fresh, with a teacher. 

I was able to source MOST of the ingredients for the cocktail locally the lemon, eggs, Maraschino cherry liqueur, gin, etc. but the creme de violette was a special order. Dad to the rescue: he overnighted me a bottle to make this all work. Who doesn t love getting a physical package in the mail these days? It was a bit MacGyver, a bit of Tom Hanks in the opening scene of Castaway, and a whole lot of fun.

Point being, don t just be, take the time and effort to curate the experience.

Here s the recipe:

Ingredients

  • 2 ounces gin
  • 1/2 ounce maraschino liqueur (Luxardo)
  • 1/2 ounce cr me de violette
  • 3/4 ounce lemon juice, freshly squeezed
  • Splash Simple Syrup
  • Garnish: brandied cherry
  • Enhancement: One Egg White

Steps

  1. Add gin, Luxardo & violette with a splash of simple syrup, lemon juice and egg white.
  2. DRY Shake the ingredients (no ice) for 60 seconds
  3. Add ice and shake for another 30 seconds
  4. Strain over new ice into a rocks glass.
  5. Garnish with a brandied cherry.
2.  Dinner Date

On to the team from Truffle Shuffle. If you are looking for a virtual dinner date, consider another curated experience sensing a theme here? This particular business is a couple of chefs that were formerly at the French Laundry, and opened up a Zoom-style, learn-to-prep-and-cook-a-meal mail order business. They are rock solid, have great production value and keep the hour-and-a-half class moving. 

We learned about the Truffle Shuffle team through the Mondavi Sisters. They offered the cooking class with one of their Dark Matter wine pairings. We loved it so much, we booked a second class. This is a great way to connect with customers or friends over the holidays and gives everyone a great story to talk about. It also includes EVERYTHING you need for the meal in one package. 

We re definitely seeing more of these particular cooking-class-style mail order classes out there, so keep your eyes open for new offerings as well as wine pairings to take this to the next level. 

Do your own search for sommelier-led, around-the-world wine tastings like the list Food and Wine recently put out. And if you are a current client of Decibel, look for your Truffle Shuffle invites coming early next year. We like it so much and it s so in my wheelhouse that we are planning to roll this out for some great client connections, as well!

3.  Game Night

Who doesn t love a good game night? If there s anything this year has taught us, it s that the simplest ideas can turn out to be the most fun. This type of virtual get-together provides easy interaction for a diverse group of friends who may not all know each other well, or for family (who may sometimes wish they didn t know each other so well). Grab the box of Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, Scattergories or Yahtzee, dial into the video call, and let the showdown begin. Multiplayer video games like Call of Duty and Mario Kart can also be shared online, many with chat functionality to smack talk your buddies as if they were sitting right next to you. The last time the family got together to do this, we ended up dueling for hours. I definitely recommend this for an easy impromptu connection that doesn t require heavy pre-planning or coordination.

For a more in-depth adventure, we ve seen in-person team-building activities like Escape Rooms morph into online experiences this year, too. Once again, centered around a shared objective, escape rooms are a different and unique way to gather a group of people and create some excitement and connections (something we re all craving these days). Just like the traditional escape rooms, the collaboration and competition among allies is great fun and the shared victory in the end is a memorable reward in itself.

4.  Gift Exchange

This one may take a little advanced planning, but with the help of a free service like Elfster, you can generate a secret gift exchange and host an across-the-miles unwrapping party with each other. 

Or you can go straight pyramid-scheme. Have you seen the Holiday Bourbon Exchange going around Facebook? By the time you read this, the pyramid should be complete but there may still be time. The basic premise is that a friend of yours tags you on Facebook and offers you to sign up for the Holiday Bourbon Exchange. The rules are that you buy ONE bottle of bourbon for your friend s friend, then put your name on the list and send the instructions to your friends. Bottles of bourbon start appearing at your doorstep. Is it a windfall? Not really I sent my one bottle and (as of this writing) have received about five in return. Not a bad return, but not the three dozen that the letter promises. Why? It s a chain letter pyramid scheme. People drop out, don t continue the trend, are wary (as they should be). It s why pyramid schemes don t work.

Why was this one different? We re all missing the human connection. I jumped on this because it was a fun idea, and thought that at $45, it was worth the buy-in to see what happened. It was worth it to do something nice for someone I didn t know (but was a friend of a friend) and thought I would love to connect with some new people. That worked in spades. It s likely my most commented post on Facebook, I have connected with friends that I have not seen in a long time, and absolutely got $45 in value out of the experience.

Why are we talking about this here? I m not expecting or suggesting you run your own pyramid scheme. But take this as an awesome experiential lesson and a magnifying glass to 2020. Virtual/digital is not enough. Your clients and audience are LONGING for a physical connection. Even more than in years past. Those brands and corporations that figure out a way to crack that barrier will end up out front. Every.single.time.

No matter how distant you may physically feel from friends and family this year, make your 2020 holidays a time for social creativity get inventive, get virtual, and get celebrating. 

Have some ideas of your own? Be sure to share them in the comments below. 

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