Welcome to a brand-new year of Gourmet Business. You can count on us to continue to keep you well-informed and educated about new products and trends in the gourmet industry.
We would like to thank our newly formed Gourmet Retail Advisory Team – the GREAT team – for their valuable input in the planning of our editorial calendar for this coming year. You will see that their insight aided us in finding ways to continue to improve the quality of our publications.
First off, you will see that our retail advisors have inspired us to “up our game” just a bit, by bringing you a new series that focuses on best practices for all aspects of retail operations in order to help you improve your business in 2014.
We are proud to report that our audience doubled in size last year, welcoming retailers from many different channels of distribution. As our audience multiplies, their information needs also expand in scope. We don’t subscribe to the “be everything to everyone” school of thinking. We would rather keep the focus of our titles intact with a clear editorial mission, and resist the temptation to dilute our editorial coverage by trying to cover too much. Instead, we choose to create new information products that can expand our realm of coverage and meet the needs of a broader audience. We are followed by a large contingent of the nation’s largest grocery chains, as well as specialty food stores, who are most interested in our specialty food industry coverage. These retailers, such as our GREAT team member Rich Draeger, indicated that they would appreciate more coverage of the food business, and we have responded by creating a new title called Gourmet Business Fine Foods Quarterly (FFQ) that will be headed up by Joanne Friedrick. FFQ will be 100 percent devoted to specialty food, and will allow us to dig deeper into the food business, including categories that we don’t traditionally cover in Gourmet Business. Watch for the first issue later this month that will include a Fancy Food Show preview.
Over the years, our readers have grown to love our special printed issues that we prepare for key trade shows in the industry, and tend to keep them for reference. We received so many requests from retailers who wanted to obtain a copy by mail, but we never have any left after a show. I have finally succumbed to the demand, and on behalf of those lovers of printed media, such as my friend and retail advisory team member Simon Shapiro of TAGS Hardware, we will begin mailing an issue directly to a subscriber base this year. Gourmet Business Quarterly Review will take important stories that we have published digitally during the quarter and bind them in a master printed issue that will be delivered directly to your snail mailbox four times during the year. If you’re interested in subscribing, be sure to contact us.
Finally, I would like to take a moment to welcome some new members to our talented team. Barbara Thau will join our staff as a senior editor for Gourmet Business. Barbara was previously the group housewares editor for HFN, so she is no stranger
to our industry. We also want to welcome Marshall Rubin, who will be joining the group to take up the responsibility of managing our marketing partnerships on the West Coast.
Thank you for your support and feedback, and we look forward to seeing you at an upcoming show.
David Spencer
Publisher, Gourmet Business
President, HousewaresDirect, Inc.
dspencer@gourmetbusiness.com