Sea Change
By Deanne Moskowitz
It isn’t only in Pacific Grove, Calif.—where Dory Ford’s catering operation, Aqua Terra Culinary Inc., was founded—that interest in sustainable seafood is strong. He says everyone’s on board in landlocked Denver, too, where last year he expanded the business and has already hosted four sustainable seafood events.
“It’s not a localized movement; it’s a worldwide area of concern,” says Ford, who observes the growing preoccupation everywhere he travels as a member of the Blue Ribbon Task Force, an advisory group of Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch.
According to the aquarium’s website, 90 percent of the world’s fisheries are fully exploited, over-exploited or have collapsed, and such detrimental fishing practices as accidental catch of unwanted species (bycatch) and habitat damage from fishing gear are impacting the oceans and the health of sea life. Continue reading »
Raising the Bar
By Sara Perez Webber
In your catering business, do you follow beverage trends like you follow food trends? Are you incorporating cocktails, wines and food-and-beverage pairings throughout your sales pitches? Will guests at your events remember what they drank as much as what they ate?
If the answer to any of those questions is “no,” it may be time to raise your bar game. When you create interesting food-and-beverage pairings and serve cocktails that showcase the latest mixology trends, you’re bound to create buzz and increase sales, according to Sharon Charny Woschitz and Jessica Bernosky of the Breakthru Beverage Group (breakthrubev.com), a wholesale distribution company representing a broad portfolio of premier wine, spirits and beer brands. Continue reading »
Crafting a Legend
By Sara Perez Webber
Tito Beveridge calls himself a “20-year overnight success.” The founder and owner of Tito’s Handmade Vodka—a geologist-turned-mortgage-broker who started out making flavored vodka infusions as a hobby in the early 1990s—launched the first legal distillery in Texas, beginning commercial production in Austin in 1997.
The pot-distilled vodka brand took off like wildfire. By 2007 more than 160,000 cases of Tito’s Handmade Vodka were sold, and by 2015, that number had reportedly ballooned to a whopping 2.8 million cases (according to Shanken News Daily, a news service that covers the spirits, wine and beer business). In 2014, Tito’s was the 10th best-selling vodka in the U.S., according to research firm IRI—no small feat, considering the young brand was competing against much larger companies with long-established brand names. The Texas brand has won fans internationally as well; Tito’s is distributed in Europe and Asia, and in July the company announced its distribution in the motherland of vodka—Russia. Continue reading »