Food in the News/ by Shelley Lance, Blog Editor
Starbucks’ net income is up in the first quarter, according to an article in the business section of today’s New York Times. The reporter mentions the success of Starbucks-owned stores that look like independent coffeehouses in Seattle’s “trendy” Capitol Hill neighborhood. This idea grew out of “a series of brainstorming sessions by a group of Starbucks employees after Howard D. Schultz, Starbucks’ chief executive, told them to break the rules and do things for yourself. “ Some of Starbucks’ new strategies: talking to customers to find out what they want and giving each store a feeling of “local-ness.” For example, the University Village store has a long communal table made from a tree that fell in Walllingford, and the Capitol Hill stores are decorated with wildflowers in mismatched jugs.
Ballard Farmer’s Market gets a mention in the Home section of Today’s New York Times in a somewhat surprising context. The story is not about food, but about an enterprizing young unemployed architectural designer, John Morefield, who set up a booth at the market sellling his design advice for a nickel. The good news: Morefield got so many home-remodel jobs this way, he’s making more money than he ever did when he was employed by someone else. My favorite part of this story, which focuses on designers around the country who find themselves out of work due to the recession, is about Natasha Case, a designer who lost her job at Walt Disney Imagineering. Natasha and her friend, Freya Estreller, “started a business selling Ms. Case’s homemade ice cream sandwiches in Los Angeles. Named for architects like Frank Gehry (the strawberry ice cream and sugar cookie Frank Behry) and Mies van der Rohe (the vanilla bean ice cream and chocolate chip cookie Mies Vanilla Rohe), they were an immediate hit.” Not too surprisingly, Natasha Case did a project on the intersection of food and architecture while studying for her master’s in architecture at UC, Los Angeles.
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