Internet guide for delicatessen stores

Home

Internet guide for delicatessen stores

“Delicatessen“ is a multifaceted term. Often we mean foods that are too expensive to be part of the daily menu of an average person – like for example caviar, frogs’ legs or champagne. The delicatessen retailers offer much more – also for everyday meals: paté, cheese, venison, pasta delicacies, ready-made salads. Retailers, who like to know what their customers like, find answers on TV, in books and on the Internet.

Cooking shows and cookbooks are currently experiencing a boom. For a long time, the Michelin stars have been guideposts for gourmets. The food you can find in a gourmet restaurant is what ambitious cooks are trying to recreate in their own kitchen. Other consumers look for easily prepared dishes, which definitely can turn into something special thanks to exotic ingredients and spices. Cult chefs like Jamie Oliver or Tim Mälzer stage themselves and cooking as an event. But also vintage chefs like Alfons Schuhbeck or Johann Lafer have long ago created their own Internet pages with photos, videos and recipes.

Communities all about food and drink

On the Web you can find countless pages of normal people, although they are often driven by a desire to express themselves, with pages that are poorly done. The numerous lively communities are far more interesting. Just a combination of the search words “chef“ and “community“ results in over five million hits at Google– with dazzling names like kochbar.de, cookingclub.de, wunderkessel.de, kuechengoetter.de or kochcommunity.net. One example: kochmeister.de is a free community, where members post their profile with a photo. They exchange recipes and also manage their own recipes on third-party websites. They share tips with each other, have discussions in various forums and meet in local groups. The more active you are on a page, the more activity points you receive. At “Kochmeister“ these are called “iCookies.“ .

Blogging about food and drink

Equally as subjective as the entries in communities are Weblogs. Here, individual authors write their Internet diaries –some sit at their personal computer every day, others once started with a lot of zest and now barely write anymore. Some have achieved cult status and are often linked and cited in the bloggosphere of bloggers. That is why they sometimes end up on the top of hit lists during a Google search.

The delicatessen segment has exciting blogs as well. The Google search for blogs can be found at http://blogsearch.google.de/. Far better though is the hit list at genussblogs.net. There are currently almost a thousand ”indulgence savvy & culinary blogs, forums and newsletters“ listed, sorted by categories and keywords. If you lose track, maybe trying a search at misterwong.de might help. Mister Wong is an alternative to Google – it’s a search engine, which is based on the recommendations of its users. If you enter “delicatessen blog“ here, your first hit will be the blog of frozen food manufacturer Frosta – for many years a pioneer in terms of customer loyalty via Web 2.0, because at frostablog.de it’s not just the people at Frosta who write; their open and honest way of communicating is well received with readers, who diligently write comments and link pages. Very popular with users of Mister Wong are also gourmet-blog.de and foodfreak.de.

Editorial choices

Compared to this, the editorial choices in cooking shows on television and magazines for friends of food indulgence are very professionally done. At derfeinschmecker.de you can find articles and tips – and also an online-delicatessen shop. The same is true for essenundtrinken.de, which tries to build up its own community. Interesting to delicatessen retailers are pages from abroad when it comes to recognizing trends and bringing them to Germany. So far, a great address was the “Gourmet Magazine“ from New York with its page at gourmet.com. The page replaces the magazine, which will be discontinued in the fall. The publishing house has just announced a new interactive Website

In France there is delices-defrance.com.

Yet there are also editorial contents without a print medium as a backer, for example www.waskochen.ch (the de-ending gets forwarded). You will find a weekly Newsletter and contributions by video-chef-reporters.

It is worth to take a look at the pages of city magazines. You can often get tips on night-life. The things people see here might be something they would like to also try at home. And many city magazines have their own communities by now.

René Schellbach, InterCool.de