We all know the axiom for sane, rational grocery shopping: Don’t go to the store when you’re hungry. Research supports this sage and ancient advice: this study found that people bought more high-calorie food when grocery-shopping hungry.

However! That’s the ideal. Life often works out otherwise. How often have you hit the grocery store for a dinner run, ravenous after a long day, and come out dazed and clutching two extra bags of cookies and fixings for nachos? Uh-huh. Us too. So let’s talk strategy — hangry strategy.

READ MORE »

Cream cheese is so often the source of such simple pleasures, and these cookies are no exception. Lemony, fluffy, and festive, with sweet drizzled icing, they’re tasty, sure — but perhaps what these cookies really have going for them is their ease. Ready? Go.

READ MORE »

The question, “What’s for dinner tonight?” is often the easy one to answer. It’s the next question that’s tough: “What goes with it?” Do your answers reveal you’re stuck in in side dish monotony? The side salad rut? Let us help. Here are 25 simple side dishes that will bring some life back into supper matchmaking. Every one of these is green, fresh, and super simple — not counting salt and oil, I don’t think any of them have more than six ingredients to juggle.

Time to freshen up the side dish routine for spring — snap up some asparagus and toss with pecorino; spiralize a zucchini; stir-fry tender greens; roast a head of cabbage.

READ MORE »

Sure, the Irish might eat corned beef sometimes, but it’s hardly the national dish of Ireland. And the masses of Dublin surely aren’t sitting down to a supper of corned beef and cabbage tonight. So, how did we come to associate this meat as a go-to meal on St. Patrick’s Day?

READ MORE »

You don’t need a pile of coupons to get added value from your grocer.

Grocers have a lot to communicate to their customers, and unless you pick up that newsletter or get chatty with that cashier who’s been there since Crystal Pepsi was in stock, some of their offerings get buried under more urgent messages like 5 for $5 promos, cooking classes, or a new offering in the deli.

In my grocery marketing years, it was a struggle to communicate everything we offered because the list was ever-changing, and we pretty much did anything (within reason) that our customers asked.

READ MORE »