Specialty Food Magazine

Summer 2020

Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.

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Specialty Food Association members: Discuss this topic in the Solution Center on specialtyfood.com 6 SPECIALTY FOOD SPECIALTYFOOD.COM Chris Crocker Director, Media Development ccrocker@specialtyfood.com PAUSE. STOP. START. M uch of the commercial world has famously hit the PAUSE button. Not everything has paused, however: Lives and livelihoods have been lost, and consumer behavior may be experiencing a tectonic shift. In reality, there are few reasons to expect we can start back up where we left off. For businesspeople, we can either hope for better days or create opportunity. We choose opportunity. And figuring out what to stop and what to start is essential to finding our path forward. Dozens and dozens of periodicals will cease to exist this year. The pandemic has accelerated their demise, but it's not the cause. Fact is, magazine readership and print advertising have been declining for a decade. We have fared better than most. But media must now be agile, accountable, and actionable, and that is not possible to deliver in ink on paper. We will stop publishing a print edition of Specialty Food magazine after this issue to concentrate our energies on advancing existing digital offerings and to start new ones. We'll continue to bring you the trends, products, and in-depth content you've enjoyed in Specialty Food magazine, now exclusively in digital form. We are also in the process of developing a new content app for the industry, which you'll be hearing more about in the coming months. We are inspired to continue to report on the industry and how your businesses adapt to the current environment: Makers and distributors adding direct-to-consumer capabilities, restaurants and retailers adopting curbside and delivery service, craft distilleries producing hand sanitizer, packaging companies making PPEs, and food purveyors of all kinds feeding essential workers and caregivers. Some of these pivots are temporary, but some should serve for the long term. While diners miss eating out and foodies crave a good hands-on shopping adventure, people have adapted quickly to working from home, meeting from home, learning at home, shopping at home, cooking at home, and eating at home. Supported by the right enabling technology, many of these ways of working and living will stick, and they will surely impact what foods people shop for, how they buy them, and how they consume them. For those of us who have nurtured this print magazine over the past 20 years, this transition is bittersweet. We remain committed to serving the industry at large and to keeping specialty foods on the agenda of those who buy food for a living. We're grateful to the subscribers, advertisers, and vendors who have helped us accomplish this in print, and we look forward to continuing to fulfill our mission in engaging, interactive, and useful forms as we embark on our next phase of our media evolution. from the publisher

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