Tag: Good Food Festival & Conference

“A Farmer’s Road” Film About Journey From Classroom to Creamery Leads to the Good Food Festival

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

Prairie Fruits Farm & Creamery, LLC, located in Champaign, Illinois, makes artisan, farmstead goat cheeses and goat milk gelato from its herd of 80 milking goats. Owners Leslie Cooperband and Wes Jarrell also host Slow Food, farm-to-table meals and other agri-tourism events. And now they are movie stars, And now they are even movie stars, thanks to A Farmer’s Road, a new documentary about Prairie Fruits, which will be shown March 26 at FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Festival.

James Beard Foundation’s Recipe for Change: How the Culinary Community is Creating a Sustainable Food System

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

FamilyFarmed’s Trade Show & Industry Conference on March 25 — the middle day of its three-day Good Food Festival & Conference — has an exciting new feature: “Recipe for Change: How the Culinary Community is Creating a Sustainable Food System” is a panel moderated by James Beard Foundation Vice President Kris Moon and featuring four of Chicago’s top chefs and Good Food champions. In this contributed column, Moon details the rising tide of chef activism and how the James Beard Foundation has responded with its Chefs Boot Camp for Policy & Change.

Kitchfix Crunches Numbers for Granola Success: A Good Food Business Accelerator Story

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

Josh Katt, a Chicago chef, came up with the idea for his eight-year-old Kitchfix company while working as a personal chef and creating healthy meals — made from anti-inflammatory superfood ingredients — for customers who were fighting cancer. Kitchfix enabled him to expand the concept to a broader customer base. He grew a business that delivers prepared meals to homes and dropoff points, does catered events, and even has a small store in the Gold Coast neighborhood just north of downtown Chicago. Along the way, Katt and his team hit upon a product they learned had serious commercial potential: a grain-free, superfood-loaded variant of granola. His desire to grow this part of his business led to his participation in FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Business Accelerator.

Energy and Variety Mark the Second Year of Good Food Business Accelerator

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

The nine Fellows participating in the second cohort of FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Business Accelerator represent a wide range of exciting entrepreneurial ventures — from bakeries to a prepared meal kitchen to an herb farm, from an apple orchard and cidery to packaged Latino food products to a kombucha maker, and more.

Giving Money to Fight Food Waste in Chicago Has Extra Rewards This Week

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

Make a small, charitable donation this week to help deliver delicious and healthy food from leading Chicago restaurants and other food servers to nonprofit organizations that distribute it to people in need. Get a voucher for a treat from one of dozens of participating outlets. Sound good?

Farmer’s Fridge and Its Salad Vending Machines: A Good Food Financing Fair Story

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

Vending machines. Not exactly what comes to mind when you think of Good Food… Until now, that is, thanks to companies such as Farmer’s Fridge, a business that is selling same-day-fresh jarred salads and healthy snacks from vending machines in dozens of locations around Chicago. This fast-growing company got a boost from participating in FamilyFarmed’s annual Good Food Festival & Conference and its Financial Fair.

How SAAGE’S Shared Kitchen Boosts Startup Food Businesses: A Good Food Festival Story

Posted on by bob.benenson@gmail.com

SAAGE Culinary Studio in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois, is a shared-use commercial kitchen providing startup food businesses with access to all the commercial grade equipment that they need to make their products. Owner Gayatri Borthakur discusses the philosophy behind the business, which will be a participant in FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Festival & Conference.

Sen. Durbin and Jim Slama at Good Food Festival & Conference

FamilyFarmed’s March 25 Food Policy Conference Covers Good Food Issues Spectrum

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

A day-long Food Policy Conference, to be held on Friday March 25, is one of the major elements of FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Festival & Conference. The program includes nine sessions aimed at bringing together public and private stakeholders to discuss food policy issues that affect the production, distribution and access of local and healthy foods.

Food to Market Challenge Offers $500,000 for Best Idea to Grow Chicago’s Good Food Supply

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

Many organizations and companies are working hard to untie knots in the supply chain for local and sustainable food in the Chicago area, the nation’s third most populous consumer market. Now the effort is getting a big boost from the Food to Market Challenge, a newly launched competition that will bestow a $500,000 award on the winning concept.

Jody Osmond and Julia McDonald of Band of Farmers

It’s All About The Farmers: A Good Food Festival Exhibitor Story

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

FamilyFarmed’s 12th annual Good Food Festival & Conference is scheduled for March 24-26 at Chicago’s UIC Forum, and exhibitor registration is open. Robin Schirmer, project coordinator for the Chicagoland coalition of CSA farms, shares her experience working with and attending the event.

Kitchfix-ing Prepared Meals in Chicago: A Good Food Festival Exhibitor Story

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

FamilyFarmed’s annual Good Food Festival & Conference is the oldest and largest event in the Midwest focused on local and sustainable food. At its heart are the producers, buyers, sellers and others who exhibit their businesses there. Josh Katt, chef/owner of a company that prepares and delivers delicious food from sustainably produced ingredients to homes and catered events in the Chicago area, shares his experiences as an exhibitor.

Good Food Begins with Good People: A Good Food Festival Exhibitor Story

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

FamilyFarmed’s annual Good Food Festival & Conference is the oldest and largest event in the Midwest focused on local and sustainable food. At its heart are the producers, buyers, sellers and others who exhibit their businesses there. Exhibitor registration is open for the 12th annual Good Food Festival & Conference, scheduled for March 24-26 in Chicago, and there is a $100 discount for participants who sign up by Dec. 9.

Living Water Farms

Living Water Farms: From Accelerator Fellow to Farm Aid Hero

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

Farm Aid’s website includes a number of stories about “Farmer Heroes,” and one recent post featured Living Water Farms — which just happened to be one of the nine businesses that participated as Fellows in the first year (2014-15) of FamilyFarmed’s Good Food Business Accelerator.

Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences students

Supporting Good Food is a Piece of (Cheese) Cake for Eli’s Marc Schulman

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

Can a rich dessert be considered Good Food? It can when it is Eli’s Cheesecake and its owner, Marc Schulman, is a strong supporter of the Good Food movement and makes the effort to source from local producers when it is possible to do so.

Rick Bayless Demo at GFFC

Ten Delicious Facts About Chicago’s Good Food Scene — Tell Us About Your Town

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

[The original version of this article was published May 1 on the Huffington Post website.] As FamilyFarmed prepared for the James Beard Foundation Awards in Chicago on May 4, we decided to welcome out-of-town attendees with an article providing “10 delicious facts” about the blossoming Good Food scene in our hometown. We found we had created a pretty sweeping guide to Chicagoland Good Food, so we’re making it a standing feature. And we’d love to hear about the Good Food scene where you live — let civic pride rule!

James Beard Awards 2015 logo

James Beard Awards Takeaway: Good Food is on the Move in the Culinary Community

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

The glamour of the annual James Beard Foundation Awards, held earlier this month in Chicago, has subsided. So it’s timely to assess what the event meant for the Good Food movement. The bottom line is that the James Beard Awards were very good news for Good Food.

Chef Rick Bayless

Chef Rick Bayless’ Stewardship Helps Farm to Table Take Flight

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

Chicago on Monday hosted the annual James Beard Foundation culinary awards ceremony, and Rick Bayless was one of the event’s co-chairmen. Famed for popularizing regional Mexican cuisine in the city, he is a celebrity chef with a long-running TV show, and he has just added to his long list of cookbooks. But to many in the Good Food movement, it is his history of helping building the region’s local food system that is his biggest starring role.

Rick Bayless Demo at GFFC

Welcome to Chicago, James Beard Foundation: 10 Delicious Facts About the Windy City

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

by Jim Slama and Bob Benenson, Family Farmed [Note: This article was first published on the Huffington Post news website.] As advocates of the Good Food movement in Chicago, we are honored that the James Beard Foundation Awards are coming to town. The Foundation was created to honor the legacy of chef James Beard. After Read more about Welcome to Chicago, James Beard Foundation: 10 Delicious Facts About the Windy City[…]

Kishr logo

Good Food Accelerator Fellow Hopes Success for Her ‘Superfruit Brew’ is a Kishr Thing

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

Differentiation is an important key to success in the expanding sector of artisan food producers. A number of food entrepreneurs have sought their special niche by reaching into their personal experience and background. This is something that Rowida Assalimy did when she launched Kishr, a traditional hot beverage of her parents’ native country of Yemen that she grew up drinking.

Spark of the Heart soup mix

Spark of the Heart Owners’ Rebound from Recession Was a Powerful Mix

Posted on by FamilyFarmed

One of the very few good things you can say about hard times, such as the recent Great Recession, is that they tend to unleash a lot of entrepreneurial energy. That was certainly the case for the owners of Spark of the Heart, a company that produces dry bean-based soup, salad and sides mixes, who will tell their story at the Good Food Business Accelerator’s Demo Day.