The Culinary Scoop

Beloved Brand Promises Celebrity Entertainers and Surprise Twist to Ring In the ‘Year of Peanut’

New Year’s Eve in Atlanta is going to be nuts – deliciously so. Today, Mars Chocolate North America and Underground Atlanta announced M&M’S® Peanut will be the presenting sponsor of the “25^th Annual Peach Drop,” an Atlanta tradition and the largest New Year’s Eve celebration in the southeast.

New Year’s Eve 2014 marks the official launch of the “Year of Peanut,” an innovative, year-long integrated marketing campaign to celebrate M&M’S Peanut – one of America’s favorite candies since 1954. Although the year-long program will include awe-inspiring, mouth-watering activations from coast to coast, Atlanta is the perfect place to ring in the “Year of Peanut,” considering peanuts have been the official crop of Georgia since 1995 and the state annually produces roughly half of the United States’ yield – upwards of 1.7 million tons in 2012 according to the Georgia Peanut Commission.

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“The Celebrities Should Not Be Doing These Commercials. They Influence Us To Do Bad Things.”

A New Qualitative Study Released By The WAT-AAH! Foundation “Understanding The Impact Of Celebrities In Food And Beverage Advertising” On Kids And Teens

A new study commissioned by the WAT-AAH! Foundation, in conjunction with Fit Kids, finds that celebrity-endorsed food and beverage advertising campaigns are emotionally and effectively driving America’s youth to product consumption. Directly from the perspective of kids, the study shows the impact and influence these commercials and celebrities have on their generation as well as how these endorsements raised troubling concerns among kids and teens. “If the celebrities know these products are bad for us, why are they promoting it …  Most of the time, celebrities don’t care about the product they only care about getting promoted or getting money.”

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Free webcast will help home bakers “Seize the Holidays” with creative and easy recipe ideas

Krusteaz, maker of premium baking and pancake mixes, announces a unique holiday partnership with cookbook author and Weelicious blogger Catherine McCord, who will be serving up fantastic and delectable baking and gifting ideas via a live free webcast on Saturday, December 14 from 1:00 – 3:00 PM EST taking place at www.krusteaz.com/holidays.

“As a creative but also busy mom in the kitchen, I’m extremely passionate about coming up with delicious meal and dessert options for my family that still leave me plenty of time to savor this special time of year,” said Catherine McCord, Krusteaz’s “Seize the Holidays” webcast host and author of popular family-friendly cookbooks such as Weelicious: One Family, One Meal.  “I’m excited to share some of the holiday recipes I’ve created using Krusteaz mixes as inspiration. These will be perfect for holiday entertaining and even great homemade gift ideas that are both thoughtful and budget-conscious.”

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Carnival Cruise Lines is launching new dinner concepts for the ships’ main dining rooms that will begin the week of December 8 aboard the Carnival Glory. The two new concepts, American TABLE and American FEAST, reflect an increased investment by Carnival in its main dining room experience and incorporate the results of extensive testing and research conducted among Carnival’s past guests.

During the development of the new dinner concepts, the cruise line’s management team spent time interacting with the leadership at Union Square Hospitality Group, a leading New York-based entertainment, food and hospitality organization, to observe best practices and the organization’s approach to culinary excellence. Taking inspiration from that interaction, Carnival’s culinary team developed the new dinner concepts, which will be offered during a pilot period with some variation in the dishes, presentation style and other elements to gauge additional guest feedback before rolling out the program fleetwide in the latter half of 2014 and 2015.  Other ships included in the pilot are Carnival Liberty beginning in January, and Carnival Imagination and Carnival Inspiration starting in February.

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wotwine launches its ground-breaking free supermarket wine app that gives consumers the definitive guide to supermarket wine.

Today’s supermarket shoppers are presented with an increasingly confusing array of wines and wine prices. Nine out of ten retail bottles we drink in the UK are bought from major supermarket chains, with 60 per cent of those on discount.

But how do we know if a deal is real? The wotwine “we would pay price” tells you whether a wine is worth more or less than its shelf price.

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