The Business of Food with Steve Alexander

In the audio clip below, you’ll hear WGN’s midday show host John Williams, widely known for his internationally popular “Speed Jokes,” say, “After much consideration, I have decided to stop doing Speed Jokes.” It’s part of a larger story about how deepfakes are fooling people worldwide. And as Dooley Tombras, president of the Tombras Advertising Agency in Knoxville, Tennessee, tells WGN’s Steve Alexander, it isn’t just world leaders and celebrities who are being targeted. The rest of us are susceptible to having the videos we post on social media used in deepfake videos. Tombras’s client, Steak-umm frozen meat, likes to call out online phoniness and misinformation. And to illustrate how deepfakes can quickly and easily be made, it invited 18 vegans into a focus group setting, gave them vegan sandwiches, and recorded their critiques. In another room, a video crew quickly turned their testimonials for the vegan sandwiches into praises for beef. Their responses to being deepfaked? Listen below.

In the audio clip below, you’ll hear WGN’s morning show host Bob Sirott, widely known as connoisseur of hot dogs, say, “I have decided to give up hot dogs. Forever.” It’s part of a larger story about how deep fakes are fooling people worldwide. And as Dooley Tombras, president of the Tombras Advertising Agency in Knoxville, Tennessee, tells WGN’s Steve Alexander, it isn’t just world leaders and celebrities who are being targeted. The rest of us are susceptible to having the videos we post on social media used in deep fake videos. Tombras’s client, Steak-umm frozen meat, likes to call out online phoniness and misinformation. And to illustrate how deep fakes can quickly and easily be made, it invited 18 vegans into a focus group setting, gave them vegan sandwiches, and recorded their critiques. In another room, a video crew quickly turned their testimonials for the vegan sandwiches into praises for beef. Their responses to being deep faked? Listen below.

Opportunity came knocking for Cindy Kienzle 16 years ago — heavily disguised. She was laid off from the job she’d had for ten years, and which she loved: head of marketing and customer communication for the Chicago Transit Authority. At the same time, at age 48, she learned she was pregnant. Three years later, with a toddler in tow — daughter Lily, who is the namesake for Hungry Monkey — Cindy began the journey toward her longtime dream of owning a bakery. In the audio clip below, she tells WGN’s Steve Alexander how she went from laid-off mom to a baker needing 10,000 pounds of bananas to fill an order from Jewel. Cindy says her banana breads had long been famous among friends and turned out to be a big seller at farmers’ markets. Then, Sunset Foods began selling her banana bread at its Chicago-area locations. But the biggest news of all came in October: Hungry Monkey Banana Bread, original plain, and signature chocolate chip, are being sold at 188 Jewel-Osco locations.

One of the biggest names in cheese comes from a small town in Wisconsin. Sargento started out in Plymouth, an hour north of Milwaukee, in 1953. It’s still there, and has cheese plants in three other Wisconsin towns, and is celebrating its 70th anniversary. In the audio clip below, Sargento’s EVP of Innovation Kristi Jankowski tells WGN’s Steve Alexander how innovation got the company on the map, and how it continues to drive success today with its Balanced Breaks line of cheese and cracker snack packs. Sargento (the name is a combination of two family names) is now a $1.8 billion third generation family-owned company with 2,500 employees in Wisconsin. And it’s a career for many of them. Kristi says some have been on the job for 50 years, with generations of families on the payroll. And, Sargento is hiring, with benefits including tuition reimbursement in any field all the way through post-grad, if that’s your goal.

Nearly every great food idea starts in somebody’s kitchen. A lot of them languish there, too, because in most cities, including Chicago, it’s illegal to sell food prepared in your home kitchen. And until this year, the South Side did not have a community commercial kitchen where food creators could do their thing. In the audio clip below, R City Kitchen founder and owner Rodney Trussell (who recently won the Shark Tank-like 10th annual South Side Pitch sponsored by the the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship) tells WGN’s Steve Alexander his six-month-old facility offers a pay-by-the-hour shared use facility equipped with commercial stoves, mixers, sinks, refrigerators, tables, dry storage, cooler and freezer spaces as well as, other food preparation equipment, and takes care of all the maintenance, safety, and sanitary matters. All you need to bring is your recipe and your ingredients. RCK also offers food sanitation safety training, and classes in everything from baking to bartending, as well as where to find funding.

In the audio clip below, Chad Wilson Olipop’s head of marketing tells WGN’s Steve Alexander why the prebiotic soda brand chose Chicago for its first leap into outdoor advertising. Olipop was created six years ago in Oakland, California, and rapidly became a darling of social media. Wilson says after carving out a niche on the coasts, Chicago, with its diverse culture, matched up as the perfect place to attack the middle of the country. Wilson says Olipop’s popularity is based on sugar content: two to five grams per can vs. 41 grams for Pepsi and 39 grams for Coke. He says buyer feedback on taste is positive and the root beer flavor is now outselling A&W’s.

Along with the 61 billboards scattered around Chicago, Olipop commissioned a mural by well-known Chicago artist Rahmaan Statik.

That iconic line was a fellow diner’s response to a meal-stopping outburst by Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally.” The scene was filmed in Katz’s, a Jewish deli in Manhattan, and the line is the title of an exhibition coming to the Chicago area. Beginning October 22, the Illinois Holocaust Museum is hosting “I’ll Have What She’s Having — the Jewish Deli.” In the audio clip below, Arielle Weininger, the curator of exhibitions at the museum, shares with WGN’s Steve Alexander how the deli played a critical role for Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors in Chicago, and many of the delis still in business decades later were started by survivors.

In the audio clip below, Javon Nicholas tells WGN’s Steve Alexander how she almost didn’t answer a phone call because the Caller ID said “Chicago Bears.” Yeah, right, Javon thought. Why would the Bears be calling her? It was legit, and her company, Egg Rolls ETC was named the Bears Small Business All-Pro for the month of October. For the frozen food manufacturer based in the Austin neighborhood, that has opened the door to marketing opportunities Javon could never afford. Untold numbers of Bears fans will now be exposed to the non-traditional egg rolls and pot stickers her company makes, which she describes as “comfort filled.” Best sellers include an Italian Beef pot sticker, a spinach and cheese lasagna pot sticker, and many more. And there’s one that is special to Javon: Gert’s Collard Greens Egg Rolls, named after Javon’s late grandmother Gertrude. Javon says it’s “comfort filled with freshly handpicked tender collard greens simmered in a savory broth low and slow for hours, then lavished with decadent sweet smoked turkey meat and tucked inside of a wonton.” Javon says her education as a clinical nutritionist and her experiences living in Taiwan led her to create a product that she says is not only delicious but unites cultures and differences inside of a warm wonton.

Social media’s a funny thing. You think you have a clever post and no one responds; you put up something you think is innocuous and it goes crazy. When Illinois farmer Deanne Frieders put up a photo on Facebook she snapped from behind her family’s extra-wide combine as she followed it (pulling a 30-foot soybean head behind her pickup) from one field to another for harvest, she wrote a few lines asking people who get stuck behind farm equipment to please be patient. The feedback was quick and enormous. In less than a week, there were 79,000 reactions, 5,000 comments, and 23,000 shares. In the audio clip below, Deanne (aka This Farm Girl Cooks on social media) tells WGN’s Steve Alexander most of the comments were favorable, but there were many who suggested the drivers pull the combine into a ditch or otherwise get out of the way.

Chicagoans tend to be a bit snobbish about their pizza, and with good reason: The Windy City is home to some of the best pizza known to woman and man. But in all of Illinois, it isn’t the Chicago icons like Malnati’s and Gino’s, or fan favorites who dominated the 2023 WGN Chicago Pizza Madness Tournament, or even national chains like Domino’s and Pizza Hut that have the most pizza stores. In the audio clip below, Lindsay Mitchell, director of marketing for Illinois Corn, tells WGN’s Steve Alexander that downstate farmers love their pie, too, and the number on purveyor is Casey’s General Store. It has more than 500 locations in Illinois. Domino’s is number two at just over 200. Lindsay tells how Casey’s has partnered with Illinois Farm Families to make sure the people who are hard at work harvesting crops, often nearly around the clock, are being given free pizza through the month of October. Casey’s pizzas through the end of October will come with a flyer featuring photos of 10 farm families representing a variety of Illinois family-owned row crop and livestock operations. The promotion is a continuation of IFF’s “We are the 96%” campaign to raise awareness that 96 percent of Illinois farms are family-owned.