The origins of my food holiday celebrations

If you and I are connected on Facebook and Twitter, you’ve probably seen me wishing folks a happy food celebration day.

Sometimes, it’s a National food holiday, other times, it’s just a declared food holiday.  Most often, it’s a food holiday celebrated in the United States of America.

I have a spreadsheet that contains the dates I’ve collected over the years and every morning, I check it so that I can wish everyone a great day.  It’s a nice reminder that there is always something to celebrate!

But that’s not reason I started acknowledging food holidays.  As a marketing consultant, I’ve always looked for affordable, out-of-the-ordinary ways for small businesses, independent professionals and entrepreneurs to promote their businesses and service offerings.

One of those ways is by celebrating food holidays;  one of the tricks is knowing the food holidays in advance.

My favorite example is National Jelly Bean Day (April 22nd).  If I had a walk-in retail location, I’d host a jelly bean counting contest for my customers and walk-in traffic, and announce the winner on National Jelly Bean Day.  It’s a great way to build your mailing list and gives you a positive reason to communicate with your list.  You could even package up a couple of tablespoons of jelly beans (perhaps using your brand colors), wrap them up in cellophane, tie them with a ribbon and attach a coupon or other promotional piece, and give them away as favors to celebrate the day.

If you were to attend a networking event and wished your new friends a “Happy Jelly Bean Day” while passing out bags of jelly beans with your cards attached, do you think you might stand out from the crowd?  Of course you would!

What if you ran your contest on your website and made it easy for people to refer others to enter your contest?  (I used this technique to build my first internet-based business – my mailing list grew into the 10′s of thousands)

Now, it’s not always easy to celebrate a particular day (for instance, yesterday was National Baked Alaska Day), but you could celebrate a food holiday week or even a food holiday month.  February is Celebration of Chocolate Month.  Think you could find a way to incorporate a chocolate promotion into your business?  I bet you could!

Let me know what you think.  Share what you know, down below!

Ricci