Tag: kelapo

Categories
Business Social Media

Social Madness Challenge

Move Kelapo to the Top!

It’s Day 7 of the Social Media Challenge presented by Spark Business from Capital One!  Guess who’s participating? Kelapo!  Kelapo Coconut is listed under Small Business category for the Tampa Bay region.  There are 144 participants in this category, which is defined has any business with 1-99 employees.  In my opinion, it’s a little unfair that a company with 99 employees can compete against a company with 5!  Isn’t there a micro category!?!

But life isn’t fair and that’s how it goes.  So super competitive me wants to win this challenge and make Goliath fall.  How competitive am I?  I sprint to the finish lines in 5k’s just because I want to beat another competitor by a half second.

Back to the social media challenge, we didn’t realize until the day it started that we were selected as a participant, so we were a little bit behind the 8-ball.  After day 1, we had collected 14 points.  Day 5, 25 points.  Day 7, 100 points!  Currently, we are in 28th place out of the 144 teams.  That’s top 20%.  Not good enough yet!  To advance in this competition, you have to place in the top 8 to be entered into a bracket style tourney challenge.  We need to advance at least 20 more places before the last day, June 19th.

All these stats and I haven’t even said how we amass points!  There is a super secret algorithm that calculates total number of Twitter followers, Facebook likes, LinkedIn Followers, and votes directly on the BizJournals website.  Each day at 7am new totals are announced.  If you haven’t already helped Kelapo, now is your chance to get us into Round 2!  Follow the links below to cast your votes and follows at all our social media outlets.

Please VOTE for KELAPO under Small Companies:

http://www.bizjournals.com/tampabay/exclusives/socialmadness

And to help us win FOLLOW KELAPO on:

LinkedIn  http://www.linkedin.com/company/957500

Facebook www.facebook.com/kelapococonut

Twitter www.twitter.com/kelapo

Categories
PR Public Speaking Travel

Mile High Club Blogging

Southwest Realtime Flight Tracker

At an altitude of 39,001ft, this blog post is part of the mile-high club! Flying back to Tampa from Denver, I get to enjoy the luxury of wifi in the sky, thanks to Southwest for just $5. It’s not bad except it won’t allow my emails to come through my mac so instead of working I’m just surfing the internet. Catching up on Twitter, Pinterest, and online shopping.. well not really shopping, just adding items to the shopping cart and never making the full purchase. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve added these black leather pumps to my shopping cart on Mango.com and never actually bought them! They would be perfect for work, a thick heel for more support and they’ll go with almost everything but I just haven’t bought them. Maybe it’s a good practice in self-control.

Excited to get home tonight. I’ve spent that last two days in Denver and had lots of good meetings! Every time I go to Denver and see the snow-capped mountains, I just want to go ski, hike, or bike. Unfortunately, there was no playing on this trip but I’ve been promised another trip back this summer to catch a Rockies game. 🙂 I did enjoy the local cuisine of bison burgers for lunch and rainbow trout for dinner.  Delicious!

It’s actually been a busy week, spending my weekend in St. Augustine seeing our friend Chef Jessica Bright and working, now Denver, and tomorrow morning I go to Orlando to speak at the American Pie Council. Funny enough, if you’re flying Southwest, like me, you can see a blurb on the American Pie Council in your Spirit magazine! In addition to the travel, we’ve been busy with radio shows and media. Check out my talk this morning on BlogTalkRadio with Apple Capital, and Kelapo’s mention in the Tampa Bay Times and Oxygen Magazine in this month’s edition on national news stands!

Categories
Public Speaking Travel

Atlantic Baking Expo

Touring the Baking Expo Circuit

Travel, travel, travel.  That’s about all I seem to be doing these days.  This weekend it was an up and back trip to Atlantic City, apparently called “The City That’s Always On.”  Hmm.. that could be wrong on so many levels.  AC really is the slummier version of Vegas.  And talk about slummier, I don’t want to be too negative but Spirit Airlines was an eye opening experience for me as well.  Coined as the “Ultra Low Fare Airline”, they really lived up to the name.  The airplanes are old and dirty.  The flight attendants are as old as my grandmother or 8 months pregnant, bless their hearts!  I actually didn’t know you could fly when you’re that prego.  Even the passengers were a unique breed of first time flyers, snow birds, and budget travelers.  At least they were on time, didn’t lose my luggage, and got me up and back safely without incident.  I will never complain about Southwest again.  Or at least for a really long time.

 

Show Floor Demonstrations

This trip to Atlantic City was for the Altantic Baking Expo, held every two years at the convention center.  On Sunday, I gave a tasting demonstration to about 100 bakers on the showroom floor.  We talked about selecting the best coconut oil, Kelapo obviously, but also about the characteristics, like bright white in color, flavorful coconut aroma, and mild sweet taste.  Then the next morning, I gave an educational lecture on coconut oil that went more into the health and wellness about using a plant-based saturated fat such as coconut oil.  In my spare time, I walked around the showroom floor and tasted cakes, cookies, and brownies!  I cut myself off very quickly and am so glad that our regular tradeshows are in the natural foods industry, otherwise, I’d probably gain 200 lbs.  There was also a cake judging contest and I took a picture of one of the culinary student’s entries, “Alice In Wonderland”.  Very cleverly done.

 
 

Cake Competition, Student Entry "Alice in Wonderland"

The whole weekend went great, just a small coughing spell after the second presentation because I was suffering from a head cold.  I must not have taken enough coconut oil beforehand!  Then it was back to the airport to catch up on my reading and also the history of Atlantic City, which includes several of the real life Atlantic City leaders now fictionalized in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.  I saw the real Nucky Johnson (not Thompson as in the show) and the Commodore, both respected and not completely crooked politicians as portrayed in the show.  By the way, when does that come back on the air and is everyone still upset over Jimmy’s death at the end of season 2?  What a finale!

Categories
Travel Uncategorized

Where does the time go?

Looking good in a hair net!

Another month has passed and no blog posts!  My travel schedule has been hectic.  Last week I was in Phoenix, Jacksonville, and Miami all within a week.  Here’s a picture from when I visited our manufacturing plant in Phoenix.  I had to wear a hair net while on the production line.  They were finishing up our new Kelapo baking sticks. Getting to see all the production and equipment, made it feel like I was taking part in a Mr. Rodger’s episode!!   I took some video as well and promise to edit it and post that soon too.  My goal will also be to post at least once a week in November!  Let’s see if I can do it 🙂

Here are some other new things that I didn’t have time to blog about lately:  Tampa Bay Metro Magazine   and Meet the Producer

Categories
Business Reading Travel

Evil Plans for World Domination

In Flight Reading

I went up to Chi-town on Tuesday evening and brought along the book “Evil Plans.  Having fun on the road to World Domination”.  Probably, not the most appropriately named book for in flight reading!  But it’s really a light, playful look at making the most of your life and finding love with purpose. It is written by Hugh MacLeod, who draws cartoons on the back of business cards, and also authors the website GapingVoid.

I read the entire book, cover to cover, before we even touched down in Chicago.  Well the thoughts and ideas that it put in my head must have planted a seed for what was to come.  I can’t reveal too much before our next tradeshow, Expo East, but my evil plan for Kelapo is seemingly shaping up quite nicely!

Get the book.  Read it.  Even if you’re not an aspiring entrepreneur, like me 🙂