"FOOD 2020: THE FUTURE OF FOOD, NUTRITION & WELLNESS

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Ketchum’s Kitchen

A Snapshot of Our Food Center and Chef

The Ketchum Food Center had its official opening party 30 years ago this month (December). In 1978, the large, homey kitchen was a first for a major PR agency, and it quickly became a hotspot for serving the needs of food industry clients as well as entertaining notable foodies such as Julia Child, James Beard and Chuck Williams (Williams-Sonoma). Located in Ketchum’s San Francisco office, the well-equipped Food Center has been used for recipe development, product tastings and culinary ideation sessions for both consumer and foodservice usage.

Today, virtually unchanged, it still is a hub of activity for Ketchum’s food industry clients. Its current chef, Catherine Pantsios, spends her days there judging submissions for recipe contests, creating and writing recipes, and hosting visiting chefs. Perspectives recently sat down with Catherine to talk about some of the ways clients have used the Food Center.

Perspectives: First, not many PR agencies have a chef on staff. How did you become Ketchum’s Food Center chef and what’s your background?

Catherine Pantsios: I worked for restaurants for 20 years, including owning my own restaurant, called Zolas, in San Francisco for a while. After that, I also taught culinary classes, training students to become chefs. I joined Ketchum seven years ago after hearing about an opening. Fortunately, during all my years working in restaurants, I learned not only to create new dishes but also to write the recipes so they could be re-created by others. That’s vital in this job. I’m also attentive to what recipes will work at the consumer level and what will work at foodservice and at all types of establishments, both upscale and more casual, chain-oriented venues.

Perspectives: What is a typical day like in the Food Center?

Catherine Pantsios: It varies from week to week. I spend a lot of time coming up with new recipes for clients; I can brainstorm as many as 20 concepts a week. Lately we’ve had a lot of product tastings, which can range from trying out new flavor combinations for ice cream to trying new recipes that we’ve sourced from other chefs. I also spend time judging recipe contests for clients. That involves reading the submissions and test-cooking the ones that could be winners. Also, a lot of the work we do with food here is for Ketchum’s B2B business, so we do a lot of culinary ideation for restaurants and for the manufacturing world. A lot of what we develop ends up in trade ads and ultimately on menus or within food products sold at retail.

Whatever we do in the Food Center, my work is always a collaboration with the account teams, from the initial PR program through developing guidelines for, say, a recipe contest to tasting the recipes.

Perspectives: What are some examples of recipes you have created and how they were useful to clients?

Pantsios: One of the most memorable recipes that I’ve been involved with creating was for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association a few years ago. We were asked to come up with ideas for children’s items for restaurants. After a bit of brainstorming, I came up with this idea for a beef sundae—a regular meal designed to look like a dessert. We used mashed potatoes in a sundae dish and topped it with bits of beef. We took pictures of it for food industry publications, and the next thing we knew beef sundaes were showing up at state fairs and then restaurants around the country. Food vendors even did their own versions of it, with some using ground beef or beef strips. That new idea for presenting some common meal ingredients drove increased interest in beef and ultimately pleased our client.

Perspectives: As someone who regularly deals with preparing food, what recent trends have you seen that could influence the way the Food Center serves clients?

Pantsios: One thing I’ve noticed is that there is more awareness of cooking and of food among consumers. They’re watching cooking shows, they’re entertaining at home more, and they’re trying to re-create or even adapt meals that they’ve enjoyed in restaurants. And because people are more likely nowadays to have tried cuisines from different parts of the world, they have wide-ranging taste buds.

All of this opens the door for clients to engage consumers more through food. Some clients already use the Food Center as an entry point for recipe contest promotions, but there is probably an opportunity to do more, such as challenging consumers to use client products in ingredient combinations that reflect our more global taste buds. Clients also may choose to share their own cooking videos with consumers, and our kitchen could be a great location for taping demonstrations in a setting that looks like the kitchen in someone’s home.