Good Food Jobs Day: Ann Arbor

I'm sure I'm not the only one out there obsessed with Good Food Jobs. A clean site design, good interviews with food folk, an awesome Tuesday newsletter and tons of foodie dream jobs - what more could a girl ask for?

Recently the site's founders suggested hosting meetups worldwide on June 16th to celebrate three years since the site was thought up and launched. They made it really easy to organize a meetup in your own community via meetup.com. I decided to organize the Ann Arbor meetup and pushed the information out through a few local foodie groups (in hindsight, I should have pushed more!). The day had an ice cream theme as the site's founders conceived the idea of the site over ice cream three years ago.

On Saturday I headed over to Iorio's Gelateria near campus to celebrate Good Food Jobs Day with some tasty gelato and food system talk. I was expecting about six people, one person came (and Carrie - an Iorio's employee - jumped in for a bit). Iorio's is really the perfect place for an event like this one. The business started exclusively as a catering business in 2004 and last year they opened their Ann Arbor location (there is another in Lansing, MI). The young owners really seem value the opinions of both their customers and employees; new gelato flavors are concocted from customer and employee suggestions. In addition, Carrie and I discussed briefly how the employees have the opportunity to jump into projects that both interest them and benefit the business.

Salted carmel, chocolate and fig, and chocolate ginger gelato all snuggled together. 

I indulged in a vanilla hazelnut cappuccino and a little gelato while there and jumped into talking with Aaron about our interests in working in the food systems. Ironically, Aaron and I took a class together and he grabs lunch at my work from time to time but I never knew of our similar interests in food issues. We talked about things going on in our community that are creating a stronger local food system and discussed creating a food book club for recent grads, young professionals, etc.  Finally, we talked about easy things everyone can do to change the food system.

I'm tentatively planning on organizing a similar event in the near future. I know there were people out there who couldn't make it and I would love to talk to them more about this topic. Are you in the Ann Arbor area and interested in talking more about building a better food system? Reach out!