Over the years, our kitchens have been playgrounds to some of the country’s most innovative chefs. Top Chef and James Beard Award Winner, Dale Levitski; Vie restaurant’s sous chef, Nathan Sears; Master Chef Adrien Nieto; and farm-to-table specialist, Cleetus Friedman — all food adventurers bringing new life to what we eat.

For one of our consumer Bond-Fire dinners, vegan Chef Kriss of Artfully Delicious served up an amazing three-course meal that inspired fruitful discussion. When clients gathered around on another occasion, Nancy Silver of Snookelfritz Ice-cream, voted second best artisanal ice-cream in the country, delighted us with a deliciously unique ice cream flavor, delicate squash brown butter!

Along with organizing food trend Lunch-N-Learns, each week our own food innovation chef, Joy DuPuis, surprises us with another Meatless Monday recipe. And, in connecting with the latest food trends, Joy recently trained with well know raw food chef, Elaina Love.

These creative pros have helped to inspire and fuel our ideation around flavors, forms and trends that reach our targets from the outside-in. We’ve leveraged their expertise to explore new kinds of salsa, breakfast foods, flatbread sandwiches and snack mixes. We ask chefs what they love about grocery and what they hate – and then watch the opportunities unfurl.

They love it. And so do we.

Beyond our kitchens the creative food passion continues. Here are a few active food blogs that come from the group at DuPuis:

Chicky Pea
Tempeh Girls
Good Foodocracy

Steven DuPuis : Design Thinking from DuPuis Group on Vimeo.

If you happen to be in our Chicago office on a Monday afternoon around 4PM, you will find Steven DuPuis in a flurry of papers, preparing to leave for Northwestern University. In addition to being the visionary behind DuPuis, Steven is also teaching at Kellogg School of Management. His latest academic project is ‘Design Lab’, an experimental course that has been in the works for two years.

The course, covering the intersection of design and marketing, looks at how design and design thinking can be incorporated into marketing theory and practice.

Design has become a critical aspect in achieving success within today’s business environment, yet is often misunderstood and typically viewed as an aesthetic application.  This confusion has lead to varied degrees of effectiveness within the business community. ‘Design Thinking’ introduces students to a creative form of problem solving– a process that requires a malleable mind– one that embraces both logic and abstraction. It really only makes sense… after business school and art school, business leaders and creatives collaborate in the real world. To make this interaction most effective, it’s important that business leaders understand creatives and vice versa.

The concept of ‘Design Thinking’ dates back to the 1980’s but has recently gained momentum as human-centered design approaches have become more commonplace within a business context. Readily employed by design schools world wide, this approach to problem-solving was first extended as a multi-disciplinary academic environment by Northwestern as part of their engineering program and has since manifested itself as part of a tri-focused degree (the ‘Triple M’ program) that combines practices from engineering, business, and design.

DuPuis’ approach to creating an environment for problem-solving through Design Thinking made Steven an ideal candidate to teach this course.  The course itself, called ‘Design Lab’, is a ten-week experience that focuses on the topics of discovery, immersion, research, collaboration, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, and culminates with a design presentation. Discussions will include methodologies to establishing a creative culture, design integration, visual trends, and case studies of companies that have adopted design as a central strategy for growth. The class will actively work with professional design agencies within the Chicago area to develop skills in understanding the creative process. Students are placed into teams and assigned an agency ‘client’, who will provide the real-world problem which they are to solve through the new approaches presented in class.

For the last six years, Steven DuPuis has been involved with the Kellogg School of Management speaking on the topic of design. In the last two years, he has regularly taught Marketing Innovation. One thing that he finds particularly inspiring is the students’ excitement around the subject. With over 500 student participants, Northwestern has one of the largest and most active design clubs within a university. This interest has led students to give Steven a very warm welcome. Last school year, the students of his New Products and Services class awarded him “Certificate of Impact”, which represented the most influential class the students had taken at Kellogg.

Steven’s next class, offered this spring, will be on the topic of Marketing Innovation.

Inspiration at DuPuis workshops comes from many different sources: the homework assignments, the breakfast buffet, the room décor and a team made up of diverse backgrounds and brain-types to name a few. Our space brings inspiration to life with whiteboard walls that dare everyone to color outside the lines.

Then, we remove the biggest barrier to creativity: fear. Many corporate careers are honed by avoiding the temptation to share half-baked ideas that would risk ridicule or career derailment. Our workshops grant participants something rare in today’s corporate world: PTS, or Permission To Suck. We want to bring everything out into the open. Idea fragments. Unoriginal ideas. Even absurd ideas. All of these can lead somewhere or inspire a bigger, better ideas.

In order to create relevance and sustained business growth, we must create true consumer relevance for our products and brands. Relevance is fueled by an honest dig into what consumers care about and what they don’t (sometimes it’s our brand).
When you attend a workshop at DuPuis, be prepared for tangents, divergent exercises, “time cops” and forced-choice exercises. We will fill our space with thinking and then sharpen our collective focus on specific pathways and next steps.

Regardless of the subject matter or the output, we promise you this: you will leave our workshop with a feeling we call “a good kind of tired”.

“I find it imperative to cross industry boundaries in order to discover unrelated opportunities – it is a receipt for innovative thinking.”

Steven returned with a fresh perspective, ready to apply the structural frameworks and fundamentals of storytelling into a business context. With brands challenged by excessive competition and category commoditization, consumers are becoming less brand-loyal. Story serves as a strong authentic marker with which to establish a deeper relationship with customers.

Good stories shape our perception by assigning meaning, significance, relevance and novelty. The act of sharing stories led our ancestors to find food and to pass traditions and cultural norms through generations—even to track and record genealogy. These ancient stories serve as the foundations of storytelling by establishing the metaphors that influence our society.

Stories are about a problem to solve. They take us on a solution-driven journey through complication, resistance, crises, discovery, revelation and finally, resolution.

Hearing the stories of successful companies such as Apple, Patagonia and Nike inspires and motivates– these stories are typically founded upon overcoming obstacles and in some cases, against unbelievable odds. But most of all, these stories are about a person or group of people who overcame a complication. This humanizes a company and allows one to feel empathy toward the business, product or brand. Furthermore, we feel a desire to continue our experience, whereby we seek to purchase the company’s products or services. If told correctly and simply, consumers will subconsciously recall a brand story each time they see or hear the brand.

New product stories like Art Fry, creator of Post-it Notes, and Larry Page, creator of Google, have become folklore in business schools as they represent an individual’s driving passion to bring a product to market: We view them as heroes. This speaks to the American ingenuity and drive to conquer the impossible. Stories serve as roadmaps, and within them are hidden metaphors to success. Marketers, designers, and business leaders can find many helpful hints within the pages of classic literature, bringing a whole new meaning to masterpieces such as the Odyssey or the Iliad. Ultimately, these stories inspire others to believe in themselves.

We all read stories as children– within colorful books that delighted our senses and introduced our minds to new concepts– but stories often live outside the context of two covers. Movies and motion pictures are perfect examples of medium that capture the necessary elements of a story– you are asked to follow a character or group of characters, in an environment, at a certain point in time, as they often struggle against external forces. In the meantime, your brain is enjoying watching these actions as if you are actually participating.

Other forms of storytelling are more subtle– the Fireside Chats, for example, had a very specific purpose but were crafted in such a way that other elements, other than content, created an experience for the listener (or the viewer, in more visual presentations).

Our senses are our receptors for any situation, and the way we receive stories is no different. How do we see a story? How do we hear a story? How do we taste a story? How do we touch and feel a story? How do we smell a story? More importantly, as storytellers, how do we craft a story to capture the senses in a way that best supports our message?

‘Brand Story’ is a term that gets thrown around often in business schools and boardrooms. It’s often presented in paragraph form and picked apart for content several times before the final story is distributed to all who have stake in the brand. However, a brand’s story isn’t much different than the storybooks we read as children or the movie we saw last weekend. In fact, it’s similar to the Fireside Chats as well. It has characters and a setting; it occupies a place in time and, most importantly, it assumes a context that is out of the control of the storyteller.

When President Roosevelt gave his Fireside Chats, he captured the listener’s ears with his words and tone of voice and attempted to capture their eyes with language full of vivid imagery… but he had no control over what the listener smelled, tasted and touched while listening.

However, where the explicit ended, the implicit stepped in:  The name ‘Fireside Chat’ suggested to listeners that they tune in next to their fireplaces, that this would be a friendly conversation. The chats were broadcasted right after dinner time, a time when families traditionally sit together in conversation, creating an environment that supported Roosevelt’s message.

Though the Fireside Chats happened long ago, and the content may or may not be relevant to your brand– the ability to craft a story in explicit and implicit terms is becoming more and more important to a brand, as communication is now as simple and immediate as an email or text message.

For more than 20 years, Steven DuPuis has led his company to integrate story into its brand strategy process, and has continually refined its application within the business environment. As a result, methods such as the Lunch & Learn seminar series– which teaches companies how to embrace their story and maximize brand value– have come to life.

Duke Cannon Soap

What was DuPuis’ role in the creation of Duke Cannon?

DuPuis helped us not only with packaging design, but also in narrowing in on the right male archetype. Ivana [Chicago's Creative Director] and her team did extensive research in stores– looking at a wide throw of inspiration: everything from the Beatles, to Don Draper and the Mad Men, guys like Steve McQueen, Blue-collar figures, Mountain-Dew dudes, etc. Seeing this wide array of different directions we could take helped us narrow in on the Workman-like-Blue-Collar aesthetic that helped form our tone and the way in which we communicate both packaging development as well as brand architecture.

How was working with DuPuis on your own venture different than other design processes you’ve experienced as part of large companies?

A lot more fluid — as if we were two partners rather than the traditional client-agency approach (big dog and pony show). It was much more collaborative and open on both sides in terms of throwing out ideas and brainstorming together. Overall, much different than the more typical formality of the client briefing the creatives, and then the creatives working in black box to come back to ‘surprise’ the client. The process with DuPuis definitely resulted in building deeper trust through a working partnership. This trust was apparent in the quality and strength of the end-product.

Your talk at FUSE was about challenging the rules of ‘big company marketing’. How did design help you take on the challenge?

It’s always been my perspective that the design world has less hard-and-fast rules than the world of ‘big company marketing’. Design helps you to think differently– and, for the more left-brained thinkers, working with designers, like the right-brained thinkers at DuPuis, encourages you to think differently and challenge norms by your own mindset. Also, it’s helped me to understand most norms should be challenged, which has definitely shaped my approach to entrepreneurship and product development.

You also talk about your witnessing ‘design hiccups’ particularly in the packaging process (with Tropicana, Gatorade, Sierra Mist, etc.). Could you explain a little bit about what you think went wrong in that ‘big company’ design process? What did you do to prevent design hiccups with Duke Cannon?

Whether packaging design, advertising, or any consumer-facing element– most problems happen when there are too many people weighing in on creative. Creative-by-committee seems a recipe for failure. When everyone from Marketing Managers to President/CEO has to weigh in and mandate change, the end product ends up being a Frankenstein. This ends up far-removed from the initial vision of the Creatives. In general, over-thinking kills great creative.

For Duke Cannon, we spent very little time with packaging/advertising– we’re trying to accomplish a visceral reaction, and spending hours and hours of analysis on small details that go overlooked by the consumer seemed like the wrong focus. We spend the majority of our time getting the brand strategy down and the rest fell into place.

You mention a lot of wasted money in focus groups and creative research. Could you maybe talk about some of the biggest design mistakes you’ve witnessed in big companies? How did Duke Cannon prevent that?

Design mistakes that are common are when you try to pack so much onto a package– claiming every benefit, NEW! callouts, luscious food shots, etc. When you try to communicate too much, you end up not communicating anything. The typical approach is to think that the package needs to scream, to shout off the shelf. Duke Cannon’s package is understated, which seems to go a long way with our target. Most products try to over promise their benefits, and often ladder up to the highest order emotional benefit they think they can live up to. Marketers need to call bullshit on, for example, the idea that oatmeal will transform your life. Is it a healthy breakfast? Sure… but very little influence over the overall quality of your life. In Duke Cannon’s case, we noticed that a lot of products, like Axe Body Wash, claimed ridiculous benefits, even promising to get you laid. To be honest, we’re a soap. We won’t get you laid. But we will get you clean. And this level of candor was appreciated by our target.

Duke Cannon is a bold, unapologetic, and polarizing brand. How did design help you communicate the brand’s voice?

We took an unconventional approach to designing the brand voice. Rather than focusing on a brief, we first focused on Duke Cannon’s voice, and built an image of Duke Cannon as a (fictional) man. We talked about what he’s like, what he does, and, most importantly, what he’s not like. Once we got to the understanding of who he is and what he stands for, our design and brand voice decisions became very easy. We always had a touch point to fall back on– What would he say? What products would he offer?

A lot of big companies miss this opportunity to clearly understand their brand in terms of humanizing it — personifying it. They operate without understanding the brand’s unique voice and what it can and can’t be. Sure, a lot of briefs I worked on involved a ‘tone and personality’, but we just threw shit in there like “optimistic/confident”. This ended in a lot of sameness. When you focus on what your brand ‘could’ be, it’s always going to end in some over-the-top aspiration. Instead, I’m a huge advocate of taking time to understand what your brand stands against, and, through that process, revealing what your brand stands for.

If you were to give designers a similar set of ‘unlearned rules’, what would they be?

1. Really take the time to understand the clients’ brand and go beyond the surface of what’s communicated in the brief. For example, Ivana and her team did historical research on what military soap and men used to look like in the 1940s, which really helped us develop a unique, informed brand perspective. Historical significance is important — most clients are only working in here-and-now.
2. Always have one or two executions that make the client uncomfortable.
3. Borrow inspiration from outside the category. Particularly in the consumer package goods segment, this brings a different perspective, and the opportunity to bring cachet to a category that often lacks it.

I get online and start googling. Life Path Center looks interesting, and it has a little store with a café. Great! Raw smoothie for me, and herbs for her!

I spill out of the taxi and wander in. Life Path is charming and meanders on off to little offices with rooms above, circled above a courtyard. Pura Avida is next door and although I was prepared for a small store, it’s not really a store, but a café with a few products. As I browse and read labels, an American walks in and starts chatting to me. When she hears of the sunburn, she strides over to an aloe-vera plant and takes a few leaves—the ones that were loose anyways she says. I am delighted and before I rush out to find a taxi and get the gel on my little darling’s lobster skin, I see a flyer of a pretty girl advertising cooking classes. But I will have to come back. And I do. And the next time she is the there—the girl on the flyer. I ask when she teaches classes and she has one in an hour. I’m in.

Alicia Wilson is her name, and right away I see we have similar philosophies on cooking. I sit up straighter in my chair sensing that I’m going to enjoy the next three hours. The other two classmates are Annie, an artist, and her mother, Becky.

Alicia believes in cooking with all the five senses and doesn’t like to label herself. She eats mostly raw, local real foods—an “Omnivore” she says. “Recipes are ideas, not a code you need to follow,” as she prepares beet soup in front of us without any measuring tools, she works in proportions.

She gets out her broth, which she has already made. She saves all her vegetable scraps in a bag in the freezer that she keeps adding to. “Treat it like a friend.” I store this away and make a resolution right then and there, to stop putting everything down the garbage disposal.
Another little tip was to pour the broth, after it’s been reduced and strained, into ice cube trays. This is probably already sounding like a lot but Alicia promises that if you just spend 2-3 hours a week in preparation, you have everything needed for the week.

She takes the onions and garlic and leaves the beets in their skins because of the vitamin content there. Slow roasting them tastes best she says. It’s one third onions and garlic and two thirds beets, and because we only have three hours, she cuts the beets in large pieces and removes the skins – usually they would roast an hour to an hour and half in the oven. But first she salts the garlic and lets it sit for 15 min—it’s more digestible that way, predigested if you will. I am skeptical as garlic is not a friend of mine, but I’m game.

Alicia drops a dollop of cold pressed coconut oil in the pot and adds the salted garlic, onions and beets. Then she turns the heat down, puts the lid on, and listens. “Sound is an integral part of cooking. You don’t really need recipes, just your five senses because cooking is instinctual.”

My new wise chef friend believes we all know how to feed ourselves, we have just moved so far away from it—and ordering ‘food’ from a drive thru does not qualify. Alicia loves getting a non-cooker in her classes, and her eyes laugh as she tells us how stiff they are at first and how after an hour they blossom and start listening for bubbling soups and the emulsifying thump of ghee. They are smelling that the cookies are ready in the oven and observing how to measure the proportions, and, of course, tasting the food.

Becky pipes up with something that I too, was wondering. How do you make ghee? “That’s easy!” Alicia cries and grabs some organic butter and plops it into a hot iron pan. “Ghee will talk to you by sound: when it gets quiet, it’s done.” We all sit in silent camaraderie and listen to the competing sounds of ghee and beet soup. Alicia adds the broth to the beets and the soup is soon simmering as she recounts funny stories of non–cookers. She had us all laughing over one story in particular. She asked a woman to toss a few apples in a bowl. The woman stood back and tried to aim them into a bowl from a distance!

All of a sudden Alicia turns. She has heard the soup and it’s too loud. She busies herself with it, adding extra salt and turning it down.

I sip my cool electrolyte water, flavored with raw honey and lime, and find myself listening for the ghee. After twenty five minutes over a low flame, the lactose and milk fat have been burned off of the butter in the pan. Once it’s cooled, Alicia filters it through cheese cloth. She was right, that was easy.

Now it’s time for cookies: my favorite. Alicia takes the almond meal from the milk and shares her basic cookie recipe with us, again, in proportions.

• ¼ cup almond meal
• ¼ cup honey – or sugar
• ¼ cup rice flour plus xanthum gum
• ¼ cup flax meal (3 Tbsp) with 9 Tbsp water

Then play! I am reminded of making play dough with my daughter when she was small. Alicia lets the flax and water thicken to a gelatinous texture—this will be the egg substitute. Then she mixes it in with the almond meal, honey and rice flour/xanthum combination and then she starts pulling ingredients out of shelves and cabinets; cacao powder, cacao nibs, a dash of allspice and a handful of dried cherries are stirred in. Again, instead of a timer, we use our noses and Alicia excuses herself when she smells that they are done. And the soup is ready too. And it smells almost more delicious than it tastes – almost!

About Joy DuPuis

Joy DuPuis is a foodie entrepreneur, who seeks to find and create unique experiences with food. She is constantly sharing her findings with our clients through food trend lunches and innovation workshops.

About Alicia Wilson Rivero

Alicia Wilson Rivero is the owner of both the Pura Vida Store and the Cooking School at the LifePath Center. She shares in a global mission to create and offer healthy, delicious food using locally harvested, fresh and organic products. Read more about Alicia Wilson Rivero

Hi all.

I had an opportunity to see Jonah Lehrer speak at the FUSE conference. Jonah wrote “How We Decide” (one of my favorites) and has a new book out “Imagine: How Creativity Works”. His speech was very interesting, allow me to share…

Basically, his premise starts with the belief that creativity is putting two things together to form a third, new, idea. He offers that most of the “low fruit” ideas have already been solved for and that the things that we are solving for today are much much harder than ever. And, today, we rely on other people to help us make connections. As evidence he put forward the observation that geniuses from the 19th century like Einstein and Darwin authored their scholarly articles themselves. Today, scholarly articles are authored by teams and that the size of the teams has doubled every 10 years or so. Then he offered an example of how Steve Jobs designed the Pixar office space to have only two restrooms in order to very purposefully force diverse people together regularly in the restrooms and in the long hallway walks that they have to get to the restrooms (Jobs observed that people don’t vary who they eat with or break with in other common areas).

Key takeaway: Organizations must encourage (force!) collaboration in order to be successful

Next, he discussed how cities are wonderfully creative places because they force people together. (Another book I highly recommend on the subject is Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser). Then Jonah compared cities to companies. They have a lot in common but they have one big difference that leads to a very interesting reality: mayors can’t control residents’ actions, schedules, what they read or who they talk to. In contrast, companies, particularly big ones, prescribe all of those things. Cities are random and chaotic and that scares CEOs. So, the result is that cities become more productive as they grow and companies become less productive as they grow until they become too big to sustain themselves. His evidence is that the average life span of a Fortune 100 company is 45 years.

Key takeaway: There is great risk to successful entrepreneurial businesses as they grow or are bought by larger companies.

Fascinating food for thought.

Dinner at the Orchard, Limonera

Nestled in the foothills of Santa Paula, Limoneira Ranch, the largest domestic grower of lemons and avocados, served as the back drop for Ventura’s recent Dinner at the Orchard. The event, part of an on-going charity-driven series, had caught Steven’s attention and we were happy to “help him out” by joining him on DuPuis’ behalf.

With only a cryptic “wear flat shoes and layers” advisement, we met at the designated shuttle stop. Much to our delight we were greeted with a chilled artichoke soup perfectly complemented by a fresh slice of locally grown avocado. This pairing provided at a bus stop was a pretty good indication of the evening ahead.

A weathered trolley arrived to take us up into the orchard. As we bounced along the winding road, the fragrant eucalyptus trees melted away any stress from that day’s work. Through the trees we caught sight of Chef Jason Collis and his staff at work in the avocado grove. More small bites, including fresh little Kumamoto oysters from seaside-purveyor The Jolly Oyster, greeted us as we stepped off the trolley. Hors d’oeuvres were paired with a selection of wines and beers from local vintners and breweries and we found ourselves eager to meet our dining companions with whom we were about to share a culinary adventure.

Dinner was served at a beautifully set, rustic table overlooking the valley. Family-style seating and pass-around courses encouraged guests to socialize. The arrival of the Dinosaur Kale salad was a perfect excuse for us to start a conversation with our neighbors: a food stylist, Paty Winters, two bakers from Rabalais Bistro, Kelly Bunder and Tracy Lippert, and, Ventura County Agricultural Education Coordinator, Mary Maranville. Mary runs a farm tour program that brings agriculture into the classroom.

As we were savoring our first course, Chris Sayer, a farmer and writer at Petty Ranch, spoke about the rich varieties of figs in development on his property. With excitement, he told us that they were only a few years away from a full-blown harvest. For the Orchard dinner, he supplied a colorful array of cauliflower and fava beans. Chris spoke about the role of the fava bean in crop rotation on Petty Ranch. Many organic farmers use the cover crop method on their land. Without the harm of synthetic fertilizers they can replenish the soil with vital nutrients, maintaining it for future generations. What is uncommon about the Petty Ranch approach, however, is the secondary use made of the cover crop. When prepared as a risotto and coupled with citrus glazed short ribs, one would never guess the fava’s humble origins of utility on the farm.

The next farmer to visit us was former chef John Fonteyn. He infused a new enthusiasm around the table, and could have easily enlisted any of us to volunteer at his organic growing operation. Through his 9-acres of land in Ojai and Ventura, John brings to life his vision for contemporary farming: a return to working with nature rather than controlling it. John spoke of the unrivaled qualities of Ventura County’s five growing seasons, which led to the inspired combinations we were tasking at table, including golden beet gratin with blood orange reduction. Only in the warm climate and soil conditions found in Ventura can you access local root vegetables and citrus in season at the same time.

We finished the meal with an ice-cold glass of Limoncello and one more walk around the table to mingle with the other lingering guests. As fellow Venturans, we felt a kinship with these wonderfully passionate and dedicated farmers, stewards of a new era of intelligent farming. With access to one of America’s most productive and unique agricultural locations, farmers and foodies are joining together to develop a culture of honesty, transparency, and creativity.

As we descended back down the hill and had a moment to savor the evening, it struck us how fortunate we are to be experiencing first hand the people and passions surrounding fresh, local foods. It made us realize that DuPuis made the right move to this inspiring community called Ventura.

The Dinner At The Orchard is part of a Totally Local VC dinner series benefiting FOOD Share. To find out more about upcoming dinners check out the Totally Local VC website.

-Sabine Dodane & Jenna Melnyk

An Evening Outside The Lines from DuPuis Group on Vimeo.

Back on April 19th DuPuis Chicago brought together and eclectic group to take part in a live art experience. 8 Local and established and emerging artists created and auctioned work while we watched, drank, ate and mingled. It was truly a unique and inspiring experience.

-Lindsey Evans