Rachel Sprinkle-Strong, owner and “chief peddler” of POPcycle Creamery in Sacramento, cheerfully describers herself as an “ice cream snob.” But she’s not the kind of person you’d call arrogant. With her sunny disposition, warm smile, and perennial optimism, Rachel is as charming and friendly as the ice cream she serves.

Still, this is ice cream like no other ice cream you’ve tasted. Flavors like fleur de sel oreo, pumpkin donut 5 spice, strawberry balsamic, and vanilla bean-cardamom showcase Rachel’s ability to combine common and unusual ingredients to create extraordinary ice cream flavors. They seem to explode on your palate. Her ice ...

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In Sacramento, as in other cities like San Francisco and New York, mobile food trucks are experiencing a kind of renaissance. ("Sweeping the food world from coast to coast," says one article, which notes that there are more than 9,500 food trucks in Los Angeles alone.)

Here in Sacramento, a few of these “mobile kitchens” have banded together to create an organization called Sacramento Mobile Food, or SactoMoFo, which lobbies on their behalf and helps promote the mobile truck vendors in the group. (SacFoodMob is another organization in the area with similar goals.)

SactoMoFo promotes mobile food in the Sacramento ...

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The adoption of social media in the wine industry provides a counter-intuitive insight. It is often said that social media helps "level the playing field," that it helps small businesses compete with larger companies.

And yet it seems to me that in the wine industry it is the bigger, more successful wineries that have more fully embraced social media as a way to engage consumers. By contrast, so many small wineries are struggling to figure it out and take advantage of the opportunity that social media offers.

Two charts in a webinar presented by Silicon Valley Bank and titled State of the Wine ...

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A woman I know, Mira Wooten, recently published her first book, Welcome to Love. Wondering if she could use Facebook to sell copies, she placed an ad. Here’s how she tells it:

“I tried using FB Ads to promote my new book, Welcome to Love. It's a romance book based in Austin. I targeted the demographic to women in Austin who had reading listed as an interest. According to FB, it got over 64,000 impressions over the two days I had it live. A total of 133 people clicked on the ad that took them to my Amazon web ...

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Social media and the Internet are powerful tools for small businesses. That's because their customers increasingly begin their shopping on the Internet, and they use social media such as online reviews when considering which products to buy and which businesses to support.

For that reason, the Internet is a double-edged sword. Used well, the Internet and social media can help small businesses. Online marketing techniques and tools, for example, can help small businesses reach prospective customers who otherwise would have no way of knowing about them. Online marketing can help small businesses sell goods and services anywhere around the world, 24x7. And ...

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26 Brix is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bullet Consulting and will be operated independently from Bullet Consulting. It’s expected to launch by July 2012. Whereas Bullet Consulting serves clients across a range of industries, 26 Brix will focus exclusively on restaurants and wineries.

Needless to say, food and wine are very different from high tech and financial services. The needs are different. The kinds of people who work in these industries are different. The end customers are different. Clients in the food and wine industry require different services than the kinds of services that Bullet Consulting provides. For these reasons ...

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