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Food

Why Should You Be Careful While Reading Food Labels

No matter what food item you buy it is your second nature to check the food label to know more details on the item you are buying. Sometimes for ingredients, sometimes for nutrition facts, sometimes for ways to prepare or store the item and almost always for price details, food labels are what most customers would check when they buy a food item.

Though you tend to check the labels for all the above-mentioned details, it’s not necessary that you understand all the facts given there. In fact, the truth is that most people don’t understand most of the details given on food labels. For example, a very common misconception that people make is regarding the nutrition details given on the labels. In 1994 FDA had brought about the rule that all food items in stores should have food labels with all necessary information. While most labels mention the calories intake and other nutrient levels that a person consumes at a single serving, most people take it for granted that the calories mentioned are for the entire contents for the food packet. This tells you how much inadequate our knowledge of food labels is.

Another example of how consumers fall for the food labels is how they purchase items that have the words “pure” or “natural” on the labels. You need to understand that these words actually don’t mean anything when it comes to the actual preparation of the item. For example, when it says “pure sunflower oil” it doesn’t mean the oil is made completely from the sunflower that you find blooming on the fields. Here “pure” only means the process started from using the sunflower and has a lot more subsequent steps that created the oil that you find before you.

Similarly, there are a lot more examples of such words you find on food labels such as “no preservatives”, “law fat”, “no preservatives added”, “low sugar”, “o% calories” and a lot more that are just to attract customers to purchase the food item. And if you are one of those customers who check only the price and no further details, you are in for a tougher time for you miss out a lot of important information that you need to know about the product that you are consuming.

Unfortunately, the habit of reading food labels is decreasing nowadays as most people now call up the stores for home deliveries and often make online purchases. Needless to say, this is highly unfortunate as you are purchasing items more blindly than before. Remember, whether you are purchasing online or offline, at the store or through home delivery, it is your need to know what you are buying and what you are eating. For your health and for the health of your family, you need to make it a habit of reading food labels and understand what is written there.

Hotel

How Can a Hotel Marketing Plan Help You Say Goodbye to ‘Hope’?

‘Hope’ is a lousy business strategy when it comes to running a hotel business. Yet many hotel businesses choose to run their marketing campaigns almost entirely on hope. They spend money on adverts, whether online or offline, and then they cross their fingers and hope. They hope that potential guests are going to find their ads and book with them. They feel they have no other option but to sit back and hope for the best.

It is hardly surprising that stress levels are high amongst hotel owners. So have you ever asked yourself if there is a better way? How would you feel if you knew you could transform the marketing of your hotel from a game of chance, which translates to insecurity, anxiety and sleepless nights, to an organised, reliable marketing system, based on ‘Return on Investment’?

In other words, you put money into your hotel marketing strategies knowing, in advance, that you are going to get more money back? What difference would it make to your hotel business and your life if this was true for you? How good would it feel if that lousy word ‘hope’ was removed from your thinking and your vocabulary forever? As a hotel marketing and sales expert, I would NEVER run my business on hope. And you don’t have to either. To ensure that your hotel marketing is successful, you must have a hotel marketing plan.

Although it is tempting to leave your marketing up to chance when you are so busy with the day-to-day running of your hotel, you cannot afford to do this. The marketing of your hotel is your most important job of all. After all, without guests, you do not have a hotel business. A hotel marketing plan means that you can stop leaving the success of your business to chance and start making the profits that you deserve.

The secret, when building your hotel marketing plan, is to test out a number of marketing strategies on a small scale, and work out which ones generate the greatest response rates and profits. Only when you have done your measuring and testing do you roll out your chosen strategies on a large scale. Just imagine the difference it could make to your hotel if you applied just one or two proven money-making strategies, let alone more.

Make it your goal to test at least one new marketing strategy a month. Within a year you might have found several that produced reasonable results and one or two that aren’t worth pursuing. However, you will likely have found five or six, at least, that prove real winners, that you can then implement on a much larger scale, knowing that you will get the results you want. The secret is to always fully test and measure every strategy that you use. You cannot make good decisions without complete knowledge.

Say goodbye to ‘hope’ forever. Say hello to ‘certainty, security and happiness’ with a hotel marketing plan that works for you.

Camping

Have Fun Camping With Kids

Taking the kids camping is a great way to get away from the television, cell phone, video games and the computer just having some fun spending time together. It is also a great way to help your children learn more about nature from their own first hand experiences.

You and your kids can be modern campers by camping in a camper or RV or you can rough it somewhat with tent camping without electricity. The latter is really a better learning experience for your kids.

When you rough it you can do fun things like have a camp fire and roast wieners or marshmallows. The children can be assigned the chore of gathering the firewood for your camp fire. Another great food to prepare is to wrap corn on the cob in foil and roast it on the fire.

It is great fun to sit around a campfire, eat camp foods, sing campfire songs and tell stories or play games. If it is after dark, teach them to be very quite and listen to the sounds of nature. Try to identify each sound and attach it to the animal from which it comes.

Let your children help put up the tent. Show them how to drive the stakes and secure the tent. Teach the kids how to wash dishes in the nearby creek.

Depending on where you go camping, then it could be fun to go hiking and exploring in the woods around the campsite during the day. Teach them to identify the different trees in the area by name and when you go back to the land of the computer then they can research more about each tree and what it might be best made from that type of tree if it was cut down.