The View from the Pass
Reviving an dusty mailing list with fresh, unfiltered takes from the industry.
Newsletter Writing | Interviews | Email Campaigns
Chef Fred Eliot should be taking it easy.
After all, it's January in Portland, Maine, when local chefs usually lay low between lucrative and punishing summer tourist seasons.
The trend for clean label baking products is nearly a decade old in the United States. As more consumers demand pronounceable ingredient lists, bigger players are getting on board. Which is how this humble duo of French pastry mecs playing an unlikely role in the in chicken sandwich wars of 2019, one of the bigger viral food moments of recent history.
Hot line cooks, we know it’s tempting. The pastry department just has so many nice things. Balloon whisks and exoglass cutters and all those fun rings and molds. They won’t notice if you just borrow one little offset really quick, right?
"Something I tell my team is they should be prepared to hear no a lot, because I tell myself no a lot. We have to be prepared to fail. The moment after you fail is a very defining moment."
Matfer Bourgeat USA’s project managers and chef liaisons are relentless- always knocking on kitchen doors, asking the detailed questions, and supporting the creative and professional lives of chefs well beyond the catalog.
We took that sweat equity and subject expertise and turned it into real, valuable reportage to relaunch Matfer’s newsletter: The View from the Pass. We skipped the glossy tv cooking personalities and Instagram chefs in favor of intimate conversations with working professionals about actual kitchen life. We went deep on the relative merits of vegan butter in viennoiserie production, profiled Pâtê en Croûte obsessives, and dropped in on a relief kitchen responding to hurricane recovery in Florida. No sales pitches, no product placement, just pure news and insights from the industry.
The monthly letter proved subject expertise, spoke the precise and technical language of Matfer’s primary clientele, and served to reanimate a dormant email list. In its first twelve issues, open rates increased from 13% to 30%. Currently, the newsletter hits about 8,00 inboxes with an average 36% read rate. Click into the quotes to read the full newsletters.