The food: Meat Butcher Shop

Where to find it: Anywhere (pictured: Duoro Valley, Portugal)

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Welcome to another edition of #FoodEntrepreneur Friday, where I serve up an order of international food with a side of guidance for entrepreneurs.

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Just like an honest smile, food is a universal language. It’s a gesture of nourishment, a symbol of a community and a creation that needs no translation. When you give and receive food, you exchange a currency that defies speculation and market fluctuations. It’s non-negotiable: we need food to survive. That’s why the food industry has and always will be a successful industry. From entrepreneurs to industries, we should all learn from the eloquence of food: successful entrepreneurship is about successful communication. Food speaks.

Take for example the hot industry of today: the Internet. The Internet facilitates communication more effectively than any other industry before it. If you’re reading this online blog post, then I’m quite certain you know the communication possibilities of the Internet. Instead of waiting months for a paper letter to arrive by boat, Pony Express or carrier pigeon, we now have this awesome technology called email. Give it a try. I’m sure you’ll like it. Likewise, I can pontificate all I want on this here blog and no snooty magazine editor can get in my way. Like it or not, the Internet has helped people communicate better than ever before, and it has toppled the likes of print media and the post office.

To (ahem) communicate my point effectively, I’ll list a whole smattering of industries that help people communicate better:

• The car industry: helps us go from one place to another so that we can be in contact with far-away individuals easily.
• The airline industry: helps us go even farther to communicate with others.
• The hotel industry: helps us temporarily live and communicate in foreign places.
• The fashion industry: helps people communicate their personal tastes and how they want others to view them.
• The publishing industry: this is an obvious one.
• The phone industry: see above.
• The music, TV & film industry: helps artists communicate their art with people who want to consume it.
• The banking industry: like food, money talks. This industry facilitates the communication of currency.
• The computer industry: helps people communicate through documents, spreadsheets, photos, videos, sound, the list goes on.
• The mobile industry: helps put the computer industry in the hands of people wherever they want to go in the world.
• The porn industry: I’ll leave this one to your imagination. I’m sure you get the point by now.

While attending Draper University, a Silicon Valley school for entrepreneurship, I learned about the next big industries, and all of them help people communicate more effectively. For example, 3D Printing democratizes the manufacturing industry. With 3D printers, people can print their own possessions and merchandise and further express their own tastes and products with others. Medical robotics will help doctors communicate their medical expertise by allowing them to operate on patients who live on the other side of the world. Any innovation in (clean) energy will help power people’s communication platforms: phones, the Internet, cars, etc.

A year ago, I wrote that we should learn from the great communicator Martin Luther King, Jr. if we aspire to be entrepreneurs. Not only did he set forth a vision, but he orated it powerfully with his words.

As for me, I hope to bring together some of the most tried and true communication strategies—food, film, music and people—and create TASTE: a documentary series about food entrepreneurs. As I create the series, I am also learning about how to best communicate with you and the world out there. Thanks for the honor and privilege of swinging by these #FoodEntrepreneur Friday posts. I hope you find them useful, informative, delicious or perhaps they communicate something we all love: some good food.