Who sells online at Borough Market?

There is no list - noone has compiled one! So we did and here it is: a guide to London's Borough Market stalls online. Hope it is useful.

Found some great recipes using foie gras

I got asked the other day what you could do with foie gras other than just have it with toast and so I hunted around the web for interesting recipes from popular food sites such as Epicurious and TheFoodNetwork.

Here are my Top 10 Recipes using Foie Gras.

Great wines from France's South West added at last

When we started selling online we used Google Checkout as our payment gateway and this was great except that they do not allow us to sell alcohol and for many of our regular customers from Borough Market we are known as much for our special selections of wines as we are for our foie gras.

So here at last is a selection of red, white and rose wines from Buzet, Gaillac and the Languedoc-Roussillon (in the South West of France) including Irouguy, Domain du Cros and Chateaux Ollieux Romanis. 

We can at last also sell Chateau Belingard Monbazillac, perfect with Foie Gras.

We'll be adding further wines over the next few months but try these for starters.

Added AddThis social bookmarking to Market Quarter

Very nice little tool AddThis that provides a simple way of getting visitors to bookmark sites in social media sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us and Stumble Upon.

I set up and AddThis account, did minor customisation to the script and then added it to my Shopify Liquid templates.  I've added it in the same spot on every page (products, collections and the home page). 

AddThis tracks the number of people who use it too, so I will be able to see whether it works. I wonder how many people will bookmark my 10 Great Recipes using Duck Confit.

Market Quarter page set up on FaceBook

You can now find us on FaceBook. We'll be publishing news on there as well as on here and encouraging more people to come to the site. 

I have joined several groups related to food, foie gras and Borough Market to help promote the new FaceBook page.

Luxury Foods include foie gras, caviar and truffles

What exactly is a luxury food?

I set out to try and find a list online of what other people thought of as luxury foods and by combining lists from other sites these are what I came up with:

Caviar, Foie Gras, White Truffles, Kobe Beef, Liqueur chocolates, Saffron, Bird's Nest, Fugu fish, Lobster, Matsutake mushrooms, Oysters, Abalone, Ambergris, Musk, Sea bass, Wild Salmon, Vanilla beans, Balsamic Vinegar

An interesting and eclectic mix with Fois Gras, Black Truffles and Balsamic Vinegar available from us online.

Some of these items are clearly considered luxury because of their rarity or cost but others like Salmon, Oysters and Lobster were traditionally viewed as cheap everyday foods near where they were produced. 

I have never eaten about half of them and I'm not sure that musk, fugu or ambergris are high on my must try list.

What would be in your luxury food list?

When do searchers look for foie gras?

A great revision to Google Trends that allows you to look at the popularity of particular keywords over time. Not surprisingly I looked at foie gras-  our best selling products - and here is the graph.

So it looks like the product rockets in popularity at the end of the year. A nice tool for studying trends in the keyword market.

Experimenting with Oodle Classifieds

Shopify has just added an improvement whereby it is possible to upload and download product data in bulk. This will make it easier to update The Market Quarter when we add new products or change categories.

But there is another big advantage in downloading the data. It means that we can reorganise it and use it as a feed for classified advertising feeds such as Oodle. 

I spent today understanding the Oodle data format and then massaging the Shopify data into the right format. Oodle should handle all the resizing of images and the main job was creating the URLs so that each product (classified ad) has a direct link into The Market Quarter. 

Handles are a nice feature in Shopify and they can be seen in the URLs of products such as www.marketquarter.com/products/3-fine-pates-with-foie-gras. The "3 fine pates with foie gras" are the handle. The handles themselves are exported as part the Shopify product data and to make them useful to Ooodle I had to rebuild the whole URL. It was easy using a mixture of Numbers and Text Wrangler.

Within an hour I had my Oodle feed ready and it has now been submitted to Oodle. Watch this space for news of its success.