With more than 200 spices, salts and seasonings in stock at downtown’s new Allspicery, variety isn’t just the spice of life. It’s a life of spice for owner Heather Wong.

When it comes to food, millennials are twice as likely as any other generation to give a whisk about organic and locally-sourced meals. Some even credit millennials’ disdain for junk food with the downward fiscal spiral of the country’s top 25 food and beverage industries. Though it may seem simple, these ideas are turning the food industry on its head.

Selling Girl Scout cookies on a rainy Saturday in Sacramento is a far cry from the Oscars, where A-list celebrities chipped in $65,243 after a Feb. 28 plug. Local Girl Scout Troop 1114 has to work a little harder for its money.

Chefs continue to be among the hottest stars in Sacramento, and American, culture. That’s thanks to the Food Network’s image-building power, our exploding love of food and all things culinary, and a new societal reverence for hands-on authenticity. The consensus is that chefs with some level of recognition can help draw customers — most of the time. But restaurateurs and chefs say the cultural pizzazz around chefs can be a double-edged sword, and it’s a force they need to use wisely.

It’s no news flash that chefs, just like everyone, can help construct reputations and build followings through social media. But many Sacramento chefs say that, given the competition in the restaurant business, and the number of bloggers, tweeters and Yelpers commenting on food, chefs can’t afford not to have a notable online presence.

Following a completely sold-out event in 2014, Sacramento Caffeine Crawl will return to the city next week with an all-star lineup of some of Sacramento’s finest coffee establishments.

If there is any advice businesses can glean from the often surprising research and real life stories about our oddly emotional connection to tipping, it’s this: Don’t mess if you don’t have to.

In a part of the state with seemingly boundless natural assets, tourism is the number one industry for counties beyond Sacramento’s city limits. Aided by the rise of culinary travel, the farm-to-fork movement, and the craft beer and wine industries, this decade finds rural counties a bigger economic driver for the state than ever.

The influence of the Golden 1 Center kitchen will likely be national. It represents something more accessible than slow food, and more refined than the nuclear orange goop we associate with stadium cheese. 

A few months before the National Restaurant Association named artisan butchery and “new” cuts of meat among their top 20 food trends for 2016, Eric Veldman-Miller and Matt Azevedo opened a shop on the corner of 48th and Folsom streets, with the intent to serve locals with something new — in a way that is actually very old.