Barry Kaye Improves Facebook For Foodies
When you’ve arranged the perfect holiday celebration, figuring out the right cuisine to accompany the wine and candles you’ve already bought is a must. Blogger and entrepreneur, Barry Kaye, agrees and his website and app, Face Your Food, is making the rigorous task of “menu coordination” easier than ever before.
Like many, Barry is in the habit of posting lively snapshots of food that he has made on Facebook, but when he became stumped by his inability to post recipes next to those photos, Barry decided to take matters into his own hands. Improving upon Facebook’s existing capabilities, Barry figured out a clever way to, not only 'face' your food but help others recreate it too.
As so much of the holiday revolves around “guessing”, taking the guess work off the table and out of our ovens is a welcomed opportunity. Now if only we can get Barry to invent a site and app to overcome the rest of our holiday woes - such as adding another shopping week to the December calendar or figuring out how to wrap fifty gifts in two hours time - we’d be “silver and golden.” I may just have to send him a Facebook message about this. In the meantime, might I suggest you read his interview below.
What is your personal mantra?
“All ideas have potential in the right circumstances. Can I create those circumstances?”
Share a bit about your personal background, including how many children you have, etc.
I work as a database administrator but my heart is in music -- specifically drumming. I left music behind for academia. Was it a wrong choice to not pursue a formal music education? Sometimes I feel that way, but I remember a different life path would not have led me to my beautiful wife of fourteen years and my two remarkable children. I am also a car enthusiast, NY Giants fan and a foodie -- a reality that led me to launch Face Your Food (FYF).
What is the best part about being a father?
It seems cliché to say, “watching them grow into responsible, caring, and maturing young-adults,” but that really is the answer.
If I asked your wife what the best word or phrase would be to describe you, what would she say?
Hmmm. Overachieving Dreamer.
You are both a blogger and entrepreneur. Explain a bit about your blogging life, including where people can find your blogs.
I’ve been writing for years -- personal musings, mostly. I like to think of myself as having a writing style that is somewhat conversational yet efficient and stingy with word count. My most recent blog posts are on LinkedIn under my Facebook Foodie profile. I also have a fledging newsletter -TheTwistedKitcheneer.com - to help support FYF. My goal is to offer enough of my writings to give FYF a hint of my personality.
Share with us the story behind your most recent entrepreneurial endeavor.
My Face Your Food (FYF) endeavor was conceived about two years ago. I have many food-centric FB friends, and it didn’t take long to realize that almost everyone of the posts food on Facebook, however, remiss of the actual recipes. Adding recipes to FB food posts seems like an obvious idea, one FB could/should have implemented, considering how much food is posted - but they haven’t. FYF solves that.
With FYF you can post food to FB as usual and THEN go back, at your convenience to create a recipe that can attach to your original post, no matter how old. Actually, the new recipe links to the old post, so both are now in the present. It wasn’t easy to create the logic and have the proper use of the FB API to do this – but we did it!
What are you hoping to accomplish through the FYF app and site?
After developing the architecture outlined above, I realized FYF is much more than a new way of socializing on FB; it’s a service that food-related businesses can use to leverage FB’s day-to-day social activity. We also have FYF events.
What is your absolute favorite recipe on the FYF site?
I’m sure there will be many more to choose from in the near future, but having quite the sweet tooth, the home-made Hamantaschen are really to die for.
Share with us a social cause or cause-based organization that this endeavor or you support?
I’m a really big fan of 'Farm-to-Table/Farm-to-Campus' programs, where colleges link up with local farmers to provide and sustain quality food and food education for college kids while creating a consistent stream of revenue for the farmers. An example is here: Farm To College.
When all is said and done, how do you want to be remembered?
I want to be remembered, mostly, as a "loving and able" husband and father as well as someone who follows an enlightened path and leads by example.
As “necessity” has proven to be the mother of invention, Barry Kaye has proven to be the father -- at least when it comes to coupling food pics with recipes in combination with your Facebook page and community. I guess Santa can expect a few more houses to serve him those ‘chocolate covered peanut butter truffles’ this year. I’m certain, I’m not the only one who can’t get enough of these. Along with really good fruitcake. Therein lies the genius of Barry’s innovation. Certain treats, you just really need the recipe for...like really good fruitcake, don’t you think?