Note: This is part of my new Follow Friday system where I get a little more in depth with one follow friday each week. To learn more about what I am doing please click here.
Tina Brooks
@pepperfire
I’ve known Tina for years, since way back when I was running my first company and the hot business networking site was Ryze (oh how I cringe). I’ve been working with Tina lately to get her companies social media plan updated and thought it was a fantastic time to feature her. Her company produces premium, organic hot sauces that damn near kill me every time I touch them. I don’t know why people enjoy this form of pain but if you do, read on. As always, here is Tina’s speel:
Although my business card says VP Marketing for Brooks Pepperfire Foods Inc., I am also the co-owner. Our company produces brilliant premium fresh pepper sauces, infusions and mashes. Our flagship lines include http://www.peppermaster.com, http://www.sexysalsa.ca and http://www.haitianFire.com. We also do small-batch specialty co-packing for food companies.
What makes us really special is our commitment to quality and our social conscience. We put our heart and our soul into our work and we even invented a word to describe our food production style: Slow Fair Trade: we purchase our ingredients directly from local suppliers and when we can’t we employ fair trade certified methods to secure them. The farmers and producers do all they work, they should earn the lion’s share of the profits. To us, it seems only fair. No pesticides, herbicides, chemically created flavours or colours, just good clean healthy food.
I’d love to get into the details about our company and how we are changing the lives of people in the most impoverished places but Alex asked me to keep this short! (Alex’s Note: At this point I have edited out over 300 words. Short my #$$#). Suffice it to say that we’ve got a very different way of living and doing business that translates into a world of help and love that is far too rare.
On a personal level, I am a Unitarian, tarot reading swamp witch. If you ask me what that means, I’ll gladly tell you. I don’t fly around on a broom or wear pointy hats, but the broom thing… if I could do that, I would, in a heartbeat. That’d be fun! I have a Loa, which in the Voodoo culture is most rightly described as a sub-deity, and she hangs out inside my head and my heart talking to me, and others, through my tarot cards. I like to call her my “imaginary friend”. She’s pretty cool, and gives a scary accuracy to my tarot readings. If you catch me on a Swamp Day, which lately have been too few and far between, I will be offering #TarotTwreadings on http://www.twitter.com/Pepperfire. I usually take such days to make up for the fact that I seem to work 24/7 and being myself as a swamp witch, allows me to recharge my spiritual batteries and do some spiritual good for others at the same time.
Being asked to be Alex Blom’s Follow Friday subject is a huge honour for me. Especially since I have been friends with him, via social media for many years now and he’s one of the few people I know who really get the idea of social media and this before the word “social media” existed as a concept. That he thinks just as highly of me, is a huge blessing.
I take my Twitter account very seriously. I have just over 3000 tweeters I follow, and I have had at least a brief introductory conversation with every single one of them and that personal contact is very important to me. I don’t blindly follow everyone just because they follow me, I want to follow people who say things that are of value to me. I want to converse with people who will either ground me, uplift me or just make me laugh. Because really there are only two reasons for living in this world, as I see it. The first is to live every second of life as if it’s the only second you’ve got and the second is to really just have fun.
Life is truly an adventure and my sole purpose is to enjoy it. Won’t you join me?
