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FHD327 Customer Service & Retail Baking Operations: Brainstorm Keywords

For Your Project...

You will research, analyze, and evaluate articles for class lecture topics.  The articles must be relevant and current with industry trends.  You will also develop marketing and merchandising tools to bring a professional product to the retail/wholesale market where you will produce, display, and "sell" this product at a class food show.

Course-related Keywords

Recommended keywords and search terms to use:

bakery trends       bakery techniques       marketing and merchandising techniques       retail bakery  
performance appraisals and evaluations      baking equipment       bakery services      breads       pastry      desserts
recipe standardization, conversion, costing        team building strategies        bakery technologies

word cloud for coffee

  
  Think about and consider how many different keywords (broad and narrow, directly and indirectly related) you can use to search for information about your topic.
  Here is an example of a word cloud of varied keywords and terms to consider for the topic  coffee.  This example offers a myriad of ways to think about, describe, and  search for this topic.
  Apply this technique to your search strategy to inspire directly-related and indirectly-related words and phrases to find more extensive information.. 

Find a Topic

Find Potential Keywords

Use the above tabbed keywords/phrases to search for information.  When searching WorldCat, the Library Catalog, you may have to search using a broad keyword or topic. We may not have a book on a specific (narrow) subject such as “key lime pies”, so search “pies” or “pastry”.  Narrower topics can be used when searching for articles in the subject specific Hospitality & Culinary Arts databases.  

Search for your product, e.g., bite$ AND desserts (the $ = bite, bites, bite size, bite-size), also search pastry, cookies, muffins, etc.

Search “food equipment” or “baking AND equipment”   Note:  If the item is an e-book, click the url for access.

Search for purveyor or vendor or supplier or other related terms along with food or restaurant or other related terms.

Search “employees AND rating” as a subject

Search “hospitality AND training” or “foodservice management”

Search “employee motivation” as a subject

Search “conflict resolution” or “conflict management” 

Google Web Search

Search Tips

light bulbEach databases have hundreds of thousands of resources.  In order to find results that you want, your search terms to be specific.  Use these tips to search the databases:

  • Combine keywords using AND for more precise results*.  If you use AND between your search terms, the database will only retrieve items that contain both search terms.  If you search for apples AND oranges, you'd see resources that are about apples and oranges.
  • Combine keywords using OR for broader results*.  If you use OR between your search terms, the database will retrieve items that have one or the other search terms in them.  If you search for apples OR oranges, then you'd see resources that are about apples and other resources that are about oranges.   
  • This is not used as much, but you can also insert NOT between your search terms to exclude a search term from your search*.  This can be useful.  For example, if you are writing a paper on apples but many of the articles you find are about apples and oranges, you can search apples NOT oranges and the database will exclude the term orange from your search, only retrieving articles on apples.  
  • Use "quotation marks" to search for phrases.  Putting quotation marks around a multiple word search term, like "honey crisp apples," will only retrieve articles that contain that specific search term.
  • If you are researching a particular topic like "teaching," you can place an asterisk (*) in your search term that will modify your search.  Your search term would be teach* and because you placed an asterisk at the end of teach, the search will find articles that have the word teach, teaching, teacher.  Placing an asterisk after the search term will retrieve the different forms of the word from the stem of the word teach. 
  • Use the Advanced Search feature to combine search categories or terms, as well as limit by date, source type, format, etc.

*: AND, OR, and NOT are called Boolean operators or search operators.