I learned the grill the way most people learn it: standing next to somebody who knew. My grandfather ran the grill at every family function I can remember, my uncles right behind him, and I watched until watching turned into doing. Music was there the whole time. By high school I was the one DJing the BBQ at the park, running the food and the playlist at the same party. Some things don’t change. They just get better equipment.
Behind the Scenes
I’ve spent my whole career behind the scenes: making records happen, building brands, getting products onto shelves. Kinder’s is one of them. I was employee #1, on board before there were employees, and for years I was the one behind the camera for their photos and videos. Most of what you’ll see on this site came off my grill and went through my lens. FlavorMade is where the behind-the-scenes work finally faces forward, and it plays no favorites.
Where the Name Came From
The name goes back to 2012. We had just landed products into a major retailer for the first time, and I built a marketing campaign called Flavor Made Easy to help sell them. The campaign ran for a season. The name stayed in my pocket for ten years, because I knew it wasn’t done.
What This Site Is
FlavorMade is what it was always going to be: the food, the music, and the people in one place. Every recipe here is built to be pulled off in a real kitchen or over a real fire, without a culinary degree and without a single ingredient you’ll buy once and bury. The playlists are real too. Cooking has a soundtrack here, the same way it did in the park.
The Table Now
FlavorMade stopped being a one-man operation somewhere along the way. The table is mostly family and friends now, and they are not just eating. They cook, they bring recipes, they taste everything twice, and they are in the room when the photos happen. What started as my grill and my lens belongs to a lot of people now.
The plates got better. The idea never changed: real food, real flavor, made for the people showing up hungry.
Flavor First.
JD
Start Here
The library is organized the way people actually cook: by what is on the grill, what night it is, and who is coming over.
- Grilling recipes, the whole repertoire in one place
- Chicken recipes, the biggest lane on the site
- Weeknight dinners for the nights that got away from you
- Game day and appetizers for a standing room
- Kinder’s recipes, the shelf I know best