Max Scheinblum
Max Scheinblum is a reporter at BusinessDen covering startups and the business side of restaurants, breweries, bars and other consumer-facing ventures, with a consistent focus on how new concepts launch, expand, relocate or shut down. His work tracks founders and operators as they navigate permitting, financing and shifting market conditions, often through deeply reported stories on single businesses or deals. Alongside food and drink coverage, he reports on outdoor recreation and other entrepreneurial niches, giving a broad view of how local consumer economies evolve.
Business lens on food, drink and hospitality
Scheinblum regularly reports on independent restaurants, bars and specialty food shops, framing them as business stories rather than lifestyle features. He has covered the relaunch of a longtime cheese shop under a new owner in the Golden Triangle, detailing how an entrepreneur from another industry takes over an established brand and reopens it in a different neighborhood.
His brewery coverage includes a new concept moving into the former Mockery Brewing space in RiNo, highlighting both the brand story and the reuse of existing brewing infrastructure.
He pays close attention to distinctive beverage concepts and the operational hurdles they face, such as a medieval-themed mead bar on Colfax that opened after what its owner described as convoluted and opaque permitting delays. When a Littleton distillery chose to liquidate after seven years, he focused on the timeline of the business, the product mix and the mechanics of winding down a small producer. In work outside BusinessDen, he has also covered a former Il Posto chef opening a new Italian restaurant in RiNo, showing the same interest in chef-driven projects and how they position themselves in competitive dining districts.
Across these stories, he consistently situates food and drink concepts within their physical spaces and prior uses, whether a café giving way to a different tenant or a brewery replacing a predecessor. The emphasis is on ownership changes, lease decisions and concept differentiation, making his hospitality coverage useful for understanding how individual operators try to stand out and survive.
Closures, restructurings and market pressure
A significant portion of Scheinblum’s reporting examines closures, bankruptcies and other stress points for businesses, particularly those tied to food, drink and leisure. He has chronicled a bouldering gym’s Chapter 11 filing after shutting one location, outlining how the remaining sites and creditors are affected. In his coverage of a distillery liquidation, he explains how inventory and brand assets are handled when a small producer exits the market.
His stories often connect individual events to wider market trends.
When marijuana wholesale prices hit record lows amid a yearslong sales decline, he treated it as a market story, linking pricing pressure to broader challenges for growers and wholesalers. When a longtime neighborhood café closed and its space was slated to become a credit union branch, he framed the change as part of shifting retail and service mixes on a prominent corridor.
He has also followed a golf-focused investment firm as it shifts to a private equity model, showing how investor strategies in leisure-related sectors evolve.
Scheinblum does not limit this lens to small operators; he also covers large capital raises, such as Crusoe’s multibillion-dollar fundraising at a sharply higher valuation, and places them alongside smaller restructurings and closures. The through-line is an interest in how capital, regulation and real estate decisions shape whether consumer-facing ventures grow, transform or disappear.
Consumer startups, products and nightlife infrastructure
Beyond food and beverage venues, Scheinblum reports on startups and products that intersect with sports, nightlife and everyday consumer behavior. His coverage of a shoe traction pad that secured $50,000 on “Shark Tank” focuses on the product’s design for athletes, the founders’ path to the show and what the investment means for their growth plans.
In a separate story on friends building a phone-charging kiosk business for bars and clubs, he follows how a small team deploys hardware across nightlife venues and scales from individual installations to a network of locations.
These pieces sit alongside his hospitality reporting and reinforce his stated focus on startups, restaurants, breweries and outdoor recreation. Whether the subject is a niche sports accessory, a charging solution for club-goers or a new brewery concept, he tends to foreground founder backgrounds, revenue opportunities and the fit between a product or service and its chosen environment.
This approach makes his coverage useful for understanding how consumer-facing startups look for traction in competitive, experience-driven settings.
Across beats, Scheinblum writes in a straightforward, deal- and operator-focused style, returning to themes of entrepreneurship, market pressure and the practical realities of running food, drink and leisure businesses. His stories give communications professionals and business readers clear visibility into the ownership, financing and strategic choices behind the venues and products they see on the ground.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.