Glen Allen native Daniel Riddick says playing in his high school band at local clubs like Ally Katz and Twisters was his first foray into the creative world.
As a student at Virginia Tech, he melded his love for art and passion for business into an advertising career. And after attending the VCU Brand Center, Riddick decided it was time to leave his comfort zone and jetted off to the Big Apple, working on accounts like Cheerios and Hershey’s. “I was lucky enough to see the world,” says Riddick. “I flew around the globe multiple times over helping make Hershey’s TV commercials.”
Once they hit 30, Riddick and his wife decided to start a family and moved back to the River City. “I wanted to transition out of the fast-paced, volatile world of ads and do something a little more stable and predictable,” says Riddick.
Enter: Ukrop’s Homestyle Foods.
Ukrop’s has been a mainstay of the Richmond food scene for nearly 90 years. Riddick, a devotee of the iconic rainbow cookies, chicken salad and breakfast pizza, took over as the company’s director of marketing and communications in 2017. In “conjunction with executive leadership,” Riddick plays a “key role in developing the strategy” of Ukrop’s and where the company wants to go in the next decade—and decades to come.
Perhaps the most notable project that Riddick has helped to plan and execute was the opening of Market Hall in December 2020. In collaboration with a group of other creative pros, Riddick helped establish the “Gather, Nourish, Share” mission of Market Hall. “Market Hall is a place for the community to gather,” says Riddick. “Nourish is a nod to our food, not
necessarily from a health perspective, but in that it’s wholesome and nourishes the soul. The sharing piece is about spreading positivity and making our community a better place.”
In his (limited) spare time, Riddick, tries to pay it forward. For the past five years, he has served as adjunct professor at VCU and started teaching classes at the Brand Center three years ago. “Mentoring young people in their career has always been a major of passion of mine,” says Riddick. “You don’t know what you don’t know, and sometimes I think, ‘Man, I wish I’d had someone to help guide me.’ That’s the lens through which I do all of this.”
