Foodservice Updates

Foodservice Updates is designed to help foodservice operators keep on top of all the industry news and provides tips for keeping business running smooth. We endeavor to provide the latest tips and solutions to keep you in the know.

What will your team look like in 2030?

At the recent National Restaurant Association Show in Chicago, the organization’s CEO, Michelle Korsmo, said the industry has about two job openings for every potential worker. As a result, restaurants are currently vying for workers who have significant bargaining power – leverage that often makes it difficult for all but the most highly resourced businesses to compete for labor. This ongoing need for support has only sharpened the spotlight already cast on technology – particularly on the urgent need for many restaurants to automate tasks ranging from order taking to food preparation. Automation will make the industry look a lot different by 2030, Korsmo said. A Restaurant Dive report about the automation technology on display at the National Restaurant Association Show identified several stand-out tools, including robotic fry stations, smart combi ovens, hygiene scanning and safety software, and robotic burger stations – tools that can help a restaurant manage tasks that are not only tedious or time-consuming but are also important to get right. While ensuring near-term survival has had to be the priority for many restaurants in the past few years, taking a longer-term view of your staffing needs is important too. How might you rethink your staffing structure in the coming years? If you’re already operating with a slimmed-down team, what tasks are slipping through the cracks as a result? Where might you automate tasks that currently stretch your staff in ways that have the potential to compromise your service and safety?

Restaurant food in grocery store settings

While operating a restaurant has long been a practice of managing on razor-thin margins, the rising costs of everything from food to labor to energy have given many operators no choice but to adjust their model. According to a recent report from Fast Company, that has meant a growing crop of restaurants are entering the consumer packaged goods arena, providing popular menu items and accompaniments that consumers can pick up at the grocery store and keep in their pantry or freezer. To be sure, restaurant-branded condiments and meals are hardly new – they have been around for decades. But the range of them has been exploding in the past few years and continues to grow, with products as diverse as burritos from the Mexican chain Tacombi and smoked mushroom garum from Copenhagen’s Noma getting into the act. The income stream not only has the potential to help a restaurant expand its brand well beyond the regions where it prepares and serves food, but also to more easily ride the waves of a challenging economy (or even a pandemic). The perception of restaurant-quality food in a grocery setting may also give it the lift it needs to secure a sale. Indeed, even in an environment of high inflation, consumers have still been able to justify splurging on their favorite restaurant brands in retail settings, according to the Food Institute.