Speed-scratch foods can be a restaurant operator’s best friend when labor is tight. Are you going as far with them on your menu as you can? While you should be more careful about cutting corners on your signature items, everything else on the menu is fair game for streamlining. Think par-baked breads, frozen items that need minimal cooking time, soups and stews that just need to be heated and served, pre-cut dessert portions, and dry mixes for baked goods or dry mix-ins that can elevate a wide range of sauces, dressings and marinades. Offering what feels like a worthwhile experience to guests is important at U.S. restaurants, particularly as restaurant inflation continues to outpace grocery store inflation. One way restaurants are approaching this is through menu innovation. According to new research from Datassential, only 16 percent of restaurant operators are not planning to change their menus this year. Making updates can boost the intrigue of your restaurant and make dining out (or ordering out) an easier decision for people. But as you innovate, it’s important to find ways to make the new dishes tempting by relating them to something familiar. For example, according to Datassential, a growing number of Latin American restaurants are enticing American guests to try birria by describing it as a twist on the French dip sandwich – an American favorite that also feels experiential because of the dipping involved. The Latin American approach, on some menus, involves quesadillas or tacos served with a brothy soup for dipping instead of a beefy sandwich served with au jus. So a dish that could feel adventurous (but maybe a little out of reach) to a guest feels comfortably adventurous because of the connection to a French dip. As you innovate your menu this year, consider your menu favorites. What dishes could be appealing templates for introducing the new flavor profiles that upgrade the experience you offer? So many consumers are eating with a conscience these days – scaling back on meat in an effort to lighten their carbon footprint and paying more attention to the sustainability of the foods they eat. Seafood is playing a new role here, with such items as seaweed and bivalves gaining traction in restaurants for their environmental and nutritional benefits. They both provide a number of key benefits to underwater ecosystems – and farming them has minimal ecological impact. While seaweed’s dietary benefits vary by variety, it’s generally a rich source of minerals and omega-3 fatty acids, as well as vitamins B, C, E and K. Bivalves contain more protein than many meats and plants, as well as omega-3 fatty acids, iron, zinc and magnesium. A recent Restaurant Business report predicts that restaurants could play a significant role in motivating more American consumers to integrate sea vegetables and bivalves into their diets. Are you skeptical that your guests may want to try microcultural foods or particular flavors beyond the mainstream? You may be surprised at how they respond. In a recent webinar from Datassential, experts suggested foodservice professionals look to some very mainstream sources – amusement parks and state fairs, for example – for a clear sense of how the general public responds to on-trend flavors. For example, at Six Flags Great Adventure, a “Flavors of the World” promotion happening this summer offers guests a sampling of food and drink from Mexico, Korea, Greece, France, Italy, the Caribbean and India. Guests can try such items as kheer, visinada and escargot en croute, among other options. If you’re interested in stretching the boundaries of your menu with flavors from around the globe, consider tempting your guests with some related limited-time offers and monitoring their responses. Once upon a time, a person could return to a restaurant year after year and see the same assortment of menu items. Inflation and supply challenges have turned that idea on its head, making rotating menus a more common experience. But even if the macroeconomic environment stabilizes, there are big benefits to keeping dynamic menus around. They spark ongoing interest from guests. What better reason to visit a restaurant more often than to discover the latest changes to the menu? They allow you to flow with the seasons and offer ingredients more apt to be local and plentiful. New menus naturally offer you content to promote online – you can entice people to come in before your menu options change and again when you’re unveiling new items. Finally, they keep your operation nimble. You’re able to respond more creatively, flexibly and cost-consciously when there is a shortage. A restaurant with a regularly changing menu can’t be shouldering a lot of waste. As more businesses adopt environmental goals as part of their corporate practices, restaurants and related vendors are doubling down on waste management too. Chipotle recently announced that it is expanding composting across its more than 3,200 stores – and CNBC reports that waste management is one of the goals that the restaurant’s executive compensation bonuses are based on. For their part, Uber Eats is also offering restaurants grants worth $10,000 to switch to sustainable packaging as part of its plan to remove all unnecessary plastic waste from deliveries this year. How do sustainable practices factor into your operations this year? As food safety has played a larger role in consumers’ view of hospitality in recent years, salad bars and other foods served buffet-style have felt the impact. We’ve all seen salad tongs drift into the ingredients they are meant to serve, carrying bacteria with them – and this is more apt to disturb consumers now than it did before Covid. Making salad serving areas feel safe requires vigilance from staff – a difficult task if you have a smaller-than-ideal team right now. But as with so many other parts of the restaurant experience, there are options coming to market that are automating self-service and delivering potential benefits for food safety. One example: touchless self-service salad bars that store ingredients in clear, refrigerated compartments and dispense a set amount of ingredients. No germy tongs or sneeze guards required – and restaurants can manage portion control at the same time. There is a growing subset of guests who are concerned less with how many calories they consume and more with the processes required for that food to reach them. They want to eat foods with a low carbon footprint and for their food packaging to reflect that ethos too. Industry research indicates a growing number of restaurants across categories offering climatarian menus that measure and share a menu item’s carbon footprint. Whether or not your restaurant offers such an option, climate impact is a topic likely to be on the minds of more guests – as well as existing and potential staff. Has the term "regenerative agriculture" come onto your radar yet this year? If not, Datassential’s new report on the year’s food trends predicts it’s only a matter of time before it becomes part of operators’ vernacular. The phrase has been appearing with increasing regularity on food packaging and marketing, as well as on menus. Regenerative agriculture refers to a wide range of farming principles and practices designed to restore crop and soil biodiversity, remove carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in soil, improve water quality, and make agriculture more sustainable as a result. While it's not a new idea, it weaves together a number of modern sustainability practices found in agriculture. Sustainable foods continue to attract the attention of consumers – currently, 70 percent of consumers believe the food they eat should be grown on farms that use sustainable practices – so restaurant employees will need to be conversant about their own brand practices and values in this area. Plant-based foods have been on the rise for some time – and there’s no end in sight. A new report by Bloomberg Intelligence projects the plant-based foods market to comprise a substantial share of the global protein market, reaching 7.7 percent by 2030 – a huge leap from where it was in 2020. Consumer interest in healthy, sustainable foods is driving the trend. Plant-based options are expanding into in new product categories including ice cream, eggs, cheese and seafood options. The recent National Restaurant Association Show reflected the continued rise of plant-based options, with a plant-based tuna filet and shrimp attracting attention and accolades in the seafood category. |
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