Mike Hohnen

Procter & Gamble is about to give Starbucks a serious run for its cup-at-a-time, gourmet coffee gold mine. Along the way, P&G (PG) hopes to change the way millions of consumers make and drink coffee.
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If an internet search engine can be any gauge of trends in the restaurant industry, try typing “sustainable” and “restaurant” into Google. The result? Some 164,000 pages of information.

But you’re probably not surprised. The sustainable food movement (part of the much larger green movement, and generally defined as finding eco-friendly sources for food products which do not over-tax the environment) is no longer the rallying cry of a handful of social lefties and owners of vegan eateries.

Full article from Restaurant Business Read the rest of this entry »

http://just-food.com/news_detail.asp?art=56778&lk=rss
The UK unit of US fastfood giant McDonald’s is reportedly planning to introduce a Quorn burger, adding to its vegetarian menu offering.

The chain has signed a deal with Marlow Foods, which makes Quorn, to supply McDonald’s restaurants with Quorn burgers, reported Marketing.

A McDonald’s spokeswoman said the company has been speaking to a variety of companies about developing another vegetarian burger.

Marketing activity for the new burger is expected to focus on the low-fat, meat-free attributes of Quorn, as McDonald’s attempts to create a healthier image for itself.

The idea for the Wild Noodles restaurants was developed a couple of years ago by Eddie Matney, a local celebrity chef and full-service restaurant owner in Phoenix, who infuses his pasta with flavors, forgoing the use of cold noodles in boiling water.

“He and I hooked up about a year ago and decided to package it for a franchise rollout,” says Wild Noodles President George Krotonsky.

Only three Wild Noodles are currently open, but six more will launch this month. The first one opened about two-and-a-half years ago, and the most recent location – and the first franchise – opened in Arizona about three weeks ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello Pizza. “I had a vision,” says Anthony LeCorre, as quoted by Leslie Chang in The Wall Street Journal. “God came to me and said, ‘Anthony, you will make 10-yuan pizzas.” And so he did, and he looks like his fledgling, Shanghai-based, three-restaurant chain, called Hello Pizza, is shaking up China’s fast-food market in a way that the multinationals, with their premium prices and hefty advertising budgets, may not understand. Conventional wisdom had it that “the high-end market” was the place to be in China … “But many found themselves competing against each other in a market that was in fact tinier than advertised.” Anthony, who is French, made that mistake at first, too — opening and closing two restaurants where his pizzas were priced at $2.50 and $5.00. Problem was, he was up against a bunch of others selling pizzas for at same prices.

“God” appeared, Anthony says, after reading up on McDonald’s, where, of course, success was had by “cutting prices while offering consistent quality and service.” So Anthony set up a new, factory-like operation in Shanghai: Read the rest of this entry »