Mike Hohnen

http://www.just-food.com/features_detail.asp?art=908&lk=rss
Giving away free pedometers, switching to healthier cooking oil, cutting the salt content of products… These are just some of the ways the food industry has been demonstrating its willingness to tackle the obesity crisis. But is the industry to blame for expanding waistlines, or does responsibility lie elsewhere? Kate Barker reports on the latest moves by the food industry to tackle the problem.

http://reveries.com/cool_news/2004/october/oct_14b.html
Farmhouse Ales. “No one has damaged the reputation of beer as much as the big beer companies, which through their own advertising have created the unfortunate image of the beer lover as bottom feeder,” writes Eric Asimov in The New York Times (10/13/04). “Nonetheless,” he continues, “the fans are on a crusade to prove that traditional beer, not the insipid supermarket stuff, is as fine a drink as wine to grace the table, if not better.” That crusade, says Eric, starts with “farmhouse ales … historically the products of an agricultural society. In the days before refrigeration, when summer was too hot for brewing, farmers in the French-speaking part of Belgium and across the border in France made beer in the winter and spring that they could put away for summer consumption.”

http://reveries.com/cool_news/2004/october/oct_15b.html
Dark Dining. At the Unsicht-Bar, a restaurant in Berlin, Germany, “every photon of light” is excluded, so that diners can experience eating without seeing, reports John Bohannon in The Christian Science Monitor (10/13/04). When patrons arrive at the Usicht-Bar, www.unsicht-bar.com (“named for the German word for ‘invisible’), they are first taken to a candlelit room and “given a menu with three options — vegetarian , fish and meat — but the actual dishes” are not revealed. Diners are then led to their tables, conga-style, led by a waiter or waitress who typically is blind (“it’s simply too difficult for a sighted person to learn how to navigate a dark, busy restaurant holding heavy trays of food and beverages”).

http://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/154000350/4020937.html

One of the most vexing and expensive managerial problems: employee turnover, and particularly turnover of the most productive and effective individuals-continues to plague the hotel industry. A recent study showed that the average turnover level among non-management hotel employees in the US is about 50%, and about 25% for management staff. Thus, small variations in property-wide turnover may have significant financial implications.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6251867/

SEATTLE – There are so few Starbucks Corp. stores in the world that customers are sometimes forced to journey more than two blocks to find one, the coffee retailer’s chief executive bemoaned Thursday.
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