Foodservice

The world’s largest specialty coffee chain once shunned the drivethru concept, fearing it might alienate customers who like to come inside and sip their lattes while listening to music in cozy chairs.

In the early 1990s, as independent espresso stands were starting to gain a steady following, Starbucks stuck to its original game plan: giving people a “third place” to escape from the hustle and bustle of home and work.

Eventually, it got hard to ignore coffee lovers’ demand for a quick java fix without leaving the warmth of their driver’s seats.

CBS NEWS

Yalie Cuisine. “We don’t want students to feel that eating well is suffering,” says Josh Viertel, explaining the philosophy behind the “sustainable” menu at Yale’s Berkeley College dining hall, as reported by Alison Leigh Cowan in The New York Times. Twist is, it’s the Yale students who can’t have Berkeley’s experimental organic meals who are suffering. They’ll do just about anything to have at the burgers of “grass-fed lamb and freshly picked mint … chicken brodo with pasta and greens and pork loin with fennel … They try to slip fake identification cards past the Yale employees stationed at the entrance. They don sweatshirts with the Berkeley insignia to make it look as if they belong …”

“Whatever they can get away with,” says Catherine Jones, Berkeley’s executive chef. It sure beats “picking from the same old nonorganic salad bars, scooping out the sugary cereals and chewing on chuck-patty hamburgers slipped into white bread rolls” like they do at Yale’s 11 other dining halls. The idea for this “sustainable” dining hall, yale.edu/sustainablefood, was hatched four years by Alice Waters, a chef, “when her daughter Fanny became a freshman.” The project started by turning “a vacant lot into a lush vegetable garden that doubles as a laboratory … The three-meal-a-day rollout came in September 2003.” The thinking is “that people and communities thrive when meals consist of locally produced, seasonal ingredients, rather than food that is shipped long distance or processed so it keeps.”

Reveries

Much of PF Chang’s success comes from its operations practices, analysts say. Restaurant managers are partial owners in the eateries they run. This helps reduce turnover — the bane of the industry — allowing the company to deliver the key factor in a restaurant’s success: a consistent customer experience in food and service, says Sharon Zackfia, an analyst with William Blair & Co. in Chicago, who rates PF Chang’s stock outperform.

What also helps, says PF Chang Chief Executive Richard Federico, is that his places offer extras not found at many mom-and-pop Chinese restaurants: upscale decor, dessert menus, cappuccino, and a 50-bottle wine list. “PF Chang’s has offered an alternative without compromising product quality,” he says.

Business Week

Starbucks Speed. How to serve drinks — and food — faster without making customers feel like “they’re in an Indy-500 pit stop,” is a key challenge facing Starbucks, reports Steven Gray in The Wall Street Journal. “This is a game of seconds,” says Silvia Peterson, Starbucks’s director of store operations, whose job it is to find ways to play that game better. It’s easy to understand why Starbucks hired her: According to Mintel International Group, mintel.com, “64 percent of Americans said they pick a restaurant based on how much time they have.” That’s why Silvia and “her team of 10 engineers” came up with bigger ice scoops, for example. That way, baristas only had to dip once for ice, helping to “cut 14 seconds off the average preparation time for blended beverages of about one minute.”

reveries

People expect fine wine to equal gourmet cuisine. “So why shouldn’t great beer be synonymous with fabulous food? asks Susan Ralston, director of research and development at Louisville, Colo.-based Rock Bottom Restaurants Inc. “Cultivating that connection has pretty much become our mission?

Recognizing that handcrafted-beer drinkers have well-developed palates and crave more than pub grub to go with their favorite brews, Rock Bottom has been working to elevate the food side of its menu. New dishes and more-contemporary plate presentations have shown promising results. Highlighted in limited-time offers that closely link dishes with matching beers, the shift in focus helped increase comp-store sales by 3 percent to 5 percent and food sales by 3 percent to 4 percent over the last two years, says Marketing Director Marilyn Davenport.

Read the Article at Foodservice 411

When it comes to dinner, consumers want it all: active, individual lifestyles AND sit-down family dinners, preferably combined with convenience AND authenticity. Which means the food and beverage world is forever coming up with innovative, wholesome yet effortless ways to feed busy singles and families; from healthy ready-to-heat meals to online grocers such as FreshDirect. Now, add to this equation services like Dream Dinners, Dinner Helpers and Let’s Dish

read moreSpringwise

Really super-fast pizza

Wisconsin’s Super Fast Pizza has finally figured out how to deliver piping hot pizzas within 15 minutes. The secret? High-tech mobile kitchen vans, officially licensed as restaurants, are outfitted with custom ovens that can cook pizzas at 600 degrees. Fully powered and wifi-enabled, Super Fast Pizza’s kitchens on wheels take orders and cook pizzas while on their way to customers. To save time and make the best of the limited cooking space, all processes have been standardized: the menu only offers the seven most popular pizzas (think deluxe, sausage, sausage and pepperoni, five-cheese, four-meat, pepperoni, veggie, and a pizza of the month), all pizzas are uncut and medium sized, and all cost USD 10.99. Online ordering is encouraged.
Fuul article at SpringWise

Ron Paul, an analyst at Technomic in Chicago, says the No. 2 hamburger chain (behind McDonald’s) saw sales grow 14 percent in January. In October, same-store sales were up 6.9 percent, compared with last year. In November, they were up 9.1 percent, and in December, 13.1 percent. Despite the closings of hundreds of stores due to bankruptcy, Paul says, “They appear to definitely be in recovery mode. Their poor times are behind them, and they’re hitting on all eight cylinders.”

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