Category Archives: food

April 1, 2016 · 9:40 am

Menu Madness

This Foodie Friday I want to talk about labels. It might sound as if we’re creeping dangerously close to politics in this post but my intent is to maintain a business perspective so please don’t get confused.

I started my business career working for a TV trade group, the Television Bureau of Advertising (TvB). I know that one of the great functions any trade group has is to help the membership with best practices as well as with advocacy. That’s why I’m a little confused about something that took place over the last couple of months. While there aren’t any overt fingerprints from a trade group on it, I’d be shocked if one or more of them wasn’t working behind the scenes.

You can read about this in detail here, but there is a provision in the Affordable Care Act that requires chain restaurants to:

  • Disclose, on menus and menu boards, the number of calories in an item as it is usually prepared and offered for sale;
  • Provide written nutrition information and nutrition claim information to consumers upon request;
  • Provide a “prominent, clear, and conspicuous statement” on menus and menu boards about the availability of the written nutrition information; and
  • Provide, on a sign adjacent to each food item, the number of calories in the item or per serving for self-service items and food on display.

Pretty consumer friendly in my opinion. After all, how can transparency and giving customers information about what they’re considering eating be a bad thing? Nevertheless, Congress passed a law as part of a spending bill to prohibit the FDA from using any funds to implement, administer, or enforce the final rule. Do any of you think your favorite Congress-critter woke up one morning and decided to do this on their own? Probably not. I’d guess one or more restaurant trade groups lobbied for this (and probably made a few donations along the way).

Yes, I get that it makes the restaurant chains involved incur expense. But it’s meant to improve consumer health and not to make the business’ lives easier. It reminds me of the papers pushed by the ANA with respect to ad blocking. Those were more about how to preserve ad opportunities and revenues than about fixing the problem that causes ad blocking in the first place.  Putting profits ahead of people – both those that buy from you and those that work for you – rarely is a good idea, at least in my book.  Yours?

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March 25, 2016 · 11:53 am

Your Kitchen

It’s Foodie Friday! It’s no secret that I watch a bunch of cooking shows. In all candor, most of them are wonderful displays of individual talent but really don’t teach us much about the real food world. Nor are they extendable into business thinking, which is what we like to do here on the screed.

Chefs in training in Paris, France (2005).

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The real challenge in a professional restaurant kitchen is coordination and teamwork. Other than Hell’s Kitchen and the annual restaurant wars episode of Top Chef, we rarely get a sense of how difficult that teamwork can be. It does neither the quality of the product nor the business any good to have the meats sitting under a heat lamp while the garnish is being prepared. Obviously, it’s the chef who must oversee the coordination and foster communication, but it’s also the individual cooks.

You probably know that most kitchens have a line and there are various stations in that line. Meats, fish, salads, etc. generally come from different cooks. If one line cook is struggling, the entire process can break down. The cooks need to be organized, making sure to have all the materials they will be needing ready to go. They need to be able to multitask – handling several different items at once. That requires training, practice, and supervision.

Your business isn’t any different. As “the chef” overseeing my “brigade” in the non-food businesses in which I worked, I never felt as if I had to be able to jump on to any station.  By that I mean that no boss needs to be able to handle every job as well as the people doing them each day.  We do, however, need to recognize when there is a problem and ask the right questions to make the problem go away.  Just as a chef can’t make excuses for a slow line cook (train them, move them to a different station, or fire them), no manager can deflect blame for very long.  After all, it’s your kitchen!

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March 18, 2016 · 11:51 am

Focusing On The Protein

It’s Foodie Friday, and since last night was the finale of Top Chef, I thought we might learn a little something about both food and business from the program. Yes, I know I focused on a learning from that show a few weeks back, but not only won’t it be on for another nine months or so (sparing you my fanboy posts), but the thing on which I want to focus was done by both cheftestants, just as the business point occurs in many enterprises.

As part of the final challenge, each chef cooked a meat protein – one cooked rack of lamb; the other cooked duck breast. The responses from the judges in both cases were the same. The flavors were fantastic, the dishes were innovative and complete but the proteins were undercooked. The lamb was nearly raw in the center on most plates, and the duck breast was nicely cooked on the skin side but the other side was underdone as well. It seemed as if the chefs were so focused on the complete dish – the sauces and accompaniments – that they forgot to pay attention to the essential part of the operation – the protein that is the focus of the dish.

We see the same thing in business all the time. A side project detracts from the main business. Resources which are already spread too thin can’t focus on serving customers the basic product because they’re deployed on something that isn’t driving profits at the expense of something that is. We can’t forget to make sure the focus of our business is perfectly served because no matter how nicely everything that surrounds that focal point is offered, those things can’t compensate for a disaster in the main business.

You might think it can’t happen in your business: you’re too experienced and very good at what you do.  So were these chefs – one doesn’t get to the Top Chef finale unless you’re quite good (and these two actually topped two other cooks who are current James Beard Award nominees). Many restaurant critics will tell you that on their initial visit they like to order something very simple – roast chicken, for example – to make sure the kitchen is paying attention to the basics.  Are you?

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