Tag Archives: Foodie

July 6, 2012 · 8:12 am

Mr. Roboto Comes To Cook

For our Foodie Friday Fun, today’s topic is the delicate balance between being consistent and being boring.  What spurred the thinking on this topic was, in fact, a food-related story that comes to us from The Daily Mail’s website.  It seems that in China they have a number of restaurants operated almost entirely by robots.  The machines do pretty much everything – cook the food, serve the drinks, take the orders, you name it:

If you pay a visit to this restaurant, in downtown Harbin, China, you will find 18 robots – from a waitress to a cooker to an usher – ready to ensure your dining experience is perfect.  The restaurant has 18 types of robots, each gliding out of the kitchen to provide your dish, with specialty robots including a dumpling robot and a noodle robot.

I’ve written before about the need to provide our customers and clients with a consistent, predictable experience yet I find this story repugnant.  I’m sure the food is uniformly something – good?  Bad?  Mediocre?  No, I guess the word soul-less comes to mind.  And that’s the business point today.

Cooking and serving food to another human being is not just another piece of manufacturing.  When I think of robots I think of them building cars, not canapés.  Oh sure, there are automated processes throughout the food industry, but they’re for packaged goods and supermarket foods, not restaurants.   What does this have to do with your business?  Think about how many business transactions involve us talking to a machine (I count email on that list – it’s more machine-like than human, lacking nuance and expression) or machines speaking to one another (digital media buying more often these days, for example).

Our clients want to see the humanity.  I’m willing to bet most clients and customers are willing to sacrifice a bit (and ONLY a bit) of perfection for the human touch.  The smile they get when they’re greeted by name.  The new photo of their kids they get to show off.  Business isn’t just an exchange of something of value for compensation – when it’s done well there are a number of intangibles that no robot can offer.

So ask yourself this.  Are you acting like a robot or like a human?  If it’s the former, maybe you ought to contemplate the differences that make us the latter.  You with me?

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June 22, 2012 · 8:24 am

Is Your Menu Out Of Style?

For our Foodie Friday Fun this week I refer you to an article on the Eater/Philadelphia blog.

menu

(Photo credit: pomarc)

It makes a statement about food that just might have some business implications too.  Let’s see what you think.

In a piece entitled The 10 Signs Your Menu Is Out Of Style, they assert the following:

…what we eat is strongly influenced by the trickle-down effect of creative ideas and the cultural atmosphere we’re making decisions in. But, at what point does an ingredient or dish that once seemed utterly fresh become completely stale?

A classic like roast chicken may be safe, but most dishes are not so timeless. For example: The Korean taco. What started as a food-truck highlight from Kogi in Los Angeles has wended its way to TGI Friday’s menus everywhere. And recently, a bacon-studded sundae has appeared at Burger King. When a dish turns up on a chain restaurant menu, it’s over.

I agree – there’s a huge difference between a classic that’s widely executed with varying degrees of success and something “trendy” that loses its cutting edge.  Of course, that’s kind of true about anything in business, isn’t it?  The problem with trendy is that it becomes passe.  Or as Yogi once said about why he no longer went to Ruggeri’s, a St. Louis restaurant: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

If your business is built around catering to the masses, grabbing the latest thing and making it widely available is a good thing.  More often than not, we’re not about mass anymore – we fulfill niches, we serve highly segmented audiences, and we can’t afford to let the rest of the world catch up or dilute our magic potion.  Apple is the best at this (and yes, they serve mass markets but they’ve moved on by the time others catch up).

So what’s on your menu these days?  Classics?  Something others will be dumbing down for their own menus in six months?  Or are you trying to stay afloat serving up stale versions of other’s creativity?  Think about it!

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April 27, 2012 · 11:01 am

Free Business Idea!

This week’s Foodie topic has to do with my home away from home, the supermarket (head faked you there – it’s not the golf course!).  I don’t know about you but I seem to spend more time dodging folks yakking on their cell phones than I do perusing the specials as I’m pushing my cart around.  While it’s an almost infinite source of comedic relief, it also can be frustrating when items I need are blocked by someone checking their email or confirming a recipe with home base.  Of course, to me that’s a missed opportunity.  Let’s see what you think.

The interior of a T & T store

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I rarely go to the market with a menu in mind.  As my wife is sick of hearing, my philosophy is “let’s see what looks good” and building around that.  Once I’ve sorted out the best looking proteins and produce, I will often fire up a favorite recipe app to find inspiration and a bit of guidance (and yes, I stand off to the side and not in an aisle).  What’s missing in this app is the free business idea but it also points to something we all might consider as we’re developing new products.

None of the recipe apps I’ve found are integrated with their locations, meaning the store.  Wouldn’t it be great if the store’s price, inventory, and aisle data (where in the store the product is) could come up as part of the shopping list generated by the recipe?  I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to settle on an idea and then find out the store doesn’t have a key ingredient or they’re out of stock or it’s very expensive or I just can’t find it.

I can hear you telling me about the obvious problem:  all the various food companies and supermarket chains would have to cooperate to produce a common set of data, and why would they do that?  Why should Stop & Shop let Shop Rite see their pricing and inventory (as if it was a secret)?   Because it’s the right thing to do for the customer, and that’s the business point we always must consider.  The reality is that these chains don’t compete that much on regular pricing – a lot of it is on location and specials.  Moreover, if the app is designed to help the customer already in the store, so the cooperation is unlikely to cost much.

If you know of such an app, that integrates recipes with store information, please let me know.  Some smart chain will produce one that’s chain specific; we’d all be better off if there was something universal.  Who’s going to step up and take the free idea?

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