It was a familiar sight at the recent 2014 National ProStart Invitational Awards Dinner in Austin as the teams from two Texas high schools waited to hear the results after demonstrating their mastery of restaurant-leadership skills in a fast-paced culinary and restaurant-management competition.

For the second year in a row, the culinary team from The Academy of Culinary Arts & Hospitality Management at Byron Nelson High School in Trophy Club, Texas, and the management team from Rockwall High School in Rockwall, Texas, won their competitions at the Texas ProStart Invitational and represented the Lone Star State at nationals, where ProStart champions from 46 states, territories and Department of Defense bases competed for their share of a total of $3.75 million in scholarships.

The Rockwall team (pictured) repeated its state success and took first place in the management competition at the 2014 National ProStart Invitational!

Every dish we cook, every meal we eat represents the convergence of head, heart and hands. reThink Food: Mind, Behavior, and Culture, is a new conference series co-presented by The Culinary Institute of America (CIA) and the MIT Media Lab to explore how we experience food—from the workings of our sensory systems, to the impact of new technologies on our food systems, to the habits and rituals that bind us.

In its first year, reThink Food will bring an audience of 300 from the science, marketing, technology, food and media industries to the CIA’s Napa Valley campus, November 7-9, 2014. The three-day program will include research presentations, panel discussions, tastings, culinary demonstrations and a variety of sensory experiences led by world-class experts who include behavioral economists Dan Ariely (Duke University) and Michael Norton (Harvard University), scientists Stuart Firestein (Columbia University) and Howard Shapiro (Mars, Inc.), chefs Christopher Kostow (The Restaurant at Meadowood), Daniel Patterson (The Daniel Patterson Restaurant Group), and Maxime Bilet (Art for Food), Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Moss (The New York Times), inventor and author Nathan Myhrvold (Intellectual Ventures), along with CIA President Tim Ryan, CMC, and MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito.

Are you branding your program, public foodservice outlets and catering services effectively? Start with a great logo, which informs branding and drives business.

By Dan Antonelli

Starting or growing a business is an exciting, frustrating, rewarding and arduous experience. It involves many considerations and a careful use of precious resources. In today’s marketplace, establishing a powerful and memorable brand is essential for any company’s success and, while most experts agree what branding is, few give the logo its due respect.

In my experience, a logo sets the stage for all of your strategic messaging. A logo is not just an equal part of a brand, like most experts would indicate. Like a bicycle wheel with many spokes, your branding spokes need to be connected to one central hub. Think of your logo as the hub for your brand and all other iterations of that logo as your spokes.

Logo Design: Look Before You Leap
As discussed, a professional logo serves as a solid foundation for your brand. A great logo conveys expertise, establishes a brand promise and creates an expectation for quality. While many business owners wouldn’t give a second thought to buying a $99 logo, there are some major points you would do well to consider before diving in.

First, make sure it is clear in the logo architecture, because you don’t have the luxury of years of brand recognition to get people to associate your name with your product or service. Likewise, you don’t have the large advertising budget required to brand generic icons that don’t help consumers understand the nature of your business.

Nearly 700 chefs benefit from fourth certification to be approved by the independent NCCA.

The American Culinary Federation’s Certified Culinary Educator^® (CCE^®) credential recently received accreditation from the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) under the Institute for Credentialing Excellence (ICE). This is the fourth professional culinary certification offered by the St. Augustine, Fla.-based ACF that has received independent accreditation.

Credentials are becoming recognized as a growing alternative path for full-time workers wanting to highlight specialized skills for career advancement and higher earnings, according to a report released by the U.S. Census Bureau in January, “Measuring Alternative Education Credentials: 2012.” Thirty-four million adults in the United States have a professional certification from an educational institution or organization.

“As research from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates, professional certification is important to full-time working professionals,” said Don Dickinson, CEC, CCA, AAC, chair, ACF Certification Commission. “With American Culinary Federation’s fourth credential receiving accreditation, we are pleased that our comprehensive certification program continues to grow in credibility and expand in recognition to help professional chefs reach their career goals.”

More than 12,800 chefs and foodservice professionals hold a professional certification from the American Culinary Federation, the largest professional membership organization for chefs in North America. Three other ACF certifications have received outside accreditation from ICE since 2011: Certified Executive Chef^® (CEC^®), Certified Sous Chef^® (CSC^®) and Certified Executive Pastry Chef^® (CEPC^®).

Americans are said to live and operate in an “experience” economy. But a new way of creating value via loyalty rather than premium price is beginning to emerge. What does this mean to our students and their future careers in foodservice? Part one of a two-part focus.

By Renee Zonka, RD, CEC, CHE, MBA

For decades through the 1990s, the U.S. economy was chiefly described as a “service” economy. An argument can be made that ours is still a service economy because more than 50% of the labor force in the United States is in the service sector as opposed to agriculture or manufacturing. How often have you called a company for service and spoken to someone with a foreign accent? Of course, I’m speaking of customer service. We’ve exported the delivery of so many services that many developing nations are considered service economies today.

Of course, a service economy can also refer to the relative importance of service in a product offering. Products today have a higher service component than in previous decades, and, virtually every product today has a service component to it. So there’s a strong case to be made that we’re still living and operating within a service economy.

The “Experience” Economy
But identifying our economy began to change in 1999 with the publication of a book by B. Joseph Pine, II, and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage. Everyone can identify with the basic premise of an experience economy, in which companies state an “experience” when they engage customers in a memorable way.

Here’s an example: Kendall College operates a white-tablecloth restaurant open to the public that doubles as a real-life classroom for culinary-arts students, called, simply, The Dining Room. Peggy Ryan, a culinary instructor and daytime executive chef of The Dining Room, once menued a lentil soup with peppered crème fraîche and fried celery leaves. The student server placed a bowl in front of the guest that contained only the crème fraîche with the fried celery leaves. So it wasn’t soup when it arrived at the table. It became soup in front of the guest’s eyes when the student poured it into the bowl. For the guest, the act was lagniappe—a little something extra, as they say in New Orleans—that heightened the dining experience. 

The Global Culinary Innovators Association and International Food and Beverage Technology Association announced their respective formations at the industry’s largest trade show last month.

Two new organizations serving the foodservice industry launched at the National Restaurant Association’s 2014 Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show in Chicago in May. Both aim to impact and benefit from the sharing of best practices and information with counterparts and colleagues around the world.

Following is a brief description of each new organization:

Global Culinary Innovators Association (GCIA)
The new association benefits corporate chefs and menu innovators from leading multiunit foodservice operations. Members will include company founders, leading culinarians and marketing experts who are spearheading the menu innovation for their companies within multiple industry segments.

Research and trend predictions point in the same direction: Use more fresh mango on menus.

National Mango Board consumer research shows that consumption of mango continues to grow. The trend toward healthy dining, as well as increased interest in tropical and global flavors, creates buzz about fresh mango.

Most recently, a quantitative study by research firm Datassential confirms use of fruit overall on menus has increased since 2008, with mango the sixth-fastest-growing fruit, climbing to the ninth-most-commonly menued fruit in 2013.

Datassential research reveals that mangos are menued in all restaurant segments and usage is growing across regions, dayparts and cuisine types.

Whether you maintain one or 21, building the practice of keeping a journal and recording key ideas and activities can very useful for three important reasons.

By Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT

Last month, we discussed strategies for retaining students in our courses and programs. This month and next month, we will talk about professional journals—not published in scholarly and trade journals, but notebooks or diaries in which one writes ideas, feelings and reflections so that they can be referenced in the future.

This month, we will discuss the power and value of a keeping a journal, whether you are a student, teacher or administrator.

Types of Journals
There are many types of notebook journals that journal individuals use. Kate Davis, on www.darktea.com, lists 15 (time-capsule journal, specific-topic journal, dream journal, travel journal, reading journal, specific-timeframe journal, group or family journal, gratitude journal, personal-development journal, project journal, gardening journal, meditation journal, planning journal, creativity journal and quick journal) and Shoshana Jackson on www.knoji.com lists 20 (family journal, couples journal, relationship journal, letter journal, birthday journal, memory journal, gratitude journal, prayer journal, good thoughts or affirmations journal, dream journal, focus journal, joke journal, book or movie journal, recipe journal, hobby journal, sports journal, travel journal, health journal, diet and exercise journal and finance journal.)

Are you dooming your students to failure by not focusing enough attention on helping them find and keep jobs after graduation?

By Adam Weiner, CFSE

I hope you will endure a bit of self-promotion. I was asked by Mary Petersen of CAFÉ to lead a roundtable discussion at the upcoming Leadership Conference in Salt Lake City on the importance of teaching life skills and job skills to culinary students.

For those of you who have read my articles for a while, you know I adamantly believe that unless you teach your students job-searching skills, skills to keep the job, and basic life skills you are dooming them to failure. I have written a number of CAFÉ articles on this very subject:

1.     “Interview Skills,” March 2011

2.     “Help Your Students Keep Their Jobs,” May 2011

3.     “Teaching Students How to Get a Job, Part I,” June 2012

4.     “Teaching Your Students How to Find a Job, Part II,” July-August 2012

5.     “12 Things for Students to Know,” on how to work in a commercial kitchen, December 2012

6.     “Teaching the Value of ‘Real’ Networking,” May 2013

7.     “The 10 Hardest Things to Teach Young Culinary Students,” July-August 2013

8.     “Working in Teams Needs to Be Taught,” September 2013

9.     “Volunteering for Young and Old,” December 2013

There should be no room for variance from a standard of expectation among all stakeholders—employers, faculty, parents and the students themselves. To ensure that culinary grads meet acceptable skill and aptitude standards, Chef Sorgule suggests employing a “passport.”

By Paul Sorgule, MS, AAC

The first question is, “What are the critical skills that will allow students to progress within your program and reach a level of success on internship and after graduation”?

Although there are numerous core competencies that set the stage for “learning” and the ability to adapt to various situations, there is a specific grouping of more tangible competencies that are essential in building “employability” aptitudes in kitchens. If planned correctly, these aptitudes can provide the setting for the other core competencies within a curriculum.

These critical skills should be drawn from a collaborative process of involvement including faculty, industry chefs and bakers, alumni and the students themselves. Knowing the expectations of these constituencies is the foundation for building a curriculum and system of evaluation that will develop confidence and lead to student success.