The third installment in a series on effective professional-development activities performed by students outside of the classroom.

By Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT

Last month, we discussed how to assign observations conducted outside of the classroom and how to make them helpful in expanding our students’ education. This month, we will discuss shadowing individuals, another way to enhance the professional development of our students through encouraging learning outside of the classroom.

Obtaining Permission
If you want students to shadow a professional, it is important to consider whom you want them to shadow and what you want them to observe. You might have in mind the work of a chef in a certain type of restaurant, a maître d’hôtel or hostess in a fine-dining restaurant, or a purchasing agent for a hotel with several food and beverage outlets. If you know these individuals and want to set up the shadowing experience, it will be a lot easier on your students.

If you ask your students to make the arrangements, however, they learn a great deal more about making appointments and conducting themselves well with professionals. Even if you want your students to make the appointments, you might want to develop a list of local chefs and other culinary professionals who are willing to be shadowed and then share that list with your students. It can work well any way you choose; just consider what structure and level of assistance make the most effective learning opportunity for your students.

NAMI’s Ultimate Guide to Bacon video provides an inside look at how bacon is made; a companion brochure features bacon facts and history.

It is the meat that has become an American obsession, once eaten solely for breakfast, but now found wrapped around other foods, infused into cocktails and even made into personal-care products. To honor bacon’s role as a cultural icon, the North American Meat Institute (NAMI) has developed a new Ultimate Guide to Bacon, featuring a video tour of a bacon processing plant and downloadable companion brochure with bacon facts, history and more.

The video is the newest installment in NAMI’s Glass Walls series, taking viewers inside a typical bacon processing plant. It shows how bacon is made from harvesting the animal to separating the belly to curing and smoking the meat to cutting and packaging the finished product.

Graduates will not remember many specifics of their educations, and will even realize that so much they thought would be important to their life paths isn’t. But they will remember those who influenced their learning in meaningful ways.

By Paul Sorgule, MS, AAC

Another academic year has come and gone. After students walk across the stage, every administrator, faculty member, student and parent has an opportunity to reflect on the two or four years that went into making graduation possible.

Deans and directors are beginning to plan time into their summer schedules for review of curriculum, some overdue maintenance on kitchen facilities, completing outcome assessment materials from the year coming to a close, and justifying budgets nearing the end of a fiscal year.

Faculty are putting course materials to bed and cleaning offices as they head into some well-earned time off. Students are breathing a sigh of relief combined with that uneasy feeling as they enter the workforce, and parents are still glowing with pride—knowing that their son or daughter has just completed another phase in his or her life.

With the addition of Master of Wine Adam Lapierre (pictured) to the team and three brand new programs to the schedule, San Francisco Wine School now boasts top-level educators from, and coursework for, all four major wine credentialing bodies. The school’s elite group now comprises three Master Sommeliers (Court of Master Sommeliers), three with Diplomas in Wine & Spirits (Wine & Spirits Education Trust), three Certified Wine Educators (Society of Wine Educators) and one Master of Wine (Institute of Masters of Wine). This guarantees that, no matter which educational path wine students choose, they will be fully supported by San Francisco Wine School.

The National Honey Board (NHB) has introduced a colorful, eye-catching, new, information-rich resource, A Guide to Honey Beverages. Serving as a complement to the Sweet Stirrings cocktail guide (2012), the honey beverage handbook features nearly 40 spiral-bound, laminated pages replete with honey tips, tricks and on-trend recipes to help operators enhance their non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverage menus and programs.

The new honey beverage guide includes the following highlighted, tabbed sections:

The Culinary Institute of America has appointed Rose S. Wang as the college’s vice president of strategy. Wang joined the college on Feb. 3, 2015, after serving as the chief financial officer of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Center to Advance Palliative Care in New York City since 2013.

Before taking her position at Mount Sinai, she was managing director of Carat Companies, a Princeton, N.J.-based consulting firm to nonprofit organizations, and division CFO of beverages for the Campbell Soup Company in Camden, N.J. Prior to that she held several financial and strategic planning positions with Avon Products, Inc., and Citibank N.A., including executive director of business planning, director of international finance and operations, and director of finance and corporate development.

Maple Leaf Farms challenges professional chefs and culinary students to think outside the box when it comes to duck preparation. And to spark their creative juices, Maple Leaf is offering more than $19,000 in prize money in the 2015 Discover Duck Recipe Contest.

This year’s focus is “Duck Redefined,” which encourages participants to create a dish featuring duck as the main ingredient in a non-traditional way. “Our contest encourages chefs to think outside the box beyond just roasted whole duck or a sautéed duck breast,” said Maple Leaf Farms’ director of duck marketing, Cindy Turk. “Duck is such a versatile protein, the possibilities are endless.”

On a recent trip to Hawaii, Chef Weiner had an epiphany: Teaching our students how to cook isn’t good enough. To better prepare them for the real world, we also need to introduce students to the different formats of serving. Here are 10 effective ideas that fit nicely within a shorter class timeframe.

By Adam Weiner, CFSE

One of the beauties of being active with CAFÉ is that you get to meet fellow culinary instructors, culinarians, students and chefs from around the country. I joke around that every time I return from the Leadership Conference I have to buy a larger business-card holder.

(Speaking of the Leadership Conference in June, I will be giving a presentation entitled “Teaching the Basic Cooking Principles in 50 Minutes.” It is designed specifically for high-school teachers. I hope you can attend, because I would love to have participation from a broad range of instructors.)

There is another way that being active in CAFÉ expands your network: You use CAFÉ to find others in the field in places where you will be travelling. Several months ago I mentioned to Mary Petersen, the president of CAFÉ, that my wife and I were going to Kauai. She introduced us via e-mail to Martina Hilldorfer, culinary-program coordinator and chef at the Culinary Institute of the Pacific at the Kauai Community College.

Although they represent nearly a quarter of all restaurant visits among Americans, Millennials’ visits and dollars spent are down considerably from several years ago. Why? Chiefly, they find it’s cheaper and healthier (and enjoyable) to cook at home. So, what can operators do to earn greater patronage from this highly desired demographic?

Millennials are the chosen generation for many marketers because of their sheer number and perceived buying power, but they are not a homogenous group. Depending on their age and lifestyles, they use restaurants differently, according to a recently released report by The NPD Group, a leading global information company.

For U.S. restaurants and foodservice outlets, Millennials as a group currently represent about 14.5 billion visits and $96 billion in spending, which is 23% of total restaurant spend. But the group has cut back in both visits and spending, finds the NPD report.

Two decades ago, dining out was primarily a special occasion. Today, it’s part of daily life for all Americans. But what differentiates the prepared-food-away-from-home choices of a “foodservice hobbyist” and an “affluent socializer”? Technomic offers an in-depth view of the current consumer foodservice landscape.

Technomic’s New Consum4Sight Group gathered data points from 81,870 consumer foodservice occasions over one full year to reveal a look ahead at the 2015 landscape. One surprising pattern: More than half of eating-out occasions are unplanned or decided on impulse. At 53% of all dining occasions, the frequency of “eating on the fly” accounts for more than twice as many routine occasions (25%); special occasions account for just 22% of dining occasions.