An emerging trend fueled by independent restaurants finds beverages taking center stage as ingredients.
Coffee, tea, beer, soda and spirits are all being featured on independent restaurant menus in new and unique ways. These beverages are contributing spicy, sweet, tart and savory flavors to dishes, and operators are taking advantage of the flavor recognition from these beverages when used as ingredients.
Big shifts in U.S. foodways emerging at this year’s conference included “clean” menu descriptions, Korean influences, strategic use of salt and black pepper and “invisibly healthy” indulgence.
Courtesy of Olson Communications
. The sponsors-only event presents the latest research, trends, menu ideas and hands-on flavor experiences that are relevant to more than 100 leading foodservice operators.
The seventh conference, August 1-4 in Newport Beach, Calif., brought flavor front and center for all conference attendees.
Numerous techniques exist to encourage students, convincing them that they can achieve success if they invest time and effort, and that their work has value.
By Bradley J. Ware, Ph.D., and C. Lévesque Ware, Ph.D.
Students are at times already highly motivated when they enter the lab/classroom due to past successes or an interest in the course topic. There are also those individuals who have not experienced the same positive results or who have a preconceived dislike for a course based on a perceived degree of content difficulty. It is precisely in the interest of both these groups that motivation and student engagement should be of primary importance for the chef/instructor from the very first day of lab/class. It is imperative to retain and foster the enthusiasm of highly motivated students and of dire necessity to help motivate others to achieve success.
Most consumers who have enjoyed dining from a food truck say they’re not a passing fad. But many non-users are still hesitant to try one out.
A new study by Chicago-based trend-tracker Technomic reveals good news for mobile food vehicles, as 91% of consumers polled who are familiar with food trucks say they view the trend as having staying power and not a passing fad. Only 7% of consumers who use mobile food vehicles (MFV) say they expect their frequency of visits to food trucks to decrease over the next year.
According to NPD, more adult consumers aspire to eat smaller portions in the coming year, suggesting that this healthy eating strategy will become more important in the future.
Portion control is a tenet of healthy eating, and it appears that consumers are increasingly aware of the importance of managing the portion size of the foods they eat, according to The NPD Group, a leading market research company.
For a recent report entitled “Healthy Eating Strategies by Generation,” NPD compiled a list of 30 healthy eating and lifestyle dimensions to determine which ones consumers of different generations associate with healthy eating. Out of the 30 attributes, eating smaller portions ranked 11th in importance among adult consumers across generations as a healthy-eating characteristic. Adult consumers ranked the top five characteristics of healthy eating and healthy lifestyles consistently: exercise regularly, eat well-balanced meals, eat all things in moderation, limit/avoid foods with saturated fat or cholesterol or trans fats, and drink at least eight glasses of water per day.