High-school culinary-arts programs in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Batavia, N.Y., earn honors for exemplary practices in—and innovative teaching of—ecological sustainability.

Kendall College, Chicago, and the Annapolis, Md.-based Center for the Advancement of Foodservice Education (CAFÉ) presented 2015 CAFÉ/Kendall College Green Awards to two secondary hospitality programs during a June 18 reception at CAFÉ’s 11th-annual Leadership Conference for foodservice educators at Niagara Falls Culinary Institute, Niagara Falls, N.Y.

Among dozens of submissions from secondary and postsecondary programs nationwide, Kent Career Technical Center in Grand Rapids, Mich., received this year’s top award. According to chef-instructor Sarah Waller, who teaches advanced baking and pastries at Kent, the $1,000 grant from Kendall College will help fund the high school’s goal to become the first water-bottle-free secondary school in Michigan.

Say a menu item doesn’t sell. Is it overpriced, poorly described, not satisfying to the customer or a combination of these? To understand the basics of restaurant-performance management systems, here are three key teachings that would be part of any 101-level course on the topic.

By Dave Bennett

In the restaurant business, competition is fierce and plenty. Owners use various types of operational strategies to stay ahead of the curve and keep profits streaming in. Measuring restaurant performance is a critical ongoing activity—to see how operations are going today, and to reveal opportunities to improve customer satisfaction and unit profitability in the future.

Strong restaurant performance-measurement systems require vast amounts of data. Your data tells you how things are going, and you, in turn, use that data to make decisions. For instance, let’s imagine that your data is telling you that customers aren’t ordering a certain menu item. Is it overpriced? How does it taste? How is it described on the menu? Armed with that knowledge, you can decide how to respond: Remove that item from the menu, which will also streamline your inventory; offer it as a limited-time offering with a new menu description; or lower its selling price to see if that boosts sales.

Serving a term of 18 months, Carroll is joined by John Sloane of Macau as vice president of the global organization serving 10 million chefs from more than 105 nations.

Charles Carroll, CEC, AAC, executive chef of River Oaks Country Club, Houston, was recently named president of the World Association of Chefs Societies, or Worldchefs.

Worldchefs, founded October 1928 at the Sorbonne in Paris, is a global network of chef associations dedicated to maintaining and improving the standards of global cuisine. An elected executive committee and a board of continental directors that oversee the regions of Asia, Europe, Africa, Pacific and the Americas govern the organization.

“Worldchefs spans over 105 countries and 10 million chefs, and I am proud to be a part of this great team,” said Carroll. “The board is focused and excited about the next 18 months and we are dedicated to all our members around the globe.  I encourage everyone to visit www.Worldchefs.org to learn more about what we are doing and our next congress in Athens, Greece, September 2016.”

Hot sauce is becoming ubiquitous in homes and at foodservice outlets, according to recent NPD Group research. And while the classic Louisiana type still rules, it’s by far not the only hot seller, evidenced by spreading-like-wildfire sales of fruity habanero and chipotle varieties.

Hot sauce, the hotness of which is often ranked by quantity of flames or symbols of hell, is, well, hot right now, says The NPD Group, a leading global information company. Fifty-six percent of households have hot sauce on hand in their kitchens, and Sriracha, a relatively new Asian hot sauce, is already stocked in 9% of total U.S. households and 16% of households headed by someone under age 35, according to NPD’s recently released audit of U.S. kitchens.

The popularity of hot sauce also extends to away-from-home dining experiences. Cases of hot sauce shipped from foodservice distributors to restaurants and other foodservice outlets increased by double digits over the past two years, reports  SupplyTrack^®, a monthly tracking service that tracks every product shipped from major broadline distributors to their foodservice operators.

Classic Louisiana-style hot sauce is still the leader in terms of case volume shipped from distributors to U.S. foodservice outlets, but shipment growth has tapered off because of the wide variety of hot sauces now available, finds NPD. Case shipments of some habanero hot-sauce flavors, particularly habanero with fruit flavors such as mango, grew triple digits in the year ending December 2014 compared to same period a year ago. There were double the cases shipped of chipotle hot-sauce flavors and Sriracha in 2014 than in the previous year, finds SupplyTrack. 

The 10 best-selling categories have shifted since just 2013, and today, cheese is still tops, but refrigerated pasta, functional beverages and nut and seed butters show big gains. Why should we care? Because foodservice is an increasingly important sector to that industry, with growth of nearly 31% since 2012.

The specialty-food industry is a bright spot in the U.S. economy. In 2014, sales of specialty food topped $100 billion for the first time, with retail and foodservice sales reaching a record $109 billion.

Retail sales of specialty-food sales grew 19% from 2012 to 2014 versus a tepid 2% increase for all food. The industry, fueled by small businesses, now boasts 15 segments that exceed $1 billion in sales, including cheese; coffee; meat, poultry and seafood; chips, pretzels and snacks; candy; and yogurt.

These findings are from a new report from the Specialty Food Association produced in conjunction with research firms Mintel International and SPINS/IRI. The report, “The State of the Specialty Food Industry 2015,” tracks U.S. sales of specialty food through supermarkets, natural-food stores, specialty-food retailers and foodservice venues. Specialty foods are broadly defined for the report as products that have limited distribution and a reputation for high quality.