Beverage

This month's Hamilton Beach® Commercial blog recap includes a familiar winner (you love your chocolate & Kahlua!) and some new posts for you to check out. If you see content you like, be sure to subscribe for regular updates from that category, whether it's Beverage, Food, Hospitality or Recipes.

Planning a school breakfast program isn’t as simple as it once was. Schools have to come up with meals that meet new nutrition standards, can be served in classrooms or the cafeteria, can be prepared in a hurry, are easy to eat on the run and won’t make a mess. Oh, and they have to please kids’ picky palates. The solution? Smoothies. Here’s why, plus tips on how to successfully launch a school smoothie program.

We're introducing a new feature here on the Hamilton Beach® Commercial blog - each month we will bring you the recap of the most popular posts from the previous month. Just to be sure that you haven't missed anything.

There's something special about the 91-year-old Lexington Candy Shop, a humble luncheonette on the Upper East Side at the corner of 83rd Street and Lexington Avenue. Maybe it's the vintage decor: neon signs, a chrome-accented counter and signed celebrity photos. Maybe it's the 1940 Hamilton Beach milkshake mixer, admired by generations of customers. Or it could be the fact that Lexington Candy Shop still belongs to the family that opened it in 1925. 

The popularity of craft cocktails is only expected to grow in 2016, and will account for 10 percent of all spirits sales by 2020.  Bar customers want a show. “Theatre remains very, very strong with cocktails ordered," Katy Carter, Cellar Trends’ research and brand manager, tells The Spirits Business. "Great looking drinks sell best  — although speed is important in high-volume accounts.”

Customers want creative drinks, made with flair — but they want them fast. How can beverage directors keep up with cocktail trends while balancing speed and finesse? Here are some strategies to try.

We take great pride in our partnerships with leading foodservice equipment and supply dealers. To that end, we recently collaborated with Supply & Equipment Foodservice Alliance, LLC -- more familiarly known as SEFA -- to create this entry for their blog KitchenBiz, which was published on 22 February, 2016. Read on to learn more about the differences between commercially rated blenders and their residential counterparts.              

Consumerism and altruism are finally making friends. Consumers want to feel like their spending is doing good in the world, and retailers are obliging. Recently we've seen not just high-end stores, but traditional retailers like Safeway, Kroger and Ahold making serious commitments to fair-trade sourcing.  

The hospitality and restaurant industries haven't quite followed suit, however. Hotels were pioneers in conservation efforts, introducing energy- and water-saving programs before almost anyone else, observes Jennifer Gallegos, director of coffee for Fair Trade USA. "But they have been very slow to embrace fair trade," she says. "Very slow." The reasons aren't clear, but she says foodservice research firm Technomic will soon be conducting a study to find out more. Is it time for hotel and restaurant companies to start using fair-trade coffee and other products? Here's some perspective.

Smoothies seem like a recent trend, but they were invented in the 1930s — right along with the blender. Now they're ubiquitous, and consumer demand shows no sign of slowing. Why are smoothies so popular? They represent the convergence of several trends: health-conscious eating, portability and personalization. As we round the corner into the New Year, here's a closer look at six trends that will shape the smoothie market in 2016.

The Japanese enjoy coffee in cans. The Vietnamese pour it over ice with sweetened condensed milk. Ethiopians spend as long as three hours preparing coffee and serving it in a special clay pot.

However they enjoy it, everyone's drinking more of it. “Consumption is increasing as societies in India, China and Latin America continue to be westernized,” Roberio Silva, executive director of the International Coffee Organization, told the Wall Street Journal in 2015. Expect the global demand for coffee to jump 24 percent in the next five years, Silva said, from 141.6 million bags to 175.8 million bags. (A bag weighs about 132 pounds.)

Europeans, Canadians and Americans remain the world's most caffeinated people, drinking the most coffee per capita. But coffee's rapidly becoming a popular drink in nations with burgeoning populations and increasing disposable income, such as India and China. Here's a look at changing global tastes for coffee.

 The Frozen Mudslide, a blend of ice cream, Kahlua, Bailey's and vodka, has been called the adult milkshake. The Frozen Mudslide got its start in the 1950s at The Wreck Bar and Grill on the north coast of Grand Cayman Island, where the bar still stands. It was a bartender known as Old Judd who is credited with creating the mudslide, and it is still the island's signature drink. Locals who enjoyed the mudslide first spread the word about the drink and visitors took the recipe back to homes located throughout the world. Strangely enough, the drink didn't become popular in the US until the 1980s.