Food

Your walk-in is texting you. Your fryer is demanding new oil. And your vent hoods are turning themselves on.

Welcome to the era of IoT in restaurants. “For years equipment manufacturers and designers have been predicting the arrival of the internet-of-things connected restaurant kitchen,” Restaurant Hospitality reports, “one where appliances sync to the cloud, equipment is accessed remotely, the daily grind of temperature monitoring is fully automated, and ovens that are about to fail send warnings to management or message for replacement parts.” But for restaurant operators, is the switch to IoT systems worth it?

Restaurant operators are tired of flat traffic numbers. In the 12 months ending February 2018, lunch traffic was flat, according to The NPD Group, and dinner traffic dropped 1 percent.

The one bit of sunshine: Breakfast. Restaurant traffic for breakfast and morning snacks rose 1 percent in that time period. How can you capture a piece of the early-bird action? The old standbys, like egg and bacon, may not be enough. Here are five creative menu offerings that will attract and satisfy your breakfast customers.

Fresh food. Fast service. Local sourcing. Craft beer. Juicing. The place where all these trends intersect is the grocerant.

What, exactly, is a grocerant? It can be defined as a grocery store that incorporates a restaurant experience, inviting customers to dine and drink in-store. The grocerant trend turns a grocery store from a destination for errand-running into a “third place” where people gather between home and work. 

Grocerants boost stores’ bottom lines as well. A 2016 study from the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) and Technomic suggests that 64 percent of stores saw prepared foods category growth of nine percent or higher in 2014. In addition to freshly prepared foods, what does a store need to offer to become an appealing grocerant?

We tend to think of oxygen as a beneficial gas. Plants make it, we breathe it, it’s great — right? The problem is, oxygen is also a powerful agent in the food spoilage process.

When oxygen is the enemy, other gases are your ally in food preservation. Introducing inert gases to food packaging after vacuum sealing can keep food looking better and tasting fresher longer.

Until now, gas flushing has been available only on the most expensive models of commercial grade vacuum sealer. We wanted to put this versatile tool in the hands of more chefs, so we made Gas Flush standard on the PrimaVac™ 406 In-Chamber Vacuum Sealer. 

If you’ve ever used a chamber vacuum sealer, you know the process is dramatic. Place a plastic pouch containing food — a nice filet, we’ll say — inside the chamber. Start the cycle and air is removed from the chamber. At the end of the cycle, when air re-enters the chamber, the sealed pouch shrinks around the filet. The result: it stays fresh and looks good for longer.

But what happens when a chef seals delicate, fragile or sharp-edged foods? Will they be crushed, or puncture the pouch? Not if you have adjustable Soft Air.

One of the coolest components of the new PrimaVac™ commercial vacuum sealer line is the JetAire™ rotary vane pump inside.

But why should you care about what’s inside a chamber sealer? You just want it to work. 

Exactly. We know that in a busy kitchen, there’s only one time the kitchen staff are thinking about the inner workings of their equipment: when something breaks. That’s why we designed the  JetAire™ pump to be incredibly durable, reliably powerful, and easy to maintain.

They always order the tofu curry, but they’re OK with chicken broth in tom kha soup. They say no to spaghetti with meatballs and yes to spaghetti carbonara. They ask for the veggie burger — with bacon.

They’re the flexitarians: people who follow a primarily plant-based diet, but aren’t averse to eating small amounts of meat. And their ranks are growing fast. But how can restaurants capture this hard-to-pin-down diner?

Continuing with our recap series, here are the top blog posts from the Food blog for 2017. These posts got the most views, regardless of when they were published.

Read on...and if you see content you like, be sure to join the HBC Community for regular updates, whether it's Beverage, Food, Hospitality or Recipes.

Freshëns Fresh Food Studio is known for serving delicious and healthy food and smoothies to people on the go. A pioneer in the fast casual space, Freshëns has more than 500 locations, including 300 college campuses.

Among foodservice operators, Freshëns is beloved for its streamlined systems. A licensee can open up a smoothie bar, train staff rapidly, and serve a high-quality product. How does Freshëns keep everything simple and maintain consistently high standards? Joe Sardina, Vice President of Operations, shares some of the company’s strategies.

Your mother was wrong: Breakfast probably isn’t the most important meal of the day — from a health standpoint, anyway. From the perspective of restaurant operators, however, breakfast is very important indeed.

At a time when restaurant sales are slumping, breakfast consumption continues to climb. The NPD Group’s research forecasts breakfast occasions (both in restaurants and at home) will grow by 5 percent through 2019. If you’re currently offering breakfast, are you hitting customers’ sweet spots? And if you’re not, is it time to expand into this segment? It’s worth keeping an eye on current breakfast trends.