Factors related to the economy permeated the 2009 National Restaurant Association Show, held May 16 to 19 in Chicago. Both on the show floor and throughout the educational sessions, great energy was poured into tapping trends to drive growth in the coming months and years.
On May 17, Steve Dolinsky, food reporter, ABC7 Chicago, led a Keynote Executive Panel designed to extrapolate foodservice trend insights. During the panel, he notes, wine maker and restaurateur Joseph Bastianich “talked about how he feels the industry is doing a disservice to itself by continually marking things down and offering happy hour specials and recession specials. He was saying that, instead, people should be focusing on how to make the customer experience even better, how to make their product even better.”
One method of escalating the consumer experience is to play into the ongoing interest in ingredient pedigrees. “People are really focusing on the sourcing of the ingredients, where it’s coming from, being of very high quality, and not coming from the back of a semi that’s been traveling all over the country, but really being local—hyper-local,” says Dolinsky. “People are using some local farms, knowing their farmers.” However, he notes, people don’t necessarily want to pay a lot for local, artisanal foods, revealing a bit of a disconnect.
Operators are looking toward more local sources, but they should also be paying attention to “locales,” notes Melissa Abbott, senior trends analyst, The Hartman Group, Bellevue, WA. “This is something that we’re going to continue to see in the next five years—local sourcing and looking to foods in a locale,” she says. “Even if it’s from an industrial farm, just giving a little bit of a story about the farmer or the business encourages the customer to feel more confident about their purchase decision.”
Global flavors are also on the rise—but restaurants need to make them accessible, notes Abbott. “Korean flavors is a great example,” she says. “Not necessarily going for the hearty, strong kimchi or the bibimbap, but the flavors that are predominant in them.”
On May 19, Harry Crane, executive chef, Kraft Foods, Glenview, IL, and president of the Research Chefs Association, led a panel on best approaches to melding the public’s desire for both local foods and global flavors. “Chefs have always been leaders in knowing where our food comes from,” he says. “They are also leaders in teaching their customers about flavor and ingredient combinations that may not be as familiar as regional favorites. Since it’s obvious that not every product a chef uses can be local, operators have to gauge how far they can go in pushing these unfamiliar concepts and still embrace consumers’ desires for the use of local ingredients.”
We should look to the members of Generation Y—and their often startlingly high foodservice expectations—to help divine future trends, notes Abbott. “They’re going to be the ones to dictate where flavors should be going.”
But we certainly can’t forget the boomers. Luckily, Gen Y and the boomers “tend to kind of mirror each other in some ways,” says Abbott. “Very often, the Millennials are the children of the boomers.” The boomers helped catalyze great culinary change in America over the years, but now it’s their children’s turn to take the next step. “What we’re seeing is that the Millennials are, in fact, teaching their boomer parents how to be a little bit more adventurous,” says Abbott. “They play off each other.”