9 January 2010
Restaurant Industry Trends
Posted by Crystal under: News .
In this day and age, with internet and other wonders of the modern technology, the restaurant industry welcomes more and more innovations not even deemed possible a couple of years ago. There are certainly some interesting new trends worthy of your attention, and we are talking about three of them here:
Create Meals from the Desktop to Table Top. Here is how this new culinary concept works: you (customer) book a cooking session on-line (or, less often, by phone), select the meals from seasonal monthly menus, the chef buys and prepares the ingredients for you, you pop along to the kitchen at a designated time, work at one of the stations with the help of the chef, and cook the meals. The restaurant has several cooking stations where you cook using step-by-step instructions, with chefs ready to help you. You can customize the meals to your family taste; you don’t have to follow the recipes exactly. After the meals are prepared and cooked, they are sealed and ready to go. Alternatively, you can seal your uncooked meals and cook them at home. There are quite a few companies on-line engaged in this type of business, check out Visit The Kitchen for an example.
Commercial Kitchen Rentals. Due to downturn economy, commercial kitchen rental is an exceedingly popular concept. If you are thinking to start a food business but can’t afford to set up a costly licensed commercial kitchen, the solution is to use someone else’s certified kitchen! If you’re on the other side of the equation and own a certified kitchen, you can rent it out and get additional income for your main restaurant business. There are many aspiring chefs in your area that would love to rent your kitchen space and equipment by the hour and will work around your kitchen schedule. You can offer opportunity to have part-time commercial kitchen use for cooking teachers, photographers, production crews or just chefs, restaurateurs, event and corporate caterers. Commercial kitchens are rented for a variety of purposes: to teach cooking classes, test new recipes for your restaurant, make products to sell at Farmer’s markets or stores like Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, etc.
Text-Messaging Vs. Paging for Restaurants Where Guests Experience Wait Times. Vibrating pagers have a lot of drawbacks: people walk off with them regularly, pagers are easy to drop and they break easily, customers need to really pay attention to them, and pagers don’t work if customers wander outside of the waiting area. To resolve these issues, Recess Mobile released a new application, called Recess, enabling restaurants to text message waiting customers to alert them when their table is ready: in the meantime, the customers can do a little shopping without having to stay within the restaurant’s waiting area. You can use this application to alert your take out customers that their food is ready. Or, as a customer waits at the bar to be seated, your messaging system can be set up to send him a text message with the drink specials. Moreover, alerting waiting customers is not the only functionality of this texting application; Recess is an application with an emphasis on marketing and promotion. The application can send messages to your customers asking them to subscribe to your restaurant’s mobile offers. Then you can manage your subscribed guests on your mobile marketing list. You can communicate directly with the customer by SMS, sending them special offers, requesting feedback, sending thank you notes, etc. Through the administrative website you can customize all of the messages that go out to your guests. System is interactive: customers can subscribe to your marketing campaigns and reply to your messages from their cell phones, 99% of cell phones are capable of receiving text messages from this application.
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