Food Service is a trade of extreme consequences. When it isn’t done well, the results can be exceptionally awful, and in some cases, exceptionally funny. Here’s a small collection of some of my favorite mishaps, fails and bad ideas in recent restaurant history. These cases range from social media disasters to racist Hulk Hogan-themed restaurants, but they all share the common quality of being both foolish and hilarious.

Magic Restroom Café

In a sudden stroke of genius, somebody decided to consolidate two facets of the modern dining establishment, the restaurant and the bathroom. Magic Restroom Café, drawing from a somehow popular phenomenon in Taiwan, is a fully bathroom-themed Taiwanese restaurant. The seats are toilets, you eat out of little ceramic toilets, there are showerheads on the walls next to every table, and a urinal is present in the front entrance (a nice touch!).

Unfortunately, the toilet seats are not actually functional toilets, demonstrating a clear lack of follow-through with the theme.

Though the idea is somewhat catchy and cute, the restaurant closed down after just half a year. This seems to be attributed to the mediocre food. Apparently dishes such as “black poop” and “stinky tofu” weren’t tasty enough to compensate for the fact that they were served in a toilet.

As a handful of Yelp reviews said, the food was “mediocre” by the wait times were great! As one customer put it:

“There was NO WAIT at all, actually, there was barely people in the cafe.”

Another customer seemed to be having a great time until “it got pretty disgusting towards the end of eating the dessert. When shaved ice and ice kind of melted and you realize that you are eating out of a toilet bowl…”

Fast Food Employee Insubordination

It takes nationwide success to give a fast-food chain a good reputation, yet it really only takes one bad employee with a social media account to ruin a reputation. That’s exactly what happened at Taco Bell, KFC, and Dominos.

In the case of Taco Bell, a photo was posted on the company’s Facebook feed a few years ago depicting an employee licking a large stack of the then-new Cool Ranch Doritos Locos taco shells.

Some would argue that you can’t blame him, but I believe it was the idea that the shells may be served later that put the fast food company in a predicament. Taco Bell assured us that this took place during training and that the licked shells were to be thrown out, but they fired the employee and apologized nevertheless.

Just remember next time you’re about to eat a Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco, it might have been licked by this guy.

KFC encountered a similar problem in 2008 when three of their employees decided to put on their bikinis and take a bath in their large commercial dishwasher sink.

The girls were discovered when they posted a series of photos from the event onto Myspace in a gallery entitled “KFC moments”. The pictures included captions such as “haha KFC showers!” and “haha we turned on the jets”.

Dominos probably endured the worst version of this. In their case, one of their employees filmed and narrated a co-worker shooting his nasal mucus into their food. In this instance, the employees faced felony charges and Dominos had to swiftly put out a statement in response to the brand-damaging act.

Hulk Hogan-Affiliated Restaurants

Pro Wrestler Hulk Hogan has dabbled in everything from rap music to web hosting to reality tv, so it’s no surprise that he’s been involved in the restaurant industry more than once in his life. It all started with Pastamania, a restaurant located in the Mall of America that served dishes such as “Hulk-U’s” and “Hulk-A-Roos”. Unfortunately for fans of both Hulk Hogan and pasta, the restaurant closed down less than a year after its 1995 opening.

Still eager to get in the restaurant business, Hogan licensed out his name to open a restaurant named Hogan’s Beach in Tampa at the end of 2012. In describing the restaurant shortly before opening, he said “It’s going to be Jimmy Buffet’s [Margaritaville] times 10; Hooters times 10.”

By 2014, the restaurant was tied up in controversy over an allegedly racist dress code. The dress code restrictions banned items such as sports jerseys, baggy attire, low hanging pants, backwards or sideways hats, do-rags, oversized jewelry, and bandannas. People felt these restrictions targeted a specific group of people, which prompted Hogan to change the dress code. The code was especially ridiculous considering they were targeting a style from over a decade ago and banning bandannas from a Hulk Hogan themed restaurant. Ironically, the restaurant changed its name and re-branded shortly following the release of a video transcript of Hogan using racist language.

Ever present in the food industry, Hogan also has had a blender named the Hulk Hogan Thunder Mixer, a grill called The Hulk Hogan Ultimate Grill, an energy drink called Hogan Energy, a line of microwavable hamburgers at Wal-Mart called “Hulkster Burgers” and finally, a website called Hogan Nutrition that sells nutritional and dietary products.

Gordon Ramsay Literally Leaves an Episode of Kitchen Nightmares, Owners Freak Out on Social Media

Kitchen nightmares is named kitchen nightmares for a reason. The restaurants featured are so awful and dysfunctional that Gordon Ramsay needs to come set things straight. This worked out well for a very long time, until one restaurant was so bad that Ramsay completely gave up on helping them.

Amy’s Baking Company, a restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona, seemed like a more than ideal candidate for Kitchen Nightmares. The owners, Amy and Sammy, pocketed their service staff’s tips and said to have fired over 100 employees since they opened the restaurant. Throughout the episode, the owners scream at each other, reject Ramsay’s advice, and literally threaten and yell profanities at a diner as they kick them out for complaining about a long wait.

Eventually, Ramsay is done and leaves the restaurant following a devastating final exchange where he calmly and effectively tells off the owners. After the episode aired, users on Yelp, Reddit and Facebook posted a healthy variety of insulting things about the restaurant and the owners.

Apparently still thinking their reputation was worth defending, Sammy and Amy struck back with a beautifully written series of semi-coherent Facebook posts in mostly all-caps. After they realized that they weren’t exactly helping themselves, they made a post claiming they were hacked. Considering the all-caps and similar nature of the rest of their comments and posts, this seems highly doubtful.

I could summarize what they say, but I don’t think I could do them better justice than the posts themselves. Enjoy.

Check out americanrestaurantsupply.com for great deals on food service equipment and supplies

Classic Restaurant F*ck ups: Mishaps, Fails and Awful Ideas in the Food Service Industry was originally published in American Restaurant Supply on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Minimum wage is increasing in various parts of the country, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that more and more areas will follow suite. Understandably so, this change is of particular concern for restaurant owners, who employee 10% of the US workforce.

The classic concern is this: restaurant owners will have to spend more on labor, decreasing their profits and putting their business in jeopardy. In order to survive, they will be forced to either lay off workers- decreasing jobs- or increase their menu prices, making their restaurant less accessible to the lower and middle classes.

On the other side, proponents for a higher minimum wage advance that the increased wages will give consumers more buying power and put more money in the economy, compensating for the loss of profits from increased labor costs. Further, they believe that paying employees a living wage takes priority over growth within the industry.

Well who’s right? In our increasingly polarized country, it’s extremely hard to tell. There are multiple studies on the matter that yield conflicting results, and a lot of the same opinions being repeated over and over again with a lack of a satisfying amount of evidence on both sides.

Let’s look at three interesting and recently conducted studies on the matter.

UC Berkeley Study:

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley looked at how Seattle’s recent minimum wage (which is currently $13 and on its way to $15 by 2021) increases affected employment and wages. This study is particularly relevant to us because it looked specifically at the food service industry for data.

Their results showed that wages increased while employment remained the same. If this study is to be trusted, one would conclude that minimum wage increases up to $13 does not have a substantial impact on restaurant employment.

Critics of the study claim that its particular emphasis on the food service industry doesn’t paint a full picture of the effects of the law. In our case, however, we are solely interested in the law’s effects on food service.

University of Washington Study:

University of Washington researchers did a similar study on Seattle, only they looked at more than just the food service industry and got vastly different results. They found that the increase resulted in a significant decrease in working hours for low wage earners.

They found that hours worked in low-wage jobs dropped by around 9%, which was a drop big enough for there to be more overall money lost than money gained from the increase in wages. This means that there are not only less jobs, but workers are on average earning less money and putting less in the economy. According to this study, an increase to a $13 minimum wage has a devastating impact on low-wage workers.

Critics of this study think that it ignores other factors within Seattle’s changing economy. Since Seattle has seen the arrival of Amazon and other companies, there has been an influx of high wage jobs and living prices have skyrocketed. They argue that these are more likely reasons for a decrease in low wage working hours. This may explain why the UC Berkeley study, which only measured the restaurant industry (which hires mainly low-wage workers), didn’t notice this shift.

Luca Study (aka the Yelp Study):

One study by the husband and wife team of Dara Lee Luca of Mathematic Policy Research and Michael Luca of Harvard Business School looked at effects of minimum wage hikes on restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area (where there have been a number of increases a bit less intense than Seattle) . Rather than looking at wages or employment, they looked at the frequency in which restaurants shut down after the increase, and then examined them in light of their ratings on Yelp.

They found that increases in minimum wage did affect the overall shut down rate of restaurants. According to their data, a 10% increase in minimum wage corresponds to around a 7% increase in restaurant shut downs.

Interestingly, they found that a restaurant’s Yelp rating also significantly affected the likelihood of a restaurant shutting down after the wage increases. While low-rated restaurants were more likely to shut down, high rated restaurants were hardly affected. Restaurants with a rating of 3.5 stars, for example, saw their likelihood of shutting down increase by 14% for every dollar increase in minimum wage, while restaurants with a 5-star rating saw no increase at all and those with 4 stars see a very modest one.

Though an imperfect measure, a Yelp rating is a pretty good signifier of restaurant quality. This study suggests that quality restaurants are fairly safe while those lagging behind will be hit hard by future minimum wage increases.

What does this mean for the future of the restaurant industry?

Though it remains unclear exactly how wages, employment and shut-downs will be influenced by increases in minimum wage, there’s no doubt that it will have a tangible effect on the industry. In the case that they have a substantial effect on the industries growth, what will that mean for the common restaurant?

Luckily, the restaurant industry has a lot of great things going for it right now, and so it’s actually not impossible that these things may cancel out whatever impact minimum wage increases have. For one, the restaurant industry has consistently seen higher annual job growth than the rest of the economy (which has still seen consistent growth since the 2008 recession), and although 2017 has seen slightly slower growth than last year, there’s still a projected increase of 1.6 million jobs over the next 10 years.

Further, there is an increasing consumer demand for dining out. A growing economy is giving households breathing room, consumers consistently report wishing they would go to restaurants more frequently, and consumer spending habits have shifted more towards buying experiences over material items in the last few handful of years.

Undoubtedly an increased minimum wage is going to be rough for some businesses, and some might shut down. For the most part, however, the restaurant industry is healthy and growing, and should be able face the changes without too much chaos.

That being said, if you’re a restaurant owner in a major city, it may help you down the road to start preparing for the changes.

Check out americanrestaurantsupply.com for great deals on food service equipment and supplies

How will Minimum Wage Increases Actually Affect the Restaurant Industry? was originally published in American Restaurant Supply on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Like just about every other industry, the food service industry is becoming increasingly automated. Considering humankind’s straightforward quest to never have to interact with one another, this makes sense. Why talk to a restaurant employee, tip them, and then complain about the service when you can order from a robot and skip right to the complaining?

In all seriousness, we are currently seeing automation in food service really take off. From fast food to middle-end restaurants, many establishments are gradually adding various forms of automation both in and out of the kitchen.

Despite recent breakthroughs in automation and robotics, we’ve actually been trying to take waiters and waitresses out of the picture for quite some time. Vending machines began dispensing food in the late 1800s. In 1897, the first Automat opened, a restaurant where you put a nickel in a shiny futuristic-machine, a cook behind the scenes prepares it, and a meal gets dispensed from the mysterious sci-fi like contraption. Over just the last few decades, soda service grew from an employee pouring it to self-serve fountains to touch-screen Coca-Cola 360 machines.

Today, however, food service automation is reaching new heights. If you’ve been to a McDonald's in Europe, Canada, or an airport recently, you’ve probably noticed the kiosks that allow you to order your food using a touch screen display and pick it up when it’s ready. Even further, McDonald's opened a beta version of a fully automated McDonald's in 2015 involving robots that work 50 times faster than the average human. There is only a small team of humans there to keep the robots in check.

The manager of the store had this to say of his robot co-workers:

“These things are great! They get their work done in a fast and orderly manner, plus they don’t ask for cigarette breaks.”

A spokesman for McDonald's cited “a high demand for a minimum wage of 15$/hr”, “protests [against McDonald's] getting worse every day”, “the tremendous margin of human error, poor hygiene, lack of education,” and “laziness” as reasons for the move towards automation.

Many local fast food workers expressed concerns about the new automated restaurant, some of them were people who lost their job during the transition to automation.

Shares of McDonald's have steadily increased since 2015, reaching all-time highs. Wendy’s is now following suite.

Increases in automation are also present in a variety of ways among many other restaurant chains. Chipotle, Panera and Starbucks have implemented touch screen ordering, and Chili’s, Red Robin and Olive Garden have implemented at-the-table touch-screen payment processing.

Moving over to the hipper side of the restaurant industry, a variety of new emerging food service businesses and restaurants are using automation as their business model. Eatsa, for example, is an expanding restaurant chain where customers order on their phone or an iPad and quickly receive a meal in a cubby with their name on it, all without having to interact with anyone. It seems the era of the automat is returning.

Robots are likewise beginning to have larger roles in the kitchen. A large portion of modern kitchen equipment has programmable settings for specific food items, making it as simple as a press of a button to cook something to perfection. With this technology, humans do significantly less, and it’s not unreasonable to expect them to be gradually phased out of the kitchen.

Some new businesses and restaurants are doing just that. Momentum Machines released a device in 2014 that makes hamburgers completely on its own. It presses patties, chops toppings, and assembles it all into a perfect hamburger at a rate of 360 burgers per hour. This burger robot is said to be more consistent, sanitary and fast than any human burger chef. Better yet, the next generation of the machine will have the capability to serve “custom meat grinds for every single customer” allowing people to choose exact proportions of meats like beef, pork, and bison to be in their burger. Last year the first automated burger restaurant opened in San Francisco using this device.

Beyond burgers, 2016’s National Restaurant Association Show featured three robot chefs that are capable and ready to go. One of them is a sushi chef that makes maki, hand rolls and nigiri at a rate of 3,600 pieces of nigiri an hour, another is a robot “employee” that can work a fryer and cook a batch of french fries as quickly as a human employee, and the last was a salad vending machine that allows customers to select custom salads from a large variety of ingredients and receive them almost instantly.

What does all this mean for the food service industry

Any discussion on automation is destined to become a discussion about the loss of jobs. But will automation in the food service industry really mean less jobs for humans? It’s pretty hard to say at this point, but I’d say it’s well within the realm of possibility.

There are three main reasons food service operations are looking to automate. One is to cut labor costs by not having to pay human employees. Another is to increase efficiency, quality, sanitation, uniformity, etc. Last, some companies will use automation and robotics for branding and publicity purposes, drawing attention regardless of the practicality of its use.

In the case of the second two, humans shouldn’t have to worry about being replaced. Kiosks at McDonalds and touch screen ordering at Chipotle probably won’t put too many people out of a job. Instead, they’re meant to enhance the experience of the customer by speeding up the ordering process and making them feel like they’re in the future. These places still have people making food and watching over the kiosks.

When considering the incentive to cut labor costs, however, it’s hard not imagine a loss of jobs. If automated technology gets cheap and reliable enough, there will be no reason to pay multiple employees a living wage. If restaurants continue to follow the model of the fully automated McDonalds in Phoenix, or worse yet, the automated burger restaurant in San Francisco using Momentum Machine’s burger maker, then we can certainly expect less jobs in the fast food industry. But will there be new jobs elsewhere?

When asked about the potential economic effects of their device, Momentum Machines had this to say:

“The issue of machines and job displacement has been around for centuries and economists generally accept that technology like ours actually causes an increase in employment. The three factors that contribute to this are 1. the company that makes the robots must hire new employees, 2. the restaurant that uses our robots can expand their frontiers of production which requires hiring more people, and 3. the general public saves money on the reduced cost of our burgers. This saved money can then be spent on the rest of the economy.”

While these points are true in certain respects, and I don’t necessarily believe we need to stop automating, I can’t help seeing negative consequences in spite of them. Fast Food Jobs are unskilled and don’t require an education or many resources, whereas skills required for robot-making jobs would presumably range from some technical knowledge of machinery to a full-on computer science degree. If jobs move from the fast food industry to the automation industry, couldn’t that take jobs away from the lower class and just place them in in the middle and upper classes?

On the second point about how using their robot would allow a company to “expand their frontiers of production” causing them to hire more people, I’m still not convinced. This presumably means opening new stores and providing more services, yet who’s to say their expansion won’t also be based on automation? New stores just mean more robots, and they have an incentive to use automation to provide new services.

Finally, if a large portion of jobs are taken by automation, then there will be less money in the economy, canceling out the fact that the reduced cost of burgers will allow more money to be spent elsewhere in the economy.

Nonetheless, automation in inevitable both in and out of the food service industry. No one knows for sure what effects it will have on our lives, but one thing seems clear: we need to learn to work with it instead of against it.

For now, at least, restaurant workers can take comfort in the fact that that robots can’t taste food. The practice of eating is just about as human as it gets, and will for a long time require at least some humans to facilitate. Until burger making machines become our robot overlords (and that will happen), we’re still ultimately in control.

Check out americanrestaurantsupply.com for great deals on food service equipment and supplies

Automation in the Food Service Industry: Where we are now and what it means was originally published in American Restaurant Supply on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Check out americanrestaurantsupply.com for great deals on food service equipment and supplies

As the seasons change throughout the year, so do the types of beers we drink. After a summer filled with crisp Pilsners and Pale Ales, it’s about time to dig our noses into the great variety of fall seasonal beers.

Changing your restaurant's beer selection for the season is not only a great way to attract a beer-aficionado crowd, but it’s absolutely required. If you yourself aren’t hip to the appropriate beers to serve in the fall time, this article is here to help.

Here are four beer types that beer-lovers will expect to drink in the fall. It’s best to engage with your local beer scene to find the best brews of these types in your area. In case you live in a beer desert where local breweries are scarce, I’ve included featured beers of each type that are both critically acclaimed and widely available in most places.

Red Ales

A red ale is practically any ale that has a color darker than a pale ale and lighter than a traditional dark ale. This can range from lighter amber ales to ales with a dark brownish red hue. These beers tend to have a sufficient amount of malts to achieve their darker color, but still room for varying amounts of hop flavor. There are generally three types of beers that are considered red ales: the American Amber Ale, the Belgian Flemish Red Ale, and the Irish Red Ale.

Like all red ales, American ambers place an emphasis on malts, with flavors ranging from toasty to fruity and everything in between. That being said, ambers are generally the lightest and hoppiest of the red ales. After all, if there’s one thing we love about our beers here in the US, it’s our hops.

Belgian Flemish Red Ales are generally a bit darker, giving a deeper red color that ranges from ruby to burgundy. A sip of a Flemish red will give you malt, complex fruit and either vanilla or chocolate flavors. Many of these ales are also fairly sour, with some Flemish reds even being classified as sours.

Finally, the Irish Red Ale is like an amber with less emphasis on hops and more on malts. Among the flavors in these ales are caramel, toast, buttery toffee and sweetness. These ales have a dry finish, and can also be brewed as lagers.

Featured Beer: AleSmith Evil Dead Red

San Diego’s AleSmith releases their Evil Dead Red Amber Ale Every Halloween. With a spooky deep-blood red color, this beer features a balance of intense aromas of citrus and pine from American hops and sweet, rich, bread-like flavors of caramel malts.

Oktoberfest/Marzenbiers

Oktoberfest Style beers, now synonymous with Marzenbiers (March Beers), are the style traditionally associated with the beers served at Munich’s annual Oktoberfest. Before refrigeration was invented, hot weather prevented Germans from brewing in the summer, meaning fall’s supply needed to be brewed in March (the last safe month to brew). The first Oktoberfest in 1810 coincided perfectly with the tapping of the Marzenbiers brewed that year, permanently imbedding beer into the core of the festival

Today’s Oktoberfest beers are a result of a tradition and continuous development of beers meant for the festival. The result is generally a full-bodied beer that is dark copper in color with rich, toasty malt flavors and a mild hop profile.

Featured Beer: Ayinger Oktober Fest Marzin

This German-brewed beer from Ayinger is on the lighter side of the Oktoberfest spectrum, showcasing an amber-tinted deep golden color. It has a moderately large body and is lightly sweet with a balance of malts and floral hop aromas.

Extra Special Bitter (ESB)

ESBs are an English beer with a medium body, low carbonation and dark gold to light copper color. Despite its name, these beers aren’t considerably bitter. Instead, like most beers on this list, ESBs are defined by their delicate balance between hoppy bitterness and malt flavors. Hop flavors and bitterness are showcased, but not enough to dominate the malt flavors. Usually made with earthy, resiny, or floral UK hops balanced by a sweet caramel malt flavor and a moderate amount of fruit flavor. A great balanced beer for the copper colors and moderate temperatures of fall.

Featured Beer: Fuller’s ESB

Brewed since 1971, Fuller’s ESB has a rich mahogany color. This beer can be described as a combination of subtle yet present cherry and orange fruit flavors, malty toffee and caramel notes, and grassy peppery notes from English hops.

Dunkelweizen

Dunkelweizens are the darker counterpart of the Hefeweizen, the very popular wheat beer from Germany. Besides their distinctive wheat flavor, these beers are characterized by complex malts often resulting in sweet and chocolate-like flavors. Like Hefeweizens, Dunkelweizens also have clove and banana flavors and a low balancing bitterness. When summer ends and the time for light hefeweizens is over, dunkelweizens will comfortably take their place.

Featured Beer: Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier Dunkel

This dunkelweizen from the Bavarian brewery Weihenstephan is most well-known for its creamy white foam head, which contrasts sharply with the dark brown color of the beer. As far as flavor goes, the beer features a fruity-fresh sweetness with hints of bananas with flavors of roasted malt and caramel.

Check out americanrestaurantsupply.com for great deals on food service equipment and supplies

Essential Beers to Serve This Fall was originally published in American Restaurant Supply on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When was the last time you stepped into a casual dining chain like Chili’s, Applebee’s, or Buffalo Wild Wings? If you’re like most Americans, it’s probably been a while. Recent years have seen a significant decline in the casual dining restaurant industry. According to industry tracker TDn2K, casual dining chains as a whole made less money than any other type of restaurant in 10 out of the 12 months of 2016. Further, many big names have suffered major losses, with Applebee’s recently announcing it will close more than 130 restaurants, stocks of Brinker International (Chili’s parent company) reaching their lowest price in years, Ruby Tuesday selling 95 restaurants and looking for a new CEO, Red Lobster going private in 2014, and several other chains following similar patterns.

Why exactly is this? If you’re between 18 and 35 you probably have a simple answer: they’re just not cool. While this very well may be the case, there are a variety of factors that contribute to the perceived lack of “coolness” now associated with casual dining chains.

A large reason has to do with the rise of dining options that don’t involve going to a restaurant and sitting down. Many attribute casual dining’s decline to the rise of fast-casual restaurants such as Chipotle, Panera Bread and Boston Market. These places often use fresh and locally sourced ingredients to provide the same quality food as casual dining chains, only they provide the speed of a fast food chain and the atmosphere of a trendy independent establishment. From the perspective of a younger person, the fast-casual experience of quickly getting decent food in a cool and trendy environment trumps waiting for similar-quality food in a dark and all-too familiar Applebee’s as you’re surrounded by people you perceive as the elderly. It’s also worth mentioning that in many cases fast-casual chains have successfully marketed themselves as healthy.

Other options involve not going out at all. The rising popularity of delivery services such as UberEats, Postmates and GrubHub allow hungry people to get good food without leaving their homes. On top of that, grocery stores have found ways to compete with restaurants more and more over the years. According to the Department of Agriculture, grocery costs went down by 1.3% in 2016. This, with an emphasis on healthier eating and a tendency of millennials to eat at home, makes eating at home all the more appealing.

This may explain why sit-down dining in general has been less popular. After all, last year saw a 2.4% drop in same store restaurant sales across the country, and that includes all types of restaurants. Yet as I mentioned earlier, casual dining restaurants were shown to be the weakest in the industry. Why them specifically?

This is a result of changes in culture. Casual dining chains are associated with suburbs, mass-consumerism, corporatism, and low-quality food and service. The restaurant industry is seeing the entrance of an emerging generation of city-dwelling, anti-corporate, affluent young people who are looking for something very different than a traditional sit down casual dining chain experience.

How Casual Dining Chains are Trying to Adapt

Aware of the source of their downfall, many of these companies set out to change their brand to appeal to millennials. The most drastic change came from Applebee’s, who over the past few years re-branded themselves as a modern bar and grill in order to appeal to “a more youthful and affluent demographic with a more independent and even sophisticated dining mindset”. To do this, they remodeled some of their locations and started serving unorthodox dishes such as sriracha lime-sauce shrimp and a pork, ham and bacon sandwich (the infamous triple pork bonanza). Many of the other chains have similar strategies involving an attempt to sell to a younger, more urban crowd. Chili’s began selling craft beer, and TGI Friday’s are trying to replicate a gastropub by emphasizing the bar and endless appetizers.

For some of these restaurants, it’s too early to tell whether these new strategies are working or not, but it’s generally not looking too good. In the case of Applebee’s, their re-branding effort completely backfired. The updated aesthetic and menu did not end up appealing to millennials, and in the process turned off regulars. The result was a sales drop of over 6% from last year.

Other restaurants have found some success in attempts to switch industries and build fast-casual restaurants. Tony Roma’s, a place I completely forgot about, opened a trendy fast casual restaurant called TR Fire Grill in Orlando to great success. Similarly, Cracker Barrel has opened a few fast-casual locations called Holler and Dash and Denny’s is working on “The Den”. This strategy may not last, however, as there have been recent reports that fast-casual growth is slowing and that the trend is starting to fade.

Red Lobster is an interesting case of recent success. After years of drops in sales, the seafood chain had reported positive comparable sales for the last six quarters (as of May 2016) and went up 10 places to the fourth highest rated casual dining restaurant from 2015 to 2016, according to the Nation’s Restaurant News survey. Perhaps most strikingly of all, Red Lobster was named top restaurant choice of 18 to 24-year-olds by Nation’s Restaurant News Survey, suggesting that they are appealing to millennials more than any other casual dining chain.

So how is Red Lobster going against the industry trend by increasing sales and appealing to millennials? They’re ignoring millennials and dining trends all together. Unlike their counterparts, Red Lobster is making no effort to appeal to specific demographics or trends. Instead, they are simply working on improving the quality of their restaurant. They are making practical changes such as increasing the size of their shrimp by 47%, changing cooking practices to improve taste, adding exciting new dishes and beverages to their menu, and responding to common customer feedback by updating their dishes. By simply working towards making their restaurant better, they have successfully appealed to multiple demographics.

If you think about it, this makes complete sense. Casual dining chains will always be just that: large, corporate, heavily-advertised establishments associated with suburbs and older generations. People, especially younger people, will always have these perceptions and will always have the option to go somewhere different. Instead of desperately trying to re-brand themselves and inevitably failing, Red Lobster simply improved the experience customers have at their restaurants.

Anyone can argue with what a casual dining chain is and what it stands for, but no one can argue with great food and a great dining experience. Each generation has their own tastes and preferences, but tasty food is universal. That’s what casual dining chains should be striving for.

Check out americanrestaurantsupply.com for great deals on food service equipment and supplies

The Death of the Casual Dining Chain (and what’s being done to stop it) was originally published in American Restaurant Supply on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As time goes on and millennials start making more and more money, it is increasingly important to have the tools and the know-how to sell to this younger generation. Millennials have reached an annual 200 billion dollars of buying power, a number that is steadily on its way towards surpassing baby boomers. Even further, a food institute analysis of data from the US department of Agriculture states that Millennials spend 44% of their food dollars on eating out, which is notably more than previous generations.

Consequently, restaurants are going to need to adapt to this new consumer environment in order to survive and prosper. A millennial myself, I combined my own experiences and other sources to compile a brief list of crucial tips for selling to a millennial crowd.

Environmental Sustainability

One of the biggest differences between millennials and previous generations is the weight they place on social and environmental issues. As a young generation inheriting an imperfect world, we care deeply about issues of environmental sustainability and social equality, and are more than willing give our money to those who share these concerns.

The best way to present your restaurant as environmentally friendly is to actually adopt environmentally friendly practices, and then advertise this to your consumers in a way that doesn’t seem ingenuine. Avoid excessively throwing around words like “green” and “eco-friendly” with little to back it up, as many consumers have wised up to this form of weightless eco-consumerism. Instead, try showing your sustainable habits in practice. For example, a self-busing restaurant or café could have noticeable recycling and compost bins with helpful instructions on what to put in each. Another example is increased transparency, as in having as much information as possible about your food and its source on the menu or available elsewhere. Millennials don’t want you to just tell them how environmentally friendly you are, they want to see it.

Another way to help the environment is by updating your equipment. There are a variety of compostable items that will simultaneously help the environment and be noticed by your customers. You can significantly reduce your energy usage with Energy Star certified equipment or advanced cooking equipment such as a Combi Oven (for more information on Combi Ovens and their many benefits, see my previous post on saving labor). This also has the benefit of saving money on utility costs, as these products ultimately pay for themselves through energy bill savings. Further, certain cleaning supplies have been confirmed to be safer and less harmful on the environment than others by the EPA.

Social Responsibility

In addition to environmental concerns, millennials care deeply about social issues and equality. In the restaurant context, the biggest issue related to this is the question of cultural appropriation. There has been a lot of controversy over white-owned restaurants profiting off of ethnic foods and décor, most notably there was a list of Portland restaurants accused of appropriation that resulted in boycotts and even a place closing down. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, it’s an important thing to consider when trying to sell to millennial buyers.

Millennials like ethnic food, and by no means does this mean you can’t sell any ethnic food if you are not of that ethnicity. It’s a matter of being mindful of your presentation and attitude. A white-owned Mexican food restaurant with a ton of traditional Mexican decor may raise some red flags, whereas a place with contemporary decor that presents its food as a unique American take on Mexican food will likely be in the clear. Listen to your consumers and make sure you are not profiting off of a culture you are not a part of.

Social responsibility can also entail getting involved in the community in a productive way. This can include catering local events, giving out food to the homeless, or working with other local businesses for both charitable and promotional purposes.

Educational Dining and Connoisseurship

Restaurant owners are likely to get a kick out of a sketch from the IFC comedy series Portlandia about how much modern restaurant goers need to know about their food. The sketch features two snobby restaurant goers asking detailed questions about the origins of their meat, followed by the waitress responding with an excessively detailed account of the animal’s life (even including its name and personality). This scene may be comedy, but it strikes a very real chord when it comes to millennial dining habits. Millennials want their dining experience to be educational, they want a story with their meal.

I mentioned earlier that we want transparency, but this means selling products where transparency is actually a selling point. This includes free range and grass-fed meat, local meat and produce, craft beer and wine, and anything where you can tell a story about the food your serving. These products may be more expensive, but if done correctly, the experience your customers get will warrant higher prices. If price is an issue, knowledgeable local craft beer service is a great place to start.

Tied into this is a sense of connoisseurship that comes with consuming high-quality items that you know about. This is especially true of beverages, as craft beer and wine has become increasingly popular with millennials (and just about everyone else!). Having a rotating selection of interesting craft beer and wines will definitely draw millennials to your restaurant. This also leaves a lot of room for creativity. For example, recommending specific beer and wine parings with your menu items, or even including the recommendations on the menu. This is also an opportunity to improve your beverage presentation with specialized glassware for specific wines and beers, something that sets an establishment apart as distinguished and intelligent.

Social Media and Branding

It won’t take much convincing to say that social media is a huge part of the millennial lifestyle. Obviously, it’s important to capitalize on this, but how exactly is the best way of going about this? Restaurant success in this arena generally results from effectively establishing a brand online, with a particular emphasis on the “voice” of a restaurant. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the crucial platforms to use. Work with a millennial-aged employee with a good sense of humor and a lot of familiarity with these sites in order to run the pages. The voice of your social media brand should be unique to your restaurant, yet a witty, socially conscience, and welcoming voice is a great place to start.

Restaurant branding can go far beyond the internet. Invest in a food truck and make appearances at local events and music festivals, sell t-shirts, publish a cookbook. These are all great ways to brand your restaurant and make it appealing to millennials.

How to Sell Food to Millennials (Written by a Millennial) was originally published in American Restaurant Supply on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Labor costs are often the highest cost for a restaurant or other food service operation. Industry standards generally place restaurant labor costs between 30 and 35 percent of total sales. With nationwide rises in minimum wage, keeping labor costs low is becoming increasingly difficult. Luckily, there are a variety of ways to lower these costs through certain methods both in and out of the kitchen.

In this two-part series, I will share some effective methods for cutting labor costs through both equipment and managerial techniques. Here are a handful of ways to save labor and keep profits high using using managerial techniques recommended by experienced chefs and former restaurant managers that I’ve spoken to for this post.

Unlike labor-saving equipment, these methods have the advantage of being completely free, and are generally pretty easy to adopt.

For ways to save labor through management, check out the previous entry in this two-part series: “Ways to Cut Labor Costs in the Food Service Industry Part 1: Labor Saving Equipment”.

Labor Monitoring Devices

The first step any manager should take when attempting to cut labor costs is to closely monitor labor in a systematic and organized fashion, adjusting it accordingly. This can be done by referring to previous experiences in order to project sales and labor needs during specific days of the week, seasons, or other time periods. There should never be any more employees than the minimum amount needed, and it’s important that they stick to their exact schedules (if 6 people stay 15 minutes late, that’s an extra hour and a half of labor costs). Using an excel spreadsheet or another organizational method, labor usage should be continuously tracked and recorded every month or so relative to changing sales and budget. Number of employees and scheduling can then be easily adjusted based on the recorded data.

Quantity and Frequency of Production

An important labor-saving method in the kitchen is to pay more attention to the quantity and production frequency of certain food items you are producing, thinking specifically about their shelf life and sales rate. Ideally, you want to produce enough product to where it will all sell by the exact time its shelf life ends. In many cases, this doesn’t happen. For example, cooks will often produce one-time batches of marinara sauce that will last for two days, even though marinara sauce has a 5–7 day shelf life. What this often results in is the need to unnecessarily produce something more often, thus requiring more labor.

The key is to find that sweet spot between the amount sold and shelf life, so that you’re producing the maximum amount of product at once without having leftover food waste costs exceed what is being saved in labor. After each batch has either sold or gone bad, evaluate whether you need to make more or less of the product next time, considering how it sold, labor costs, and food waste costs. If all of the product was sold before the end of its shelf life, a larger quantity of product should be made at once. The perfect sweet spot lies where a product is being made as infrequently as possible while there is as little food waste as possible.

Keep a Healthy Roster of Part-Time Employees

Restaurant sales volume can vary drastically throughout a week, day, or even a night. In order to spend as little as possible on labor, it’s important to make sure no one is working when they don’t need to. Rather than hiring several full-time employees, keep a roster of part time employees who are readily available. When your employees aren’t committed to working 40 hours a week, you can easily add and drop workers on the fly depending on their current and projected sales volumes.

Ways to Cut Labor Costs in the Food Service Industry Part 2: Managerial Techniques was originally published in American Restaurant Supply on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this two-part series, I will share some effective methods for cutting labor costs through both equipment and managerial techniques. I learned these methods through both my own experience in the food service industry and by talking to professional chefs. Here are a handful of ways to save labor and keep profits high using labor-saving equipment.

Combi Ovens

Combi Ovens are perhaps the most well-known labor-saving piece of equipment. These units produce both convection and steam heat, and are capable of switching between the two automatically throughout the cooking process. Combi ovens can roast, bake, braise, grill, steam, blanch and poach, and many of these can be done at the same time.

When preparing food that is not cooked to order, this saves a large amount of time and labor. If you only had one convection oven and wanted to prepare braised meat, pasta and roasted potatoes, you would have to cook each one separately one at a time. With a combi oven, you can cook at least two if not all of these items at once. In some cases, you could even program a combi oven to braise your meat overnight, eliminating the need for anyone to be present.

This cuts hours off of the cooking process, and will save you a lot of money on the employees you would need during that process. Even in cook-to-order situations, Combi ovens will reduce the need of having multiple employees operating different cooking applications in different spaces at once. One person is required to operate the combi oven.

In addition to its labor-saving qualities, the combi oven provides the following advantages to an operator:

- Versatility allows for an expounded menu

- Cooking speed increased drastically

- Nutrients are preserved at lower temperatures

- Many units are self-cleaning

- All in one unit saves space and energy

- Allows for control of both temperature and humidity, reducing cooking time

Though many complain of the high prices of combi ovens, they generally provide more returns than losses. Saving labor, energy, water, kitchen space, and the opportunity for menu expansion are well worth the price of one of these units.

Consider the graph below comparing the rough unit cost of an Alto Shaam CTP7–20 Combi Oven (pictured above) and utility savings relative to achieving the same functionality with conventional cooking equipment over a 10-year life span.

In just 4 years and 3 months, the utility costs saved by using a combination oven will have covered the entire cost of the unit. By less than 9 years, the savings will have doubled the original cost. This doesn’t even factor in the amount saved on labor and the amount that can be gained from menu expansions. Unfortunately, these two factors are difficult to quantify, but even utility savings alone clearly make a Combi Oven a worthy investment.

Blast Chillers

The basic concept behind saving labor with blast chillers is that by cooking in bulk and quickly chilling and storing the output, you eliminate the need to continuously cook products throughout the day, thereby reducing the labor required to do so.

Quickly cooling hot foods can be tricky without a blast chiller, as harmful bacteria can grow on your product within the temperature range of 40˚F and 135˚F. Legal regulations for cooling times vary depending on locality, yet a general rule of thumb is that your food needs to leave that range within 4 hours. In many cases, walk-in fridges or freezers will not cool down the product fast enough.

Blast Chillers, on the other hand, have the capability to cool a product through this range in roughly 90 minutes without compromising the freshness or quality of the product. This allows you to prepare a large amount of food beforehand and simply reheat it when it’s ordered, saving copious amounts of time and requiring less hands in the kitchen.

Use a blast chiller in combination with a combi oven and you got yourself a cook-freeze system, maximizing labor cost savings. Cook multiple items at once and immediately chill them in a matter of a few hours. You will quickly find that the number of employees needed at once will be reduced significantly.

Food Processors

A simple way to save labor is through the use of food processors. Rather than paying employees for hours of manual cutting, food processors can slice, dice, ripple cut, grate, shred and more. These machines can be used to prepare a wide variety of items such as vegetables, fruits, soups, marinades, sauces and French fries. These processors are fast. To name one example, the Waring WFP14S Batch Bowl Food Processor can grate 45 lbs of cheese, chop 360 lbs of meat, slice 600 lbs of cucumbers or knead 120 loaves of bread in a single hour, and it’s not even a particularly large unit. It could take multiple paid employees to achieve those rates.

For ways to save labor through management, check out the next entry in this two-part series: “Ways to Cut Labor Costs in the Food Service Industry Part 2: Managerial Techniques”.

Ways to Cut Labor Costs in the Food Service Industry Part 1: Labor Saving Equipment was originally published in American Restaurant Supply on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Unmatched customer service, excellent shipping and return policies, and much more makes American Restaurant Supply the best and most reliable destination for your restaurant equipment needs.

Experts Who Care

Here at American Restaurant Supply there are two things we care about most: quality restaurant equipment and the needs of our customers. We are a family of dedicated employees from food-service backgrounds. From our offices to our warehouses, our employees have worked all around the food service industry and understand it well. Where our competitors’ employees are reading from guides or lack the necessary means to help, we have the expertise, knowledge and experience to help you find the perfect equipment for your needs.

We are committed to helping you find the most economical and sensible solutions for your establishment. Our experts will dedicate themselves not only to helping you find the quality equipment you’re looking for, but will work within your budget and help you make the perfect choices. That means recommending equipment that will save you labor, sharing profit making strategies, or even making special deals on certain products. We know how to increase profits and we know the right brands that will help you do it. We’ve been serving the food service industry since 1951, and we’re a partner that you can trust and rely on.

Unmatched Customer Service

The biggest problem in the online restaurant supply industry is an absence of quality customer service, and we’re out here changing that one day at a time. It only takes a quick web search of our competitors to find a large quantity of frustrated and unhappy customers, usually centered around unhelpful or rude representatives, damaged products and unfair return policies.

Simply put, our customers don’t need to worry about these issues. We pride ourselves on fostering and maintaining the best and most productive partnerships with our customers. If there is ever an issue with our service, we encourage you to give us a call and we will find a way to sort things out. Our customers can call us and speak to an actual person more frequently than any strictly web-based company. We have a return policy that is vastly superior to many of our main competitors, and due to the relationships we have with our manufacturing partners and our absolute dedication to being your restaurant equipment source, we’re often flexible beyond our written policies. Further, since we repackage all of our glassware, the likelihood of us shipping broken products is significantly less. At American Restaurant Supply, maintaining strong partnerships with our customers is our top priority.

Great Relationships with Brands We Trust

American Restaurant Supply doesn’t just sell any restaurant equipment, but only the best of the best from the brands we trust. We have developed relationships with manufacturers who are time-tested and distinguished, and we don’t waste our time with low-quality products. We do business with name brands that use quality materials, engineer to the best specifications, and care about their customers. Unlike some vendors, we will never try to push cheap items on you for our own benefit. Even if it means making less money, we stand by the brands we trust. This is because we measure our success based on the success of our customers.

Our great relationships with our manufacturing partners allow us to have great relationships with our customers. The reason our return policy and deals are so great is because we have the type of relationship with manufacturers that allow us to negotiate the best outcomes for you. We believe good business is built on good relationships, and we will always prioritize our manufactures and customers over a quick buck.

Visit americanrestaurantsupply.com to start shopping for quality food service equipment now!

Why Use American Restaurant Supply? was originally published in American Restaurant Supply on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.