Today’s blog is a short one. I was doing some research today and I stumbled upon this small conference that I had never heard about, the Welcome Conference. This article below from Grubstreet.com, summarizes the author’s Top 10 take away’s from last year’s conference. I was bummed to find out that this year’s conference in …
health inspections
The Ugly Truth about Dirty Restaurants and Yelp
Would you eat in a restaurant if you knew that the week before they got several people sick? You would be a fool if you did. Yelp is going from a review site to the first line of defense in foodborne illness outbreaks. We’ve been very supportive of Yelp posting health inspection scores on their …
McDonald’s tests delivery in New York
As part of their turnaround strategy McDonald’s has launched a delivery service test in the NYC market. The market consists of 88 stores and the ordering and delivery will be managed through Postmates which is a mobile app technology that allows customers to place orders through their mobile device. The delivery is then performed by …
MIT Is Developing Sensors To Detect When Food Is Going Bad
An article on fastcoexist.com talks about an MIT lab working on a sensor that will tell you when food is going bad vs relying on labels placed on the items. The stat in the article cites that in the US we waste 40% of the food that we harvest. They claim that sell by and …
Healthy Kids Menus
An article on NPR is citing a study that was done by ChildObesity180 on the fast casual restaurant chain Silver Diner changing up their kids menu to offer more healthy options. The study tracked some 350,000 kids menu orders covering 6 months before and 6 months after they changed the menu. Healthy meant the meal …
A Restaurant Without A Restaurant
There’s a great article in Wired about David Chang’s new venture, Maple. Talk about going crazy with implementing technology in a restaurant. Maple is a fine dining restaurant that you can’t dine in. That’s right they only offer delivery ordered through their mobile app. They have one kitchen in the financial district of Manhattan with …
Chipotle removes GMO ingredients
Chipotle announced that they have removed all GMO ingredients from their menu. GMOs are getting a lot of buzz the last handful of years or so, and being in St. Louis where Monsanto is headquartered, I certainly hear my fair share of the GMO arguments. For Chipotle the move makes sense, they have been talking about …
Pizza chains thrive on convenience, value, technology
Nation’s Restaurant News posted an article today on the turnaround and success of large pizza chains recently. Publicly traded pizza chains posted a 6.4% same store sales growth in the 4th quarter of last year. Domino’s posted 14.5% sales growth in the first quarter. Marco’s Pizza’s net sales rose 41% last year. So there are …
Letting your Why guide your actions
Check out this video on what makes Chipotle’s pork different.
Chipotle stopped serving pork in hundred’s of it’s stores back in January because one of their suppliers wasn’t living up to Chipotle’s animal care standards. I’m assuming that this cost them quite a bit in profitability as pork is a higher contribution margin item than chicken or steak.
I think that Chipotle’s corporate culture and commitment to selling humanely raised animals is a great example of understanding yourself as a company and what your customers value.
So often companies market their corporate responsibility but when the rubber meets the road, and they have an earnings call coming up, they cave and go for profits and alienate their customers and damage their brand. It is refreshing to see Chipotle practicing what they preach.
#chipotlerocks
Sexy Thermometer Calibration
Shame on you if you clicked on this because you saw the word sexy; you need to get some. We found this great article on Kitchen Thermometer Calibration from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Here are some of the points that I found most interesting and the full article is at the bottom of the …