Rethinking your food and menus status quo. I have been following pop up restaurants, tasting at trade shows and conference, tasting menus and virtual tastings. Tastings offer an opportunity to enhance taste buds and expand opportunities. What it does it give the choices back into your customers hands and even allowed expansion of food types, ingredients and opens their options for future buying and expanding nutrients and nutrient dense foods.
There have been high end menus that have allowed someone who couldn’t afford that restaurant so never got the food experience or the customer experience to enjoy. What this does is open opportunities for branding, influencers, buyers, expanding customer bases. During Covid as a necessity to expand business and now have become part of the sales strategy is pick up tasting menus which help to reach a different audience and have allowed them to do the marketing via social platforms about the food, packaging, total experience for these restaurants. Eleven Madison did a thanksgiving plant based tasting menu for pick up with instructions for finishing off the cooking/preparations and a story with each food. It gave me and my family the complete experience in the safety of our home but with the quality and expanding our taste with choice of ingredients.
One Chicago school has been preparing dishes for students, parents and community members around the city in an effort to better cater to the taste buds of students, with plans to hold 40 separate taste tests this summer. One recent test at the Heart of Chicago neighborhood’s Whittier Elementary of an egg and potato breakfast taco, a veggie pasta salad topped with a light dressing and a creamy chocolate-chickpea dip unsurprisingly found that he kids loved the chocolate-chickpea dip and liked the breakfast tacos but the veggie pasta salad wasn’t so popular.
Pop Up restaurants within hotels, healthcare operations and more all offer opportunities for the food manufacturers, the host site and the customer. the goal is to expand your operations with tasting menus, sampling of food, developing recipes with yesterday’s recipes with today’s flavors. Adding plant based, adding spices, herbs. Trade shows doing educational tastings allows customers to understand more about the origin of ingredients, how to taste and to use and engage them in the experience. Collaborating with business partners to make food collaboration tastings can be a win win as it allows both to be elevated in the finishing product(s).
It’s up to you to think out the box and bring choices, flavors and experiences to your customers differently in today’s climate to grow your business.
MARSHA DIAMOND 