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Ford and Argo AI kick off charitable food delivery pilot in Miami

December 7, 2020 Big Data

In partnership with the Education Fund, a collection of nonprofits working in the U.S. and other countries to improve the quality of education, Ford and Pittsburgh-based autonomous car startup Argo AI say they’ve teamed up to make contactless deliveries in Ford’s Fusion Hybrid self-driving test vehicles. The launch of the pilot, which is taking place in Miami, comes as Ford continues to build out a service for autonomous ride-hailing and goods delivery in Miami-Dade County.

Some experts predict the coronavirus outbreak will hasten the adoption of driverless vehicles for delivery. A study published by CarGurus found that 39% of people don’t plan to use human-driven ride-sharing services post-pandemic for fear of insufficient sanitation. Despite driverless cars’ need for regular disinfection and the public’s misgivings about their general safety, they promise to minimize the risk of spreading disease because they inherently limit driver-rider contact.

Ford says it and Argo will make weekly contactless deliveries of groceries and school supplies furnished by the Education Fund’s Food Forests for Schools program over an eight-week period. These will reach the families of approximately 50 students attending Feinberg Fisher K-8 in Miami Beach and Riverside Elementary School in Little Havana. After the Ford and Argo team collects the bags at each school, the deliveries are made in Ford’s self-driving Ford Fusions with two test specialists.

As the self-driving cars progress along their route, the two specialists — one behind the wheel and one in the passenger seat — will be monitoring the vehicles and the road ahead, ready to take over if necessary, according to Ford. At each drop-off location, one of the Argo test specialists makes a contactless delivery. Argo says it is working with city and state officials and plans to mandate social distancing, institute regular cleaning, and provide personal protective equipment, as well as HEPA-certified filters, air recirculation devices, and physical barriers inside the vehicle’s cabins.

Ford autonomous vehicle business director Navin Kumar says the pilot will provide an opportunity for Argo to refine its self-driving system. Among other challenges, the cars have to find specific locations to make a delivery, park properly, and ensure the drop-off is made safely. They will also encounter a range of locations, including high-rises, duplexes, and small apartment buildings, some without curbside or driveway access, as well as traffic in densely populated areas and residential neighborhoods.

“With each delivery we complete through this pilot, we gain a deeper understanding about how our self-driving services can help organizations and businesses fulfill delivery orders in a safe, reliable, and trusted manner,” Kumar wrote in a blog post. “This is the first time we’ve integrated the self-driving capabilities from Argo with our customer-facing partnerships. This is giving us meaningful real-world insights into what is required to run an efficient business.”

Based on the success of the pilot, Ford says it will continue to expand and refine its moving goods business with similar pilots in 2021.

Ford pushed the unveiling of its driverless service from 2021 to 2022 earlier this year, but it’s business as usual at Argo, which has over 1,000 employees and a $ 7.25 billion valuation. Beyond Ford, Argo has close ties with Volkswagen and is testing in cities around the U.S., including Washington, D.C.; Pittsburgh; and Austin.

Ford is only the latest to repurpose its self-driving fleet for charitable deliveries during the pandemic. Some, like Waymo and Cruise, have received pushback from drivers, who say they’re being forced to work in dangerous conditions. According to the Verge, Waymo drivers were recently told to drive in suffocating ash from wildfires and after COVID-19 infection rates had reached new peaks.

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YOUR PETS LOVE THEIR BUG FOOD?

November 13, 2020 Humor

It’s what they’ll be getting:

Nestle’s Purina brand is launching a line of pet food using insects, as the world’s biggest food group tests more environmentally sustainable protein sources.

The move addresses a trend of people seeking more eco-friendly or allergen-free diets for their pets, and puts Nestle into potential competition with smaller brands like Yora and Green Petfood’s InsectDog.

“We see increasing demand for diversified sources of proteins for pet food products,” Bernard Meunier, head of Purina in Europe, told Reuters in an interview on Thursday.

He said limited planetary resources and decreasing meat consumption in Europe were incentives to explore new proteins.

The Purina Beyond Nature’s Protein line, which launches in Switzerland this month, will be available in two variations – one using chicken, fava beans and protein from black soldier fly larvae, and one using chicken, pig’s liver and millet.

Both will be available for dogs and cats at Swiss retailer Coop, which also sells insect-based snacks and burgers for human consumption. Rollouts in more markets are planned starting next year, Meunier said.

He said the COVID-19 pandemic had strengthened the bond between people and their pets, pushing up demand for high-quality pet food and leading to market share gains for Purina.

Nestle’s petcare unit had sales of 13.6 billion Swiss francs ($ 14.96 billion) last year. It was the group’s fastest-growing category with 10.6% organic growth in the first nine months of 2020.

In April, Nestle bought UK-based natural pet food brand Lily’s Kitchen. Meunier said Purina’s European portfolio was now complete and the focus would be on organic growth.

In a blog post last year, the British Veterinary Association endorsed insect-based pet food, recommending it to owners who wanted a ‘livestock-free’ diet for their pets.

One leading supplier of insect protein in Europe is Dutch company Protix, founded in 2009, which sells ingredients made from the black soldier fly, mealworms, crickets and locusts.

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

WHEN FOOD GETS IN SHORT SUPPLY….

April 13, 2020 Humor

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

Global Food Solutions Puts Affordable, Nutritious Meals in the Hands of U.S. Students

February 22, 2020 NetSuite

Posted by Hayley Null, industry marketing lead manufacturing, food and beverage

Opportunity and challenge often go hand-in-hand — just ask Global Food Solutions. The Hauppage, N.Y.-based food distributor found itself at the crux of enormous opportunity a decade ago when the Obama Administration tightened school food regulations for the first time in a generation.

CEO Michael Levine saw an opening to take Global Food Solutions—then a young regional company looking to make waves with a healthy, sustainable approach to mass food production—to a new level. Levine knew that the big names in the space, companies like General Mills, Kellogg’s and Marriott, weren’t prepared for the changes that were coming.

“There was this massive demand that was about to hit the marketplace for better nutrition products on a massive scale for the school food service industry,” said Levine. “We saw this as a very unique opportunity to capitalize.”

So Global Food Solutions pounced. It started adding items to its list of product SKUs, adding school districts, and forming relationships with more distribution partners. Over the next several years, it found itself expanding across the country, and today it provides lunches for more than 5,000 schools, most located in underprivileged urban areas where student lunches are subsidized by the federal government.

Growth Breeds Complexity

But as the company grew, and its business became increasingly complex, its backend systems were not up to the task. It had been relying on a combination of QuickBooks and Excel spreadsheet to manage financials, and Global Food Solutions’ growth exposed the limitations of that setup.

“We had these pockets of software that were doing specific tasks in the business for us, but none of them were talking to each other. It was okay when we only had a handful of SKUs and it was one manufacturer and we were only shipping in one state and it was very controlled,” Levine said. “But as we expanded our model, we began to push these systems to — actually, not to, but well beyond — a breaking point.”

The problems this created were ubiquitous. The company had distribution challenges; it struggled to track inventory; and its workflow from orders to customer service were choppy and disconnected. Levine recalls the company having to put band-aids on multiple areas where the siloed systems couldn’t keep up with the business.

“It absolutely was not going to be a sustainable solution by any means,” he said. “It was almost kind of running away from us, and we needed to find a way to get a handle on it because we knew that we couldn’t scale to the next level and do all of the things we wanted to do without the right software provider and the right services.”

The Search for an Answer

Finally, in early 2018, Global Food Solutions began to search for a solution that would help the company bring all of those pieces together. It looked at several options, including a newer QuickBooks Premier product and SAP for Wholesale Distribution Products. Ultimately, however, it turned to NetSuite, not only because of its current capabilities, but the flexibility it would offer going forward.

This was critical, Levine said, because the business was looking at doing some new things. For example, it wanted to create a workflow that would support the assembly of meal kits, which would require multiple components of the business to be tightly integrated. Those kits would be delivered complete and handed out as after school snacks for economically disadvantaged students who might not have other snack options presented to them.

“The NetSuite system was able to do those things with ease,” said Levine. “It’s built in a way that is ready to expand with us as we get there. The other software companies that we evaluated, they were just not able to do that.”

With SuiteSuccess, Global Food Solutions worked closely with NetSuite and had its system deployed and live in 85 days, allowing it to work with the system before the start of the following school year. Levine said the NetSuite Professional Services team made a number of recommendations throughout the implementation process that have really helped the business take full advantage of the technology.

Swift Results

In the short time the company’s been on NetSuite, it has already seen significant improvements. The company has cut the time it takes to receive an order, create a PO and confirm with vendors by 75%. For the first time, it has clear visibility into inventory, with data delivered in clear dashboard reports. And because its data is in a single system, Global Food Solutions has cut the time it takes to resolve simple customer inquiries that once took up to 30 minutes to mere seconds.

“It’s just amazing how we feel we’re able to get so much more time back to focus on growth and creation for our business and not worrying about things being wrong,” said Levine.

NetSuite also enables Global Food Solutions to achieve the scale needed to serve so many lunches despite having just 20 employees. The company relies on manufacturing partners for production and for tapping into their buying power to purchase ingredients, and also works with a network of distribution partners.

NetSuite has become the secret ingredient to making Global Food Solutions’ network work together seamlessly. It’s integrated with the company’s CRM, enabling emails to be easily attached to customer records, and is exploring an integration with Box to bring more data into view.

Far From Done

Much more is on the horizon. The company plans to tap NetSuite’s ability to bring automation into its workflow process. It wants to expand upon its demand forecast and planning capabilities, set up auto-generated purchase orders that would maintain stock levels. It also is looking to integrate with NetSuite partner Tesorio, which will help it improve its management of cashflow and receivables.

For now, however, Levine is simply enjoying the contrast between the past experience of running the business on disconnected, stitched together components, and enjoying the integrated, data-rich environment NetSuite has enabled.

Said Levine: “It has been an incredible breath of fresh air.”

Posted on Wed, February 19, 2020
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Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank Fights to Effectively End Hunger

January 20, 2020 NetSuite

Posted by Courtney Kang, Industry Marketing Lead, Nonprofit

When Jenna Schexnayder accepted the role of CFO at the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank in the summer of 2015, she thought she knew what she was getting into.

The Louisiana-based food bank distributes food to the food insecure in 11 parishes across the state. Of 200 food banks across the nation, it’s one of just a few that doesn’t charge for the food it gives out, relying mainly on community donations and grants for funding.

For years, the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank had been managing its finances on an ERP platform provided by its parent organization, Feeding America—one that was sorely in need of updating.

“When I came onboard, we made a small upgrade to the platform, but it wasn’t enough,” said Schexnayder. “We knew it would take a significant investment to update the IT side of our business.”

Over the course of several years, the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank had undertaken a project to update every piece of IT software within the organization. The financial platform was the last piece of that puzzle.

“Without current IT platforms to support your business, you’re going to be left behind,” said Schexnayder. “There is power in having access to data.”

Schexnayder and her team were finding that donors were asking for more and more information, which they had to be ready to provide. Given that she was living in spreadsheets, when someone asked her a question, it took her a while to manipulate the data and find the answer. Grant allocation tracking in particular was an arduous task.

The management team finally decided it was time to make an investment in a more robust financial platform. And then disaster struck.

In August of 2016, a devastating storm stalled over Baton Rouge for several weeks. The Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank was inundated with 4-5 feet of floodwater in the building.

“We lost about 500,000 pounds of food, and every piece of furniture, equipment, trucks sitting at loading docks – the whole gamut,” said Schexnayder.

Up to eight feet of sheet rock had to be removed from the building. The only thing remaining was the building’s frame.

“We spent millions of dollars cleaning and sanitizing everything,” said Schexnayder. “It was an incredible amount of stress.”

Just prior to the storm, Schexnayder had started evaluating a donor management system to connect to the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank’s existing CRM system. That process heated up when they went into disaster mode. “We had a ton of support coming in at the time,” she said. “We were very fortunate.”

As she was evaluating both donor management and desktop accounting software, her director of development happened to forward a video about NetSuite. “He came to me and said, ‘Jenna, look at this video. I think this software is what you need,’” Schexnayder said.

Jenna watched several more videos and was immediately taken with the user-friendly interface. NetSuite’s module for nonprofit accounting, with a lot of the intricacies she needed already built in, also made it attractive.

“I wanted a system that would be able to create the reports I needed in a couple clicks – something that would make my job easier, so I could stop living in spreadsheets and look at our information at a higher level,” Schexnayder said. “I wasn’t acting as a true CFO because I had to do so much data manipulation. I never really saw the data in summary form or had the dashboards I saw at other organizations.”

The Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank now has three users running the general ledger and payables out of NetSuite. Their time to close the books, invoice approvals for accounts payable, and allocation reporting has been significantly reduced.

Schexnayder appreciates NetSuite’s ability to drill down easily for allocation tracking. For specific grants or programs, she’s able to view data at an invoice level. She can easily see in summary how much the food bank has spent towards that program and click through to see all the expenses.

“It’s very important for us to make sure we stay as close to budget as we can,” she said. “We have a responsibility to our donors to spend their money as wisely as possible. With NetSuite, we can look at different revenue streams and make sure we properly budget. We can look for places to be more efficient.”

Schexnayder also received a lot of value from NetSuite’s Learning Cloud Support. She knows that the best way to get a return on NetSuite is to make sure she is knowledgeable about the system. “I’m pretty comfortable with it now,” she said. “If I need to figure out how to do something, I know where to start. I’m not afraid of trying.”

Going forward, the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank would like to sync its inventory management system with NetSuite, migrate over accounts receivable, add constituent data and both offer and receive electronic payments.

“We can see NetSuite has more potential beyond our current applications,” Schexnayder said. “The movement towards data analytics will be very beneficial for us. Even though we’re a non-profit, we still need to operate like a business.”

Learn more about NetSuite software for nonprofits.

Posted on Tue, January 14, 2020
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Feeding Innovation: Food And Beverage Industry Steps Into The Future

November 20, 2019 BI News and Info

Arguably, no other segment claims as large a social, geopolitical, or environmental impact as the food industry. Food is also tightly intertwined with people’s cultural identity. There are a plethora of needs, desires, and expectations that must be met to transform food production, processing, distribution, and selling in order to shape a more ethical, sustainable and profitable model.

Substantial technology advances have upended the entire value chain and expanded the ways stakeholders entice customers and earn their trust. Many incumbents still hold strong share, however, niche players continue gaining momentum, pivoting on enhanced awareness and formerly unexplored value propositions.

Those challenges require a deeply transformative approach that will redefine competition rules and generate crucial opportunities.

The broad picture

The overall sector’s equation is far from being solved: agriculture and food is the largest employer in the world, yet wealth and development inequalities create chasms in both productivity and access to staples and refined products. Moreover, while it’s responsible for at least one-quarter of overall greenhouse gas emissions, food production will suffer more and more from climate change and scarcity of resources.

Nearly half of the planet’s population has bad dietary habits, whether related to undernourishment or unhealthy consumption.

On the distribution and sales side, increasingly sophisticated behavioral patterns make manufacturers and retailers question how they can stay competitive and delighting their customers.

To mitigate the burdens of such a complex environment, two main areas need to be tackled: on one hand, consciousness, education, and cooperation are key to increase the accountability of individuals and communities alike. On the other hand, process optimization, digitization of products and equipment, and partnerships across stakeholders can increase the odds of winning the battle.

The call to action: priorities

Reframe value chain assets and distinctive features, thus strengthening or even changing the customer value proposition

Streamline operations and infuse them with additional capabilities, like automation and traceability

Build an end-to-end data platform to achieve full, consistent, real-time visibility across processes, departments, and teams

Embrace the “phygital” selling approach by blending the best of both digital and physical worlds while delivering new services and unbeatable customer experience

Change collaboration rules with partners to reach a wider, more diverse customer base and maximize profits

Technology enablers and capabilities Feeding Innovation: Food And Beverage Industry Steps Into The Future

Figure 1: Technology enablers and capabilities

The business benefits: processes to explore

Precision agriculture and vertical farming: Precision agriculture is an integrated whole-farm management system that aims to optimize site-specific production in an efficient and profitable manner while minimizing environmental impacts. Vertical farming refers to both rooftop greenhouses and food growth in layered stacks inside dedicated buildings. It represents an attempt to address high urban demand, resource scarcity, and short food mileage; eliminate the effect of unpredictable weather conditions; and improve profitability, particularly for high-end vegetables.

Smart food cells: Optimization of fulfillment and distribution patterns, particularly within the largest cities, implies creating smaller, consistent, and intelligent food cells. The concept includes proximity warehouses for collecting goods and dispatching them quickly, enabled by highly automated operations, replenishment micro-hubs for local retailers and restaurants, and non-traditional delivery vehicles (e.g., autonomous electric cars or robots).

Personalized meals: Personalized nutrition is gaining ground: food preferences and needs are widely diversified for medical and well-being reasons. Collecting purchase history data and applying machine learning algorithms helps to predict consumption choices and enable accurate production forecasts. Increased automation and sensors make life easier for food manufacturers and let them tackle the burdens of the lot size of one. The combination of nutrigenomics, physical activity tracking. and consumer preferences opens new market segments, strengthening relationships with end users and providing them with advice on what to order, cook, and eat.

Traceability: Compliance with regulations, fraud and counterfeit reduction, visibility in food provenance and processing, and measurement of environmental impact are among the most compelling reasons for companies to commit to traceability across the entire value chain. Cloud-based networks, IoT, and blockchain get the lion’s share of attention; recording every step of a product’s lifecycle permits detection of potential bacteria-related hazards or unexpected troubles with refrigeration, thus allowing food sellers to anticipate changes in shelf life.

Efficient supply chain: Not only does the volatility of raw material supply and unexpected contingencies demand flexible provisioning and adequate inventory-level management, multi-faceted customer expectations challenge cost controls and manufacturing productivity, while varying temperature and humidity conditions require safeguarding the cold chain process for quality and security. Furthermore, transportation route optimization leads to more prompt delivery and resource optimization.

Services: Pairing the food supply with innovative services lures consumers and caters to their changing value drivers. Subscription models; recommendations on what, where, and when to eat provided by real or digital personal assistants; direct communication channels with physicians and health experts to fine-tune daily meals; or concierge services to deliver orders at the best convenience, whether it’s at the door, gym, office or by engaging chefs for home-cooking … these are just a handful of possibilities to leverage.

Reinvention of retail stores: For retailers to stay relevant, their stores have to adapt to consumers’ constantly changing purchasing preferences. While fancy layouts, assortment variety and quality, and frictionless payments are no-brainer features, new opportunities keep the segment lively. Stores in unconventional locations, ready-to-eat aisles and hot bars, cooking classes, and “grocerants” (combination restaurants and grocery stores) push the customer experience forward. Grocerants also allow consumers to combine shopping with dining in the same place, and provide brands with instant feedback on new or pilot products.

Figure 2: Sample future business processes across the value chain

Where to start

As individuals and companies, we all live in the experience economy era, one that hounds us with countless offers of products, services, and opportunities. However, customers’ loyalty is rooted just as much in satisfactory experience: only those organizations that never let consumers down and devote relentless energy to keeping their promise can succeed. Fusing experience data with operational data is therefore paramount.

Experience Data and Operational Data together build the Intelligent Enterprise Feeding Innovation: Food And Beverage Industry Steps Into The Future

Companies need to take the pulse of their current capabilities and map the ones they are missing to achieve their goals. An engineered, design-thinking approach aimed at defining possible transformative opportunities and piloting them quickly through internally consistent proofs of concept is a good starting point.

Tackling digital evolution as a whole can be daunting, whereas small, agile innovation offers a safer environment and builds confidence. Moreover, a clear assessment of differentiating business processes vs. “commoditized” ones can help organizations focus on priorities and determine follow-up actions (e.g., new implementation/redesign vs. benchmarking and optimization). The next stage is transforming the vision into a viable and sustainable roadmap; this requires accurate planning, optimized time-to-value, and delivery on promises.

Learn how to leverage experience and operational data to deliver best-in-class customer experiences! Join our webinar on November 26th.

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Leveraging Your Restaurant’s PMIX to Reduce Food Cost

September 27, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

You may have heard it referred to as a product mix, sales mix, or a menu item sales report—a PMIX has many names, but one major purpose: to provide insight to effectively manage food cost. That insight changes when using the PMIX daily versus weekly and monthly. Many successful operators use it frequently, but perhaps not as comprehensively as they should. This deeper dive will help you leverage this valuable report to ensure your restaurant is achieving its best food cost possible.

Daily

The daily PMIX provides quick insight for managers, shining light on crucial metrics including daily prep usage and menu item performance by day of the week.

Daily Prep Usage

One leading practice to identify and stop waste is to check the variance between actual and theoretical prep usage. This exercise should be performed daily by someone who has an intimate working knowledge of ingredients, recipes and station prep schematics, like a kitchen supervisor or manager.

Start by checking how many of one item you sold on the PMIX, then compare that to actual prep usage in that specific station on the line.

Example: If you sold 12 orders of mahi mahi tacos yesterday, there should be an equal depletion of the prep for mahi mahi tacos on the line. So, if a full pan of cabbage mix yields 24 orders of tacos and the pan was full yesterday, there should be approximately a half pan left. If there is less on hand, you just uncovered a problem you need to research. Are the cooks adding too much cabbage to the tacos? Was
the cabbage thrown away due to over-prepping? Use the daily PMIX to pinpoint waste.

Menu Item Performance by Day of Week

Another leading practice is to keep your historical PMIX reports in a binder tabbed by day of week (i.e. Mon, Tues, Wed, so on.). When filling out your daily prep list, you can make informed decisions of how much of an item to prep based on trends.

Example: looking at the PMIX for the past four Sundays you notice that you sell 50% less buffalo

wings than on Saturdays. Since you spotted this trend, you’re able to flex your par for buffalo wing prep between Saturday and Sunday, consequently reducing waste and improving freshness.

Weekly

A weekly PMIX will provide insight into activities performed less frequently, like ordering or product shelf life analysis.

Ordering

Viewing your rolled-up menu item sales quantities for a full week will provide helpful insights into

setting order pars. It’s a good idea to start with analyzing your most expensive food items and adjust your order pars accordingly.

Example: if you know you sell an average of 100 orders of mahi mahi tacos per week and there is 4 oz of fish per order, you know you’ll need about 25 pounds of fish on hand per week, assuming a 100% yield.

Product Shelf Life Analysis

The magic balance in a restaurant is to produce fresh food without excessive waste and labor, and shelf lives help maintain that balance. The goal for operators is to prep enough of something to last its full shelf life. Analyzing the weekly product mix to make sure you’re prepping to hit the shelf life “sweet spot” will help you manage food quality, reduce waste AND save labor.

Example: if there are 20 ingredients in your ranch dressing and it has a 4-day shelf life, you can see how prepping ranch every day would be a waste of valuable time. Oppositely, if you’re prepping too much and it doesn’t taste as good after four days, you’ll risk wasting it or serving an inferior product to your guests.

Monthly

Running a monthly PMIX is a great way to analyze the performance of each of your menu items.

Menu Item Performance

The science of menu engineering is complex. Basically, it all starts by categorizing menu item

performance based on popularity and profitability. Knowing which category each of your menu items fall into will help you make informed decisions about what action to take to improve your menu’s performance. Here are the four groups along with examples of possible actions to take:

Star: high popularity, high profit—this is a winner! Keep it.
Plow horse: high popularity, low profit—think about reformulating the item to improve margin
Puzzle: low popularity, high profit—highlight or reposition on the menu, or run a promotion.
Dog: low popularity, low profit—replace with a different item on your next menu rollout.

Posted on Thu, September 26, 2019
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Deer Bows Head To Food

September 23, 2019 Humor

Enjoying some hand feeding and reciprocating respect.

“When a god is hungry I feed him.”
Image courtesy of https://imgur.com/gallery/YgajW.

Transparency is Vital Step for Restaurants in Addressing Food Allergens

June 16, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Kevin Lentz, NetSuite Product Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

Eating out should be a relaxing experience where guests sit back, order freely and enjoy their meal. For those with food allergies, though, it is rarely quite that carefree. For the estimated 15 million U.S. consumers with a food allergy, a restaurant can prove to be a very challenging environment. A survey conducted at the 2007 Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network conference found that 34% of the 294 respondents had experienced at least one food allergic reaction in a restaurant. A different study revealed that nearly half of fatal food allergic reactions over a 13-year period were caused by food from a restaurant or other food service establishment.

And the stakes are high for the restaurant. If you mishandle the situation, your best case is a ruined evening out and a lost customer, but your worst case could be dire. With food allergic reactions accounting for as many as 30,000 ER visits each year and as many as 200 deaths, it’s important to get your allergy preparations right.

So far, only four states (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, Virginia) and a handful of cities have enacted legislation concerning allergen safety in restaurants. So how can a restaurant proactively serve this segment? In a word: transparency.

Anything you can do to shed light on your prep process and ingredient lists will be helpful. This consumer segment is intensely scrutinous and inquisitive, and they have to be. So have the information as readily available as possible. That may be as simple as ensuring waitstaff are familiar with company-approved answers to questions, or you may choose to go further.

For instance, are you able to provide a list of each ingredient for each of your dishes, and are you able to confirm the source and preparation methods for each of your ingredients? Some restaurants are able to provide the actual labels with clear allergen statements to their patrons upon request. Consider whether you are able to do this at the time of ordering or ahead of time when the guest is researching dining options.

Consider also how food is prepared in your kitchen. Do you maintain a separate location to prepare allergy-free dishes? Be sure you can answer questions around cleaning and cross-contamination, as well. What other dishes are prepared there? How often is it cleaned? Ready access to this information will help put allergen-aware guests at ease.

Perhaps most important is staff training. Staff should be regularly trained for food allergen safety and allergen awareness, and consistently reminded of safe food handling procedures. No amount of process will keep guests safe if it does not become a way of doing business. This is also a good time mention that you should research your state’s regulations in terms of staff training, supplemental allergen awareness training, and any signage required to maintain compliance.

With an estimated 10% of the population directly affected by a food allergy, it’s important that the restaurateur does everything possible to properly and safely serve this segment. Often, that means empowering your staff and your customer. Empower your staff with adequate training and awareness so they can assist the guest appropriately and empower your allergy-aware guests with whatever information that they may need to sit back order freely and enjoy their meal.

Everyone will be better for it.

Posted on Thu, June 13, 2019
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The Restaurant Food Delivery Debate: Handle Delivery In-house or Outsource It?

April 21, 2019 NetSuite

Posted by Brady Thomason, NetSuite Solution Manager, Restaurant & Hospitality

From bean burritos, to French toast, to detox juice, Grubhub’s annual survey of trends in ordering pushes into focus just how much the options have increased for those hankering for delivery over the years.

Consumers now eat 80% of their meals at home, up from 75% a decade ago, according to coverage in the Wall Street Journal of research from market research firm NPD Group. By most accounts, the proliferation in those options and the increasing proclivity to have something like a peanut butter acai bowl delivered to one’s home is strongly related to the explosive growth in third-party delivery services like Grubhub.

In fact, sales totaled 9.8 billion last year for the five largest delivery providers, an increase of 55% over the previous year, according to coverage in Restaurant Business of Technomic data. Technomic is a Chicago-based restaurant management consulting firm. That makes Caviar, DoorDash, Postmates, Uber Eats and Grubhub the third- or fourth-largest restaurant chain in the U.S, according to the coverage.

As the market for delivery grows, restaurateurs for whom the business model makes sense (in that Grubhub survey, 40 percent of customers ordered most from fast casual restaurants, followed by quick service and casual dining) — are really no longer chewing on whether to deliver their fares, but how.

Should you snub GrubHub?

Recently, Jimmy Johns’ CEO announced that the nearly 40-year-old sub chain would never use a third party provider to deliver its famously fresh, fast-delivered subs – which are available in zones that lend themselves to delivery within five minutes. It backed up its decision with statistics by Service Management Group as well as a study it commissioned with Boston Consulting Group. Some 92% of customers expected their food deliveries within 15 to 30 minutes of placing an order, and the largest delivery services averaged 49-minute delivery times, according to coverage in Fast Casual.

Reasons for not using third-party delivery services also often reference the cost of the service to restaurants – which include fees to pick up and deliver the order from the restaurant that can range from 10% to 35% for every single order, according to coverage in Restaurant Business.

Or let third-party deliver in?

But the move by Jimmy Johns is one that bucks much of the industry. Chipotle launched delivery with DoorDash last year. Taco Bell recently announced it would partner with Grubhub to deliver orders of at least $ 12 (excluding tax) for free, according to Fast Casual.

Now at $ 13 billion, the third-party food delivery market is projected to grow at a 13.5% annual rate, according to a recently published report from Pentallect Inc., a food industry strategy firm. The market, which includes firms providing restaurant meals and groceries, is expected to reach $ 24.5 billion by 2022. That’s as the $ 1.6 trillion U.S. food industry grows at 3% per year, according to the research.

“By most measures, the business is in its infancy. Current providers and new entrants are dramatically enhancing their capabilities, improving their overall value, and becoming increasingly attractive to consumers,” Barry Friends of Pentallect said in a press release. “We will most certainly see a marked shift away from brick-and-mortar in the food industry, and that will present challenges to many traditional restaurants and food stores.”

Trying to find balance

It’s a quandary that the CEO of Darden Restaurants Inc. – parent company to brands like Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse — perhaps frames best in explaining his approach to testing third-party services to deliver its menu items.

“How do we ensure that these delivery services will enhance our brands?” Gene Lee is quoted as saying in Nation’s Restaurant News. “Can it be flawlessly executed for our guests and our team members? Can we create a sustainable incremental growth at scale that’s additive to our company? Can we agree on viable economics?”

Finding that balance will be key. As evidenced by the dramatic decline of avocado toast in this year’s Grubhub rankings, tastes may change, and people will continue to argue about what to order (nearly three quarters of respondents surveyed said they’ve argued with their significant other about it over the last year). But consumers agree on the reasons why they want to order in; they don’t feel like cooking, they want to satisfy a craving or just don’t feel like cleaning up.

Posted on Thu, April 18, 2019
by NetSuite filed under

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