ingredients

The 30-minute food cost audit

If you know what to look for, a quick tour through your restaurant can show you how to save a few more bucks on food costs.

Sustainable Foodservice Packaging is Focus of Attention

According to packaging industry executives, the desire to be considered environmentally friendly is legitimate and sustainable companies tend to do business...

The dining public is saving lots of room for dessert. According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2006 Tableservice Restaurant Trends report, 30 percent of fine-dining operators, 27 percent of casual dining places and 32 percent of family restaurants say their customers are ordering more dessert now than they did two years ago. And data from NPD/CREST reveals that 12 percent of consumers order dessert at restaurants. So what should you be purchasing to satisfy these sweet cravings?

Meat is usually a restaurant’s priciest food purchase. But even with wholesale food costs skyrocketing over the past year, the current news isn’t all dismal at the center of the plate. Red meats haven’t been hit as hard as wheat, eggs and dairy products. Yet.

Wheat is missing from gluten-free menus--and a growing number of customers couldn't be happier.

Start your blenders Frosties, smoothies, frappes, milkshakes, slushes - call them what you will, frozen drinks are hot. Cool debuts are in the news, like...

Coffee and tea are served year-round, but come winter, operators start filling mugs with more inventive hot beverages. And cocoa is gaining steam.

Although chicken and turkey costs are trending slightly upward, they are still better buys than red meat.

Soy sauce is both remarkably complex and extraordinarily simple: complex because it contains more than 300 individual flavor components and amino acids that give it a distinctive flavor and bouquet; and simple because it is made from just four ingredients—water, wheat, soybeans and salt—transformed through fermentation.

Bottom line: A very specific need here: a restaurant needs to do a cooking demo on TV and doesn’t know best practices. If they do it right not only will...

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