Patricia Cobe

You can’t learn everything in culinary school. Or business school. Some lessons you’ve just got to learn on the job. With that in mind we set out to gather a little collected wisdom from the industry on how to do some of the more obscure tasks an operator might face. Challenges abound out there. Hopefully this will help get you through a few of them.

Commodity prices are on the rise. And animal proteins—always one of a restaurant’s more expensive buys—are getting hit hard. But there are ways you can purchase and plate beef, pork and lamb to ease the pain—without shortchanging your customers or your profits. Listen to what these chefs, suppliers, economists and other experts have to say.

Culver’s, famous for its Butter Burgers and frozen custard, is heavily franchised—only nine of its 427 stores are company-owned. But to keep messaging consistent and response time short, Culver’s centralizes its social media efforts, monitoring Twitter and Facebook from its home base 24/7. Tweets and posts fall on the agile fingers of the internal marketing team with help from an outside agency.

The last few years have seen a subtle to seismic shift in the way restaurants source fruits and vegetables. From planting rooftop gardens to partnering with farmers, chefs and operators are making a big effort to be local and seasonal. But 2011 is shaping up as an even more produce-centric year.

Product recalls can be devastating to the restaurant industry, yet traceability along the foodservice supply chain is complicated and outdated. “Foodservice is where retail was 40 years ago,” said Syndee Stiles, vice president of operations support for McLane Foodservice, at Restaurant Leadership Conference session on traceability.

Value-oriented consumers, increased protein prices and the social media revolution were a few of the trends laid out during presentations by Technomic and GE Capital at the Restaurant Leadership Conference.