How to use technology to stay on trend with your menu

According to The Grocer, 12% of Brits follow meat-free diets with the younger generation leading the way. This indicates that 7.8million people have ditched meat with almost 4million declaring themselves to be vegetarian.

As awareness for both health, environment and animal welfare grows more and more consumers are planning to reduce their meat consumption – a movement called flexitarians. This is backed up by a survey by I-AM, which found that 43% of 18-35 year olds and 52% of 36-50 year olds are eating less meat than they used to.

In their annual food and drink report, Waitrose has hailed the arrival of the “mindful customer” with consumers looking after their health, wellbeing of their family as well as that of the planet. Food trends predicted bitter food like black coffee, dark chocolate, char-grilled meats and craft beers. Interesting ice cream flavours, West African food and alcohol-free cocktails have all been highlighted as what we’ll be eating and drinking this year.

Posted 09/01/2019

With all these trends and stats it’s never been more important for operators to keep up with trends and ensure menus stay fresh and, most importantly, cater to customer needs. Whilst re-designing and printing menus across multiple sites can cause headaches, it can be incredibly time-consuming to recalculate dishes to ensure kitchens hit their GP. However, head chefs can breathe a sigh of relief as technology provides a menu engineering and recipe costing solution which is both quick and hassle free!

Created using feedback from chefs, our recipe costing technology simplifies the whole process and within minutes you can have full costings for each of your new recipes – from venison to vegan.

Not only does technology make it easier to change menus to keep up with the trends but food safety and quality management system goes even further by providing crucial allergen and nutritional information at the click of a button. Our unique functionality puts the onus on suppliers to update all product and price files giving operators the peace of mind that they have the most accurate and up to date information.

As Keith Shearer, Group Executive Chef at Macdonald Hotels comments “I get a lot of positive feedback from chef’s who are embracing the technology”. He adds “the recipe management system is one of the key features I use, it allows me to create generic specs, have complete transparency on costs and margins, and be able to demonstrate theoretical GPs. I would recommend it to any chef”.

Operators who have the ability to understand GPs from new menu items as quickly and easily as Macdonald Hotels – are sure to be able to keep their menus fresh and meet customer trends.

Find out more about how Access Hospitality suite can help you to stay on top of customer trends.