Food & Beverage Opinion Articles

April 5, 2023

Why Uber Eats cracked down on ghost kitchens – and the lessons hospitality businesses need to learn

Virtual restaurants – brands that operate exclusively on delivery platforms without real-world venues – have proven hugely successful in recent years, offering existing restaurants and takeaways a much-needed opportunity to boost revenue and reach new customers by offering alternative menus from their kitchens. But while the best virtual brands have quickly become fan favourites on platforms like Deliveroo, Just Eats and Uber Eats, the rest may be about to reach the end of the road.

By Sam Martin, Co-founder and CEO of Peckwater Brands (PWB), Peckwater Brands

Opinion Article

March 9, 2023

The Value of Great Servers Straight from a Michelin Server Captain

The onsite restaurant is a hallmark of nearly any great hotel, with customer sentiments towards the former entity reflecting back onto property reviews and, ultimately, guestroom bookings. Within the F&B silo, we glorify the cuisine, the beverage selection, the wine cellar, the décor, the location and the executive chef, but rarely do the servers get their moment in the spotlight. And yet, like a triage nurse who first attends to a desperately ill patient entering the emergency room and is the lifesaving determinant ahead of any doctor’s intervention, server teams are the frontline for success in any hotel’s F&B operation.

By Larry Mogelonsky and Adam Mogelonsky

Canada

Opinion Article

March 2, 2023

Future Foods for Hotels in 2023 and Beyond

Food and beverage for hotels is at a bit of an inflection point. On the one hand, we are still contending with all the inflationary wages, short staffing and supply chain headaches left over the pandemic. On the other, we have a recession year ahead of us where we still need to derive profits from the onsite eatery (or at least use the chef-driven restaurant concept to support hotel bookings).

By Larry Mogelonsky and Adam Mogelonsky

Opinion Article

February 24, 2023

Best practice for pairing wine with art in the classroom: A synesthetic approach

For a few years now, Gildas L'Hostis, EHL Senior Lecturer in Oenology (the knowledge of wine, wine service, production, economics and tasting), has been trying out new tools enabling students to express themselves more freely and creatively. The synesthetic approach is a method that shuns traditional analytical wine tasting along with the ubiquitous wine tasting ‘grid’, replacing it with a more imaginative practice that summons up many of the senses. Here, students are encouraged to practice wine pairing by creating matches with specific paintings.

By Gildas L'Hostis, Senior Lecturer Practical Arts delivering courses in oenology (the knowledge of wine, wine service, production, economics, and tasting), EHL

Opinion Article

February 10, 2023

How to make sure your F&B program bears fruit in 2023

According to the recent research study by Strategic Solution Partners, F&B has been one of the departments most affected by the ongoing staffing shortages. What does the current F&B situation look like and how should hotels adjust their programming for a successful 2023? Seasoned F&B experts Fernando Salazar and John Young share their viewpoints on the matter and provide useful, actionable advice on how to make the most out of your F&B program in 2023.

By Fernando Salazar and John Young

Opinion Article

February 1, 2023

How to make sure your 2023 beverage program goes down well: 5 questions with Kim Haasarud

Learning to throw out the rule book and be flexible was among the most valuable lessons hotels learned from the pandemic. Adaptation and flexibility are still just as important now, as the industry navigates the staffing shortages, and to find out more about what that should look like in the F&B space, we have interviewed Kim Haasarud, a nationally recognized mixologist and Beverage Expert at Strategic Solution Partners.

By Kim Haasarud, Consultant, Strategic Solution Partners

Opinion Article

January 31, 2023

2023 Outlook for the Foodservice Industry

As many of us have left the pandemic behind in 2022 and begun traveling again, airlines have begun seeing profits. Some tourist destinations also recorded the highest-ever RevPAR (revenue per available room, a key hotel performance indicator).

By Linchi Kwok, Professor and Department Chair, CAL Poly Pomona

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Opinion Article

January 30, 2023

Plant-Based is Just an Extension of Data-Based

Vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian, dairy-free, gluten-free, ovo-pescatarian, fruitarian – there are lots of diets out there and, significantly, more and more people are adjusting their habits away from the starchy, fried and meat-focused Standard American Diet (SAD). Underpinning any operational changes made to accommodate this societal shift, though, is the data.

By Larry Mogelonsky and Adam Mogelonsky

Opinion Article

January 28, 2023

Hospitality in a recession: how businesses can overcome economic downturn

The majority of hospitality businesses will have suffered at some point or another in the past few years, with the immediate and knock-on effects of Covid-19 lockdown measures massively curtailing revenues and profits while causing widespread closures throughout Europe.

By Sam Martin, Co-founder and CEO of Peckwater Brands (PWB), Peckwater Brands

Opinion Article

January 23, 2023

In Vino Veritas XCVII: Serving Smartly

We would be remiss to write a series of articles on generating more wine sales without devoting one column to the most serious issue of drinking and driving. The statistics are almost mind-numbing; every day, some 30 lives are lost due to crashes caused by drunk driving. To reframe this in a less abstract way, in the time it takes a party of four to go through a bottle – say, roughly an hour – another person has died from an alcohol-related death.

By Larry Mogelonsky and Adam Mogelonsky

Opinion Article

January 13, 2023

Stimulating coffee facts with EHL’s Alain Berruex

Coffee - so much more than just a drink - more a way of life. The director David Lynch is famously quoted as saying that “even a bad cup of coffee is better than no coffee at all”. While the amount that is either good or bad for your health is still unresolved, coffee remains the most popular beverage in the world with more than 400 billion cups consumed each year. More important than the sun rising in the sky, once the taste and kick are floating around in your blood system, it seems that the day is ready to start. Senior lecturer in Food & Beverage Management, EHL's Alain Berruex takes us through some lesser known coffee facts and explains the love story between EHL and this luxuriant beverage.

By Beatrice Venturini, Hospitality Insights content editor, EHL

Opinion Article

January 2, 2023

In Vino Veritas XCVI: A Knack for Cognac

It’s been quite a while since we’ve reported on scoured grapes or any other form of distilled spirit from the pomace from a wine fermentation tank or any other residual grape material. Each country has a proud tradition of turning leftover lemons into boozy lemonade, but perhaps the pinnacle of these is cognac, and knowing more about this liquor will help you to sell practically any aperitif or digestif.

By Larry Mogelonsky and Adam Mogelonsky

Opinion Article

December 28, 2022

How consumer trends should influence your 2023 F&B programming

Every successful F&B program should take into account major dietary trends and societal shifts, rather than just allergies and intolerances. This is becoming increasingly evident in the latest industry reports, such as the 2022 Plant-Forward Opportunity, elaborated in collaboration with The Culinary Institute of America, Food for Climate League, and the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative.

By Fernando Salazar, Food and Beverage Expert, Strategic Solution Partners

Opinion Article

December 15, 2022

In Vino Veritas XCV: Buying Wine at Auction

The wine auction market affords an opportunity for the hotelier to add bottles to the property’s cellar that may not be available through conventional means, namely continual repurchasing orders through wine merchants. A restaurant can use auctions to fill in vintage years missing from a particular chateau or adding some ‘spice’ to a wine list with interesting, cult or hard-to-find bottles.

By Larry Mogelonsky, Partner, Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited

Opinion Article

December 12, 2022

The Lag in Food and Beverage Recovery

According to CBRE’s September 2022 Hotel Horizons® forecast for the overall U.S. lodging industry, rooms revenue per available room (RevPAR) will exceed 2019 annual levels in 2022. This is driven by the accelerated recovery of average daily rate (ADR) which first occurred during the third quarter of 2021.

By Robert Mandelbaum and Andrew Hartley

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Opinion Article

November 14, 2022

Recipes: 4 Reasons Why Your Operation Needs Them

Everywhere You Look it’s Bleeding 🩸. The Patient is So Messed Up it’s Not Even Funny. It Will Never Fix Itself. You Need CORE On Your Side. Cost, Operations, Revenue, Execute.

By Patrick McClary, President/CEO CORE Food & Beverage Profit Consulting, David Lund

Opinion Article

November 3, 2022

EHL's Culinary & Restaurant Management certificate unpacked

Do you dream of making a professional dent on the Food & Beverage landscape but don't have four years of study-time available? Then EHL's CREM course (Culinary & Restaurant Management certificate) might just be your winning ticket. This intensely rich, fast-paced program offers key insights into the professional world of restaurant management. Ideal practical learning for future entrepreneurs armed with motivation, creative vision, critical thinking and a service-oriented mindset.

By Beatrice Venturini, Hospitality Insights content editor, EHL

Opinion Article

October 24, 2022

In Vino Veritas XCIII: Developing Your Wine Strategy

This running column has been all about wine, but alas this age-old alcohol is only a subset of the overall F&B program for any hotel property. It makes little sense to build an extensive wine selection – or for that matter contemplate any wine purchase – without first consulting the restaurant manager, the F&B director and, in some cases, the GM.

By Larry Mogelonsky and Adam Mogelonsky

Opinion Article

September 27, 2022

Restaurants manage to minimize the impact of rising food and labor costs

“Everything is getting more expensive every day!” Is that how you feel about today’s inflation? Consumer prices at grocery stores, for example, had increased 13.1% in July 2022 from a year before.

By Linchi Kwok, Professor and Department Chair, CAL Poly Pomona

Opinion Article

September 23, 2022

A tragedy of the Commons at Chinese dining tables

In economic science, the tragedy of the commons occurs when individual users, who have open access to a resource without shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land in Great Britain and Ireland. But how does this apply to Chinese cultural table habits and ways of tackling food waste?