SheeFood

Hawaii to the Rescue

It seems that now is the time to call on Hawaii for menu inspiration. Maybe guests can dream of the tropical locale easier than they can visit it at the moment. (There’s a 14-day mandatory quarantine for tourists who arrive to the islands before the end of July 2020, and after that, a gnarly COVID-19 test prior to travel is required.)

But the flavors and essence of Hawaii always work on the mainland, and especially now for several reasons. Not only does Hawaiian fare breath summer, it can be as simple as pineapple, mango or coconut flavoring with Hawaiian menu wording, like paradise, lava or tropical. A celebration of Hawaii can also easily be achieved without meat, which has to be attractive to operators right about now. And if fish sounds healthier and more refreshing than beef, Hawaii comes through with its popular poke. Speaking of which … upscale New York eatery David Burke Tavern recently added Canned Tuna Poke to the menu. If the pros do it, obviously you are not limited to fresh fish to pull off your own version of the now iconic Hawaiian dish.

But perhaps it’s time to revisit the tropical fruits that make up beverage and dessert opportunities. Dunkin’ offers new Dunkin’ Refreshers—a rejuvenated take on the old Arnold Palmer that combines green tea with fruit concentrates. One of the flavors is dragon fruit. Likely, most folks haven’t tried dragon fruit before, but what a great, inexpensive introduction for tropical adventurists.

Lion’s Choice has a new Hawaiian Delight Sundae. It breaths Hawaii with such few tropical ingredients as pineapple and a cookie featuring coconut and macadamia nuts.

Passion fruit is a rising darling of Hawaiian tropicals. If you aim for authentic Hawaiian, check into the yellow lilikoi version versus the more common purple variety. In Hawaii, usage of the word passion fruit is only for the benefit of tourists. Locals would never call it that. Lilikoi is larger and more tart than its purple cousin. It’s a popular flavor for shave ice, and in that case is often drizzled with sweetened condensed milk.

King’s Hawaiian bread presents another sweet opportunity to highlight the islands, though an under-utilized option. Its pleasant flavor could be part of an island-themed breakfast LTO featuring Hawaiian French toast, as could anything with now-trendy coconut milk.

There are so many ingredients that carry Hawaiian overtones (mango, pineapple, coconut, macadamia nut, tuna, kalua pig, SPAM, etc.) that it isn’t hard to bring the island theme to a promotion. A dish only needs one or two of those ingredients and a reminiscent name. Here are some current menu item names that call upon the lingo:

Burgers

• The Hawaiian Five-o
• Da’ Big Kahuna (Kahuna is a Hawaiian word!)
• Amazing Aloha Yum Burger

Pizza

• Maui Zaui
• The Hilo
• Diamond Head
• Hula Hawaiian
• Pineapple Chicken Luau

A brainstorming session may be about all that’s needed to pull off a Hawaiian-themed promotion of food or drink. Bring the vacation cheer home to your over-sheltered guests—and tell me what you think.

Jody

Comfort Food During Calamity

Kudos to those restaurants that during our unprecedented crisis went to the drawing board for problem-solving menu development, including meal kits, meal bundles and selling groceries. A few months ago, I tried to write a meal-kit themed article and had to scrap it because I only found one restaurant doing meal kits, and that was Chick-fil-A, back in 2018, and they discontinued it after a time. I could write that article now! (and practically did in my last blog post).

But one evergreen theme menu developers return to in a crisis is comfort food. What are they tapping into for solace this time around?

Breakfast. I don’t know why, but nothing warms the cockles like breakfast food. Mind you, it doesn’t have to be for breakfast. Wienerschnitzel recently reached for the cereal box for its Froot Loops Shake and Froot Loops Dipped Soft Serve Cone. Einstein Bros. Bagels introduced French Toast Chicken Egg Sandwich. Bagels already carry the breakfast vibe, but how about French toast bagels with chicken? This LTO combines the comfort of breakfast with the trendy chicken sandwich theme making it appropriate for any meal.

What else could be done with breakfast to fit the comfort-food theme? Consider the breakfast favorites of internationals. In China, they love their hand-held crepelike breakfast street food jianbing. Hispanics might be missing churros right now.

Kids. For the children and the child in everyone, now is a good time to revisit mac & cheese. Sports bar chain Yard House wisely came out with a Mac & Cheese Meal that serves four people. For $50, it’s clearly not a box product. It includes chicken, bacon, wild mushrooms, cheddar cheese, Parmesan cheese and truffle oil. It comes with either a Caesar salad or mixed field greens salad.

For its bundled Feast For Five meal, Romano’s Macaroni Grill taps into its kid-friendly comfortable carbs by offering “enough Spaghetti Bolognese, Fettuccine Alfredo with chicken, Pasta Milano or mac & cheese to feed five people.” For an extra $10, customers can add Brussels sprouts, toasted cheese ravioli or chocolate cake. 

Classic home-cooked meals. Everyone’s gotten used to their go-to shelter-in-place home cooked favorites, but it’s so much work! Let restaurants come to the rescue. Current prices aside, brisket is a family favorite that restaurants typically don’t include in their menu mix. But Smashburger just launched a Smoked Bacon Brisket Burger. 

Turkey and dressing only pops up on menus at Thanksgiving, but in April, Perkins broke out a Turkey & Dressing Family Style meal for four that included turkey over sage dressing with turkey gravy and cranberry sauce plus salad, mashed potatoes and buttered corn.

Could classic pot pies see a revival? Church’s Chicken recently offered an order of four Hand-Held Chicken Pot Pies free to those who purchase a family meal.

We don’t know how soon restaurants will dispense with the comfort-food theme and go back to their long-term plans centered on healthy/sustainable fare and practices. But clearly, this has been the time to push pause and meet customers where they’re at.

Oh, and BTW, Chick-fil-A recently proudly revived those meal kits that they tested and discontinued in 2018.

Tell me what you think.

Jody

How the Virus Changed Restaurant Food

The view of restaurant meals has forever changed, and I think operators’ food offerings may never go back in some ways. In restaurant war rooms all over, I’ll bet cries of “why didn’t we look at it this way before?” are being heard regarding COVID-19-inspired meal tweaks that consumers may love long-term.

Meal combos. Yes, they’ve been around forever. Who hasn’t driven through a fast food drive thru and simply said, “I’ll have a No. 1 and a No 4?” But meal-combo innovation stagnated, I believe, because customization overshadowed it.

So, my husband and I drove through the McDonald’s drive-thru for a quick bite and saw the sign for a Family Meal Bundle for $20. It included eight sandwiches, two large fries and 20 Chicken McNuggets. You know what, for that price, it didn’t even matter what the sandwiches were. In fact, they weren’t even listed. All we saw was $20 and a solution for lunch, dinner and a few snacks for the two of us. It was fun riffling through the two bags we received. We liked it so much, we bypassed Burger King, which was closer, the next time we were out and hungry, and went for McDonald’s Family Meal Bundle.

Could the combo forever morph into bundles… cooked and uncooked? Burleson, Texas-based Muscle Maker Grill just came out with a handful of bundles. Its Breakfast Bundle features 12 eggs, a pound of bacon, a loaf of bread, omelet ingredients, a gallon of milk, a half-gallon of orange juice and a pound of butter. That, my friends, is grocery shopping! (Yes, and note that other chains are also offering groceries now.) Muscle Maker Grill also has a Burger Bundle that features all raw ingredients to make burgers—and chips. And why not pick up some cleaning supplies? It offers the Cleaning Bundle, which is four rolls of TP, two rolls of paper towels, disinfectant spray and a box of 100 disposable gloves. Couldn’t consumers appreciate someone else doing all the thinking for them, and they just order the bundle and make due with what comes with it?

It’s all the opposite of today’s trendy personalization in favor of trying new things or just “going with it.” At Smokey Bones, you can order the Family Feast and you’ll get a pound of pulled pork, a whole BBQ chicken, two large sides and four pieces of garlic bread.

Meal Kits. So there are meal kit companies—plenty more besides Blue Apron. And grocery stores have noticed and gotten in on the idea over the past few years. But restaurants are now full into it, and it might just make sense for them. Smokey Bones has added their versions: Chicken Basics meal kit; Meat Masters Basics meal kit; and Backyard Basics meal kit. Perhaps the difference with these meal kits is that there are no elaborate recipes to follow. You see what you get, and you know what to do with it or you improvise.

Snooze AM Eatery now has the BLT-riffic Kit, which gives expected BLT ingredients (plus avocados), hash browns to cook and 15 eggs. It doesn’t even matter if all the ingredients don’t make sense. You can use them somehow, sometime.

Pizza kits are catching my eye right now. I just saw that fast casual Blaze Pizza now has several DIY Pizza Kits. Its press release states, “Each of the kits are available for pick up or delivery via the Blaze Pizza app or online. You’ll find an image of the Family DIY Pizza Kit below. A quick instructional video for how to craft the pizza (oven settings, etc.) featuring our executive chef can be found at diyblaze.com.” They come with dough and toppings.

So I think the door of innovation in meal bundles and kits has opened wide. Necessity truly became the mother of invention. Maybe consumers are ready to trade off customization for a little whimsy. Time will tell.

Let me know what you think.

Jody

Panera Wakes Up to Breakfast

The other morning when I read about Panera Bread’s new coffee subscription plan, I almost spit out my coffee, pointing the article out to my husband. It’s brilliant. The phrase coffee and breakfast disruption comes to mind.

About the same time, Wendy’s announced its new breakfast menu, and that took some well-deserved buzz away from Panera Bread. If I were Wendy’s, McDonald's or the like, I’d be worried, or else I’d consider something similar.

Here’s Panera’s plan, which it already test-marketed with overwhelmingly positive bottom-line results:

• For $8.99 per month, subscribers can stop by for unlimited hot drip coffee, iced coffee and hot tea—multiple times a day if they want. It’s to Panera’s advantage that for many people, coffee isn’t just nice, it’s necessary. The question is, will they switch their loyalty away from Starbucks? (50% of surveyed consumers have purchased coffee at Starbucks in the past 3 months vs. 25% from a fast casual like Panera Bread, per Mintel’s Coffee and Tea on Premise—US, July 2019 ) Where price is considered, Panera Bread has changed everything. Where Starbucks may not go down easily is in the realm of specialty coffees. Panera is only offering the very basic.
• The super-cheap coffee subscription program is only available to MyPanera loyalty program members. Way to go… signing up new members, tracking purchases and likely extending other offers. This, no doubt, will steal business (coffee and otherwise) away from the competition. Who is that competition? Well, besides the fact that 50% have purchased a coffee at Starbucks in the past three months, 41% have purchased coffee from McDonald's and 32% from Dunkin’ (per Mintel). You have to assume that Panera has good coffee—at least as good as the others. It’s something Panera has worked on. They now buy whole beans and grind them fresh daily in-store with their new grinding and brewing equipment (according to Nation’s Restaurant News).
• Panera has made this coffee subscription convenient, and in that regard it has created a level playing field. At play is in-store pickup/order-ahead, drive-thru and delivery (with a minimum order requirement).

It’s all there. Why had no one thought of this before? Well, I don’t think it would be in Starbucks’ best interest to just give coffee away. Most folks who go to Panera are there for the food. Coffee sales only make up 3% of Panera’s total revenue. Wouldn’t you imagine that those who take Panera Bread up on its cheap coffee subscription program would continue buying food, and probably more-so, boosting the bottom line? You imagine right. In market testing, to quote the Nation’s Restaurant News article, “We saw a 200% increase in frequency of customers, food attachment went up by 70% and we were able to attract new customers.”

But I have a question. Is there a target demographic? The youngsters (Generation Z, those up to age 25) are not so much into brewed coffee. Only 34% of them, compared to 50% of Generation X (ages 44-55), have purchased regular brewed coffee from a foodservice outlet in the past three months, per the Mintel report. However, iced coffee is included in this deal, and Generation Z is by far the biggest purchaser of that.

I think that to some (maybe not many), the subscription will be disappointing in its limits. Among its specialty beverages, Panera offers caramel latte, caffe mocha, chai tea latte and more. Those aren’t included in the coffee subscription program. However, with the robust loyalty program it’s attached to, those beverages could somehow be offered as a reward.

The coffee subscription is indeed brilliant and disruptive. I’ll be curious to see what competitive programs spawn as a result.

Tell me what you think.

Jody Shee

Kroger Links with the Dark Horse Among Ghost Kitchens

Kroger just surprised us again this year. First it set up a food hall within a store. Now it’s entered into the world of ghost-kitchen meal delivery. All it took was a linkup with a visionary who already had the infrastructure in place.

Long before the term ghost kitchen was born, Chris Baggott developed food-tech startup ClusterTruck in Indianapolis in 2015 with the idea that his remote kitchen and delivery operation would be a preparation and delivery resource for food trucks wanting to expand into delivery.

By and by, ClusterTruck’s world of menus, food/ordering and delivery took on bigger significance than food trucks, and ClusterTruck became its own “one-of-a-kind delivery restaurant” as it now operates in a few cities, including my hometown of Kansas City.

Ah, but a marketing best practice has emerged. Ghost kitchens are inherently invisible to the consumer. They are a blank screen in terms of branding. A ghost kitchen does not best operate as its own independent brand. There’s no emotional connection. Partnerships with established brands are the way to go. The Kroger partnership is quite strategic and perhaps a blueprint for ClusterTruck’s future endeavors.

Restaurants are already well on their way with ghost kitchens as the likes of delivery companies Grubhub and DoorDash expand their food delivery role to include food preparation for restaurants.

In its four-plus-year experience, ClusterTruck has the whole operational process down to an art and science, to the point that customers can have their meal within a half hour of placing their order. With the infrastructure, including a full menu, in place, ClusterTruck can court non-restaurants to present a complete plug-and-play meal-providing service that is going to take the restaurant industry by storm.

The already-crowded foodservice industry will only become more so as consumers get used to ordering food from these non-traditional locales. Imagine if ClusterTruck strikes a meal preparation, ordering and delivery partnership with Walmart, Target, Costco, Amazon, etc. … And customers get used to it? Who needs a restaurant?

My word of advice to ClusterTruck… You are a significant player. But as I said earlier: Ghost kitchens are inherently invisible to the consumer. They are a blank screen in terms of branding. A ghost kitchen does not best operate as its own independent brand. There’s no emotional connection. Do not seek to become a household word yourself. Be strategic with your marketing—letting your partner’s brand and marketing engine power the consumer connection. You have built the infrastructure. They have built a following.  Though you are in the meal-providing driver’s seat operationally, take a back seat in the customer’s eyes. If you will embrace that, I predict that with the right partnerships, you will disrupt the restaurant industry completely. And kudos to Kroger.

Tell me what you think.

Jody

Well, I Never Would Have Thought of That

I’m not quite ready to look forward to 2020. I’m still intrigued with some of the foodservice deftness I saw in 2019—just in the month of September.

While others were reading trend reports and closely following what everyone else is doing to determine their next foodservice move, others announced initiatives that caused me to spit out my coffee and choke, “You did what?!” The professional term for what my three examples did is disruption. (Was this September Foodservice Sweeps?) See what you think of these launches:

Cheez-It-like Pizza. How did this mashup happen between Pizza Hut pizza and Kellogg’s Cheez-Its? I love them both, and in September Pizza Hut announced its novel Stuffed Pizza Cheez-It LTO. The details are in the four jumbo Cheez-It-looking and tasting crispy squares filled with either cheese or pepperoni and cheese served with a side of marinara dipping sauce. I’m a Boomer who grew up on Pizza Hut and Cheez-Its. Love the idea, but they didn’t have my demographic in mind for this LTO. It was timed to coincide with college football season. Do college students like Cheez-Its? Let me at them.

Grocery Store Food Hall. In September Kroger unveiled a food hall in its newest Cincinnati store a block from Kroger HQ. Either this On the Rhine Eatery, as it is called, is an elevation of the grocerant movement, or it’s a cheapening of the chef-driven food hall wave. In true food hall fashion, the five eateries included are not chain restaurants. Menus cover tacos, Asian street fare and BBQ for starters. The idea of a food hall in a grocery store is a bit head scratching to me, but it’s in a swanky neighborhood, so a cool store-centric food hall might not be a stretch for that area.

Food Magazine Opens a Delivery-only Virtual Restaurant. You thought Bon Appetit was a magazine. But now it’s a restaurant too. Mind blowing. Ghost kitchens and delivery partnerships make this totally possible. Bon Appetit, Delivered is the name, and Chicago is the location. The virtual storefront is operated by Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises (LEYE) with Grubhub as the delivery partner. The concept features popular dishes from the magazine, website and Instagram feed.

I thought on this one for a long time. What is to stop any other food-related company from opening a virtual restaurant? Nothing. Is Oprah listening? Why not a Weight Watchers virtual restaurant? Health club and spa virtual restaurants, anyone? The Food Channel? A gas station? (I’m not crazy. What about Wawa?) Theme park neighborhoods could do it with fair food. Think Disneyland/Disney World. I’ll stop with that and let everyone else think of others. But this I would call restaurant disruption. And maybe therein lies a new spin on ghost kitchens, which is shaping up to be a huge trend for 2020 and beyond.

Tell me what you think.

Jody

How Far Can Impossible and Beyond Burgers Go?

I’m starting to think that the plant-based meat alternatives put out by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat are the Scrub Daddys of the foodservice industry. Who would have thought they would catch on as quickly and as completely as they did? They are still in the introduction phase of their product lifecycle and already national chains are putting out press releases nearly daily with Impossible or Beyond menu launches.

It began with full-on burger sandwich offerings from early adopters White Castle and Fatburger followed by the likes of TGI Friday, Burger King, Hard Rock Café, Cheesecake Factory, Carl’s Jr. and Red Robin, to name a few. But it’s jumped from burger sandwiches to use as a plant-based meat replacement ingredient in tacos (Qdoba and Del Taco), as a pizza topping (Little Caesars, Oath Pizza) and flatbread (Courtyard by Marriott). And it’s also made the leap away from beef substitute to sausage substitute at Veggie Grill and at Tim Horton’s in Canada. Don’t blink or you’ll miss the big hop to chicken. KFC is testing and evaluating Beyond Fried Chicken.

Plant-based protein shipments from foodservice broadline distributors increased 18% in the past year—up from 17% the previous year, according to NPD Group.

In the beginning, I was positive the bottom would drop out of this flash movement. Nothing is that wildly successful overnight. OK, Scrub Daddy was with the help of Shark Tank investor Lori Greiner. Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have also received heavy investment. So I’ve wondered if that’s what is behind their success.

But no, I’d say these products rose up at the perfect time, or else they created the perfect time to focus on plant-based proteins for environmental causes. Nearly half (49%) of GenZs (ages 12 to 24) are trying to add more plant-based foods into their diet compared to 33% of Baby Boomers, according to Mintel’s Plant-based Proteins—US, May 2019 report. Also, 45% of consumers believe that plant-based protein is healthier than animal protein.

But I’m still not ready to concede that these Impossible and Beyond products have staying power. Some factor could arise to change everything.

I remember a few decades ago when consumers suddenly started clamoring for organic produce. The national produce suppliers couldn’t change their fields fast enough to satisfy the cries. And in the twinkle of an eye, consumer sentiment jumped from organic to local. This came about so completely that without a thought, consumers would have answered “yes” to the question, “Is local produce healthier than produce shipped from far away?” This shifting consumer sentiment left national growers who were in the midst of changing out fields to organic standing with their jaws dropped.

Could an ethos arise that would change everything for these plant-based protein brands? When I read an article about how highly processed these products are, I held my breath. Could that become the game changer? Is some group or prominent publication or news magazine TV program going to discuss the myriad of ingredients in these things and compare that with whole foods? Whole foods (not the retailer), after all, is a movement itself. Are there artificial ingredients in these plant-based proteins? Because if so and someone jumps onto that, there are 33% of consumers who say the food claim free of artificial ingredients is important to them.

Amidst the shifting sands of consumer sentiment, we shall see how far these plant-based proteins go in their presently positive lifecycle.

Tell me what you think.

Jody

Is it Too Early to Make 2020 Menu Predictions?

Well, let me be the first to predict a menu shift we should have seen coming 15 years ago: lifestyle menus. We will see more operations that base their entire menu on lifestyle diets.

The embryo of this menu trend was first spotted in the early 2000’s when Ruby Tuesday stunned the industry when it boldly introduced a new separate menu featuring low-carb items. The setting for this was the low-carb craze that few of us industry old-timers will forget. It was a well-recognized national phenomenon that took the baking industry down for a time. Ruby Tuesday’s idea gave way to icons next to items that met the criteria of the moment. And to this day, icons for vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free are common menu inclusions.

What’s different now that changes everything is the emerging generation with their personalized nutrition expectations. Currently we see a small outbreak of menu items developed for lifestyles. Consider Chipotle’s Lifestyle Bowls launched in January (Paleo, Keto and Whole30). Blaze Pizza just launched a line of Life Mode pizzas (Keto, Protein, Vegan and Vegetarian).

But these are just baby steps toward where this is ultimately going. If we consider the functional-food oriented younger generation, we should look at what colleges and universities are doing to address the cause.

Earlier this year, Chartwells, the Compass Group contract management outfit that operates about 300 college and university dining facilities, launched its Fueling Your Unique Lifestyle program. It highlights foods with ingredients that make vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and keto so yesterday. Rather, Chartwells picked eight areas in which they could develop dishes that would provide purposeful benefits. To name a few, Immunity Boost dishes have antioxidant-rich ingredients; Love Your Heart options contain omega-3-fat-rich items; Improved Clarity options zero in on brain focus (think caffeine, herbs, spices and elixirs); Clean Eats items have no preservatives or additives; and Recovery foods is my favorite category. It’s not hangover recovery, but muscle recovery after heavy workouts. Chartwells’ executive chef pointed out to me pickle juice as a good recovery go-to. So they have developed 40 kinds of pickles!

These health-benefit labels appear at the beginning of the dish name, so students know the benefit right away.

While restaurants could learn from this and incorporate something similar, I think this is going to lead to a new (probably crowd-funded) genre of restaurant…lifestyle restaurants—beyond smoothie shops. LYFE Kitchen (with three units) could be considered the embryo for this idea. It labels many of its dishes with the lifestyle benefit, as in the breakfast Anti-Burnout Bowl, Paleo Power Start, Balance Bowl, Keto Scramble and Protein Pancakes.

But can we call lifestyle restaurants a trend yet? No, but we are going to see them. Perhaps Jamba will evolve to this. It took a baby step in June when it announced it was taking Juice out of its name and adding the tagline Smoothies, Juices, Bowls. But we need to see some operations with intentionally functional full menus.

Tell me what you think.

Jody

Marketing That's Missing Something

I was recently in an airport killing time, so I stopped by a hair-care outlet. A curl-enhancing product caught my eye, so I asked the sales associate about it. She informed me it was made from all-natural ingredients, and the brand gives back and makes sure women workers in Africa are fairly treated and supported. Something boiled up inside me. How was it that she applied food marketing messages to a curl enhancer?

Obviously, I’m naive. That was apparent as I then sat on the plane and opened the inflight magazine to the 2019 Beauty, Health and Snack Must-Haves and saw these food-marketing terms freely bandied about for soap and deodorant. I did not know there’s such a thing as vegan, cruelty-free and palm oil-free soap. (Help. Is something wrong with palm oil?) For every product sold, one bar of soap and one month of clean water is donated to a child in need. I see. But tell me about the actual soap.

The list also featured a deodorant formulated by the daughter of a breast cancer survivor and is free from common unpronounceable ingredients. The company donates a portion of sales to breast cancer research and survivor support.

It’s official. Anymore, products aren’t sold by their personal beneficial qualities as much as by their contribution to society.

The description of a list of condiments highlighted on that magazine page sounded just like the soap and deodorant, if not slightly more condescending. It said, Condiments were bland products made with bland practices by bland companies. This inspired us to create the tastiest, award-winning condiments and dressings possible, using the finest non-GMO ingredients and ethical practices, such as certified humane free-range eggs.

I’m going to guess that this description was written by a magazine intern who filtered the product through his/her demographic (Millennial or GenZ) filter and freely concluded that bland equals any product or company that doesn’t do good—demonstratively.

And probably this intern is right. Restaurants have been waking up to this for several years, and there’s always news of brands taking it a step further. Today I read that Taco Bell is hoping to reduce antibiotics in beef by 25% over the next six years. It had already made a commitment to eliminate antibiotics in its chicken. All this is in response to customer demand.

We have to hand it to this generation that has always been known to speak up and only support products that operate in line with its ideals. I should not have been surprised to find that soap and deodorant are subject to the same ethical scrutiny. Every industry is under the microscope.

But I have a little request. In our food marketing, can we also say what’s in the product and how it tastes? Let’s talk about senses, spices, texture and flavor. Go back to terms that reflect balance, refreshment and deliciousness.

Tell me what you think.

Jody

Bowls Have Come a Long Way Baby

Ten years ago, bowl entrees only appeared about 150 times on restaurant menus. Now they show up more than 1,500 times. Just in the past three years, menu incidence of bowls has increased 65%, according Mintel Menu Insights. What has happened?

I can point to at least two things. The bowl has become a recognized carrier of themed ingredients and it’s one of few formats that unwieldy health-forward beans and grains easily fit into.

The bowls of yesterdecade were often rice or noodle bowls with Asian moorings. Breakfast bowls were also starting to appear and have done nothing but soar in the past three years, up 148%.  

But I like to ponder what it was that made restaurant menu developers start to think seriously about bowls, and I want to zone in on the “themed carriers” idea combined with the upscale concept of deconstructing that’s now in everybody’s playbook. Sandwiches/wraps and pizza are among the most common classic ingredient carriers, but if you tear them down and put the ingredients in a bowl, you have things like Olive Garden’s Meatball Pizza Bowl, but more. Because with a bowl, you can add extra flavorful ingredients. After all, bowls enclose. Pizza doesn’t.

More is better, especially if it is better. Power bowl is a common entrée name to convey that this isn’t just a hodgepodge of random ingredients, but a carrier for superfoods. Corner Bakery recently launched its Power Breakfast Egg Bowl, partly described as “our power greens blend of baby kale, arugula and spinach topped with fluffy scrambled eggs, farro and oven-roasted tomatoes.” Meanwhile, LYFE Kitchen just added its Acai Power Bowl: “housemade acai-blueberry compote, coconut milk, chia seeds and toasted pecan almond crunch.”

Notice the way menu developers are turning to bowls to make healthy more craveable. Chipotle, that until the new guard arrived, rarely added a new ingredient or dish, recently launched a line of Lifestyle Bowls, calling out keto, paleo, whole30 and double protein. Dunkin recently added an Eggwhite Bowl which smacks of healthy. Indeed, the company notes that the bowl contains vegetables, lean protein and no bread to appease the low/no-carb crowd. (Let it not be lost on anyone that many carriers are carb-laden, bringing on a nap attack.) And BFY brand Jamba Juice just dropped the word Juice from its name to expand its focus and added a tagline: Smoothies. Juices. Bowls.  

Bowls are also a palatable way to get more fish in front of guests. Menu incidence of fish bowls went from near zero to 65 in the past three years. Perhaps we have the emergence of Hawaiian cuisine and its iconic poke bowls to thank for that. For anyone embarrassed to admit they don’t know what poke is, it’s raw fish chunks (often tuna) ala sashimi, but mixed with mayo and a few other seasonings. For those who won’t eat sushi unless it’s a California roll, poke is an indulgent first stab at raw fish.

I think bowls are only in their infancy as a carrier for themed ingredients. We aren’t seeing many dessert bowls, beyond ice cream. But even that could take a twist. You’ve heard of freak shakes that include all kinds of decadent ingredients? Why not freak bowls?

The second reason I think we’re in for a lot more bowl action is the emergence of robots. Notice my last blog post The Salad Bar of the Future. Sally the salad robot by Chowbotics is also a bowl robot. After all, a salad is a bowl. The company is just now promoting it as also a bowl robot.

And finally, I have to give a nod to ingredient manufacturers/marketers as the third reason we will see more bowls. It’s the job of food/ingredient manufacturer corporate chefs to develop and pitch menu ideas to restaurant chains. There are grain (and bean) companies doing just that, and bowls are the dream trend for these folks. There will be more bowls on chain restaurant menus, or those companies will die trying.

Tell me what you think.

Jody