Looking For A Bigger Win
By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business
If the industry is going to get serious about using foodservice as a venue to boost consumption, the trade needs to invest in serious research to understand the behavioral effects of different produce offerings in restaurants.
This piece of research indicates two things clearly. First, there are boundless opportunities for individual companies to promote intriguing new items in the foodservice sector. Chefs yearn for innovative items by which they can distinguish their cuisine from others, and, especially in the white tablecloth sector where price points are high, chefs actively seek to differentiate their offerings from what patrons could get at more moderately priced chain restaurants.
Second, this research gives precious little credence to the idea that it is easy to increase total produce consumption or that the joint PMA/NRA/IFDA effort, launched in July of 2009 to double produce consumption in foodservice, has had any impact at all.
Most of these exciting new items appear in less than 2 percent of all menus. This is because they are used solely in specific ethnic dishes or because they are used solely by white-tablecloth chefs. Since, say, Thai restaurants are only a small percentage of all restaurants and white-tablecloth restaurants are less than 1 percent of the U.S. foodservice scene, neither of these approaches can effectively move the needle on consumption.
When there is a real breakthrough, as with kale, this research explains clearly the dynamic:
Last year’s intense focus on kale (5%) can be traced back to the growth in menuing and appeal of spinach. As spinach (59%) saturated the market, operators looked for another dark green vegetable with an equally healthy perception that could be used in a wide variety of applications. Enter the year of kale and its rapid proliferation on the menu.
This trend is great for anyone with a specific interest in selling kale, but for anyone interested in either the commercial interests of the produce industry in expanding sales or increasing public health through dietary change, there is nothing here. Some restaurants want to innovate, so they replace spinach with kale. Where is the win there?
Yet a paucity of data, plus an urge to self-congratulatory presentations, has led most assessments of success or failure on the issue of produce in foodservice to focus on facts of questionable relevance — such as menu mentions — or “case studies” that don’t assess all the relevant variables.
So a chef shows that his restaurant reimagined a dish, replaced a 1,500-calorie breaded Veal Parmesan on an ocean of spaghetti, covered it with cheese and with a few ounces of grilled veal and some vegetables. The restaurant announces that the new dish outsells the old. But the study never discusses whether it has changed eating habits or whether the same people who bought the Veal Parmesan are now switching their orders. It is quite likely that those who wanted the mega meal have switched to the equally gluttonous lasagna, and the grilled veal and vegetables are a switch from the salad set.
The PMA/NRA/IFDA initiative was doomed from the start because nobody had baseline data on how much produce was used in foodservice; therefore, nobody will be able to say what happened to usage in 10 years.
Furthermore, nobody is doing the kind of research that would really tell us if menu changes in restaurants make a difference. First, we have to know if changing dishes can really change eating habits in the restaurant. Do people switch from the 16-ounce Veal Parm over pasta to the 3-ounce grilled veal and steamed vegetables if given the option? But that is not enough if we are interested in public health. Maybe the larger serving satiates hunger, and those people skip dessert. Maybe the fewer-calorie serving makes people feel they ate virtuously and so they can indulge in a banana split. Or maybe the lower-calorie choice leaves people raiding the fridge at 2 a.m.
Few are inclined to fund or conduct this kind of research, so at chef conclaves, they give each other awards for reimagining dishes without any evidence that their efforts make any difference at all on produce usage or public health.
None of this takes anything at all away from chefs who use produce in an innovative manner or vendors and producers who work to introduce new items. If we didn’t do that, produce would be a bore, and sales and consumption would ultimately decline. It is just like saying that putting tail fins on a car may switch people to that model, but it probably won’t increase the overall number of cars sold over a long period of time.
So if the industry is going to get serious about using foodservice as a venue to boost consumption, the trade needs to invest in serious research to understand the behavioral effects of different produce offerings in restaurants. Otherwise, every kale triumph will come at the cost of a spinach failure, and we will have accomplished little or nothing.