What Does ‘Fresh’ Mean?

By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business

What does “going out to a restaurant” mean? The same National Restaurant Association that tells us four out of five consumers think going out to a restaurant is a better use of their time than cooking and cleaning up also tells us that back in 2001, what the restaurant industry calls “off-premises” — takeout and delivery — accounted for 58 percent of total restaurant traffic. (That number is likely much higher today.)

What does “casual dining” mean and does the word “dine” bias answers when many times consumers view their restaurant adventure as a form of refueling?

We wonder about the significance of the word “fresh” when Bryan writes: “Our diners put a premium on the presence of fresh produce on the menu when deciding where to dine — 58 percent say this is important to their restaurant selection.” We have some uncertainty as to what that means.

Perhaps they like to go to restaurants that offer a lot of obviously fresh items, such as entrée salads and many choices of fresh vegetables. It might mean that if they order items with fresh produce — a salad or a burger topped with lettuce, tomato, and onion — they want the produce to be high quality and crispy — fresh being shorthand for quality.

Or could they be saying they want all the side dishes to be fresh as opposed to frozen or canned? One wonders if they could really tell the difference in a lot of cases.

Maybe they want the cooking to be done with fresh produce, say french fries made from potatoes cut, peeled and fried in-house. They want soups made with fresh vegetables.

It is impossible to know without further research. One of the dangers of having a goal in research — such as learning consumer attitudes toward fresh — is we sometimes use words without really knowing what the consumer means in answering our questions.

Sometimes a word is just a throwaway. Next time we do such a survey, we should try to divide the respondents and ask some to rank the importance of fresh fruits and vegetables on the menu and some to rank the importance of fruits and vegetables on the menu. We could also try other qualifiers such as “healthful.” This would enable us to judge if we need to work on consumer perceptions of fresh vs. frozen or canned items.

One key place where the produce industry can help itself is recipe development in ethnic food areas. Bryan’s comments about consumer enthusiasm for Italian, Chinese and Mexican, as well as cuisines growing fast in popularity, such as the Vietnamese cuisine that is being discussed at PMA’s Produce Solutions Conference, points less to the popularity of ethnic cuisines than to the mainstreaming of these foods into American cuisine.

Just as nobody thinks of Frankfurt, Germany, when eating a hot dog (frankfurter), or Hamburg, Germany, when eating a hamburger, few foods are more American than pizza. In fact, chefs such as Wolfgang Puck and chains such as California Pizza Kitchen have developed countless pizzas no one in Italy would recognize as Italian food.

Relatively few ethnic restaurants are focused on authentically duplicating the eating experience of the home country. The trend is to both fusion cuisine — combining attributes of different cuisines — or a kind of nouvelle cuisine of ethnic foods, a re-imagining of dishes to use ingredients and equipment that were never available back home. This opens the door for the produce industry to suggest usages that, though true to the spirit of the cuisine, are light years away from anything Grandma or Grandpa would have recognized.

The issue of health and produce in restaurants also needs to be explored in greater depth. Of those 89 percent who request to substitute and add in fresh fruit or vegetable items at least sometimes — how many are requesting a second vegetable portion rather than a starch, such as pasta, rice or, most of the time, a potato. Perhaps they were all on Atkins when they made the request. We would also like to see research that distinguishes between those seeking weight loss and those seeking health enhancement.

Bryan makes a strong point about the power industry members possess as consumers. As a father, this author has tried to prod restaurants to alter the children’s menu to include more healthful options — grilled chicken instead of deep fried; peas, carrots, and corn, in addition to a starch; fresh fruit for dessert instead of a scoop of ice cream. Generally, if they have it, they will substitute.

If we regularly go to an independent restaurant so the owners know us, they will even inventory a new item and change the menu — assuming we are reasonably representative of what parents want. We have found they are often quicker to add canned peas or pears to the menu — knowing they can store it — than fresh fruit or vegetables.

The industry must confront a broader problem, namely, consumers’ unprompted responses usually focus on protein. Most casual dining chains will report customer comment cards focus almost exclusively on the protein. Was the steak, chicken, fish plentiful, well cooked, good quality, delicious? As long as that is the focus of consumer comment, the inclination will be for restaurants to put their money into the protein, fill up the plate with the cheapest starch they can find and then add a couple stalks of asparagus and a cherry tomato for color.

Restaurants are pretty responsive to consumers. If we get consumers to really care — not just say they care — about eating more fresh produce, bet the restaurant menu problem will take care of itself.