Many columnists pen a year-in-review piece every December, but I thought it wiser to do the opposite and craft a year-in-preview. So here’s a wishful/wistful look back at what hasn’t happened yet in foodservice. But could. And in some cases, should. Read it and reap.
January: Late in January 2015, CEO Tim Cook announces plans at CES in Las Vegas for Apple to become “The Chipotle of Tech Companies.” Stock price doubles.
February: The restaurant business finally gets serious about the hiring and development process in order to solve its 25-year-old labor challenges. We realize it’s not a “labor” crisis; it’s a turnover crisis, and companies finally begin focusing on the root cause of job abandonment instead of its symptoms. Thought-leading brands start defining and advertising their core values and culture, and begin seeking only people who wish to align to it, imbuing the culture during onboarding, paying people fairly, developing them daily, illuminating career paths, giving teams enlightened and fun governance, and then — and only then — turning them loose on our guests. Magically, the churn lessens while tenure lengthens. Oh, and profits rise for all practitioners.
March: Excited to improve the dynamics surrounding building and maintaining strong teams, we apply customer data to the process of employee engagement and culture. We begin to get at the “what” behind the “why,” leveraging technology to define, measure and improve our people, performance and profits. We assign and embed brand ambassadors in each department to ascertain that we’re measurably raising the bar with each new hire. We figure out how to make it a privilege to join our teams. We start to listen to retail people engineers like Amazon’s Anurag Gupta who said: “There are two possible mistakes you can make — you can either hire the wrong person or fail to hire the right one. None of us like to say no, but you should bias toward the latter.”
April: McDonald’s announces a detailed plan to become “The Chipotle of Burgers” in three years. “That’s it, we’ve had it, enough is enough,” says a Subway spokesperson, “We standardized the DIY process, not them. Subway is the original Chipotle of Chipotle.”
May: It seems that many food trend writers spend way too much research time at big-city restaurants so hip they can’t see over their own pelvis. This is why frothy superlatives about the ascendance of quinoa, acai berries, Greenland shoal oysters, cricket burgers, kale, Cronuts, tequila-gin infusion, juniper berry reduction and handlebar mustaches on mixologists don’t get much traction outside of Williamsburg and Wicker Park.
So where’s the next culinary frontier? While Steampunk Buffets or Hobo Bindle Bundle Burgers may have potential as the next big thing, the fact remains that if Asian were any hotter it would have to wrapped in a burrito. Since Pyongyang can now dictate not only its own people’s diet but also Sony’s holiday film release schedule, perhaps North Korean cuisine will be next in the food writers’ “trendinista” crosshairs. But can there be such a thing as a “fresh” take on a grass-and-thistle salad?
June: A fast-casual chain figures out how to share and duplicate its own best practices. Sales grow exponentially. Turns out one of their employees ran into a problem while performing a routine kitchen task or using back-office software or working the drive-through. And then she spent a good deal of time troubleshooting and finally solved the problem. Well done, but not so good for the rest of the company if she didn’t share the solution with anyone else. Chances are other team members will have similar challenges in the future, wasting valuable time retracing the same steps. So this company decides to make it mandatory for team members to post their “Troubleshoot Triumphs” on the company intranet, or present the details at the next staff meeting. It turns out big data is little data too.
More predictions
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July: Farm-to-table died suddenly today due to acute overuse and apathy. It was born in 1067 AD when the farm was invented, and waited nearly 940 years to marry, since the process of transporting crops from the field to the dining board in the hut had yet to be named. Farm met table in 2005. They are survived by a son, Locavore, and a daughter, Sustainable. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the Friends of Nouvelle Cuisine in Blackened Redfish, La.
August: At $290,335 a share, Chipotle stock now exceeds Berkshire Hathaway stock. Steve Ells buys Apple for a straight swap of 50,000 shares and a $100 ShopHouse gift card.
September: Tipping is banned by city councils in Berkeley, Calif.; Boulder, Colo.; and Ann Arbor, Mich., for being elitist, unfair and vaguely Republican. Diners are asked to donate gratuities instead to the recently established Farm-to-Table Relief Fund in Snackwells, Ind., or to attend Burning Man.
What are your predictions for the year ahead? Join the conversation in the comments below.
October: MIT and Stanford jointly announce that they have successfully cloned a Ray Kroc/ Colonel Sanders/Howard Schultz “super leader” from recombinant DNA recently found on an old French fry, chicken leg and Venti soy latte, respectively. The clone appears on The Chew and The View, and then immediately applies for a position as an intern at Chipotle.
November: The industry’s human resources and training departments wake up and decide to stop training employees and start educating entrepreneurs instead, assuring a strong talent pipeline and bench strength into the year 2020.
December: Honda develops and sells the first robot waiter, SRVR-1, who can perform over 75,000 duties and sell appetizers and desserts in 214 different languages. More than 500 media credentials are issued to the press to document its first night on the job, but the ink-stained wretches retire to the bar early when SRVR-1 calls in sick right before its scheduled shift.
