How a downtown Deli took a delivery box, made it remarkable, and saved 45,000 dollars in the process.

Most of the menu analysis and menu engineering models were built during a time of solid annual growth for our industry. These models focus on high gross margin items. Today, blindly using these models to adjust menu prices may hurt your bottom line. 

A recap of one of Erle’s Dardick’s Brown Bag session with seven executives from major Fast Casual companies. The conversation covered:
• How and why to centralize control points
• The value of online ordering , and
• The advantages of providing an ordering method mix

In North America we’ve been really good at taking uniqueness and enthusiasm and scaling it over a large number of units. Meanwhile, the little guys are nimble, and are very good at creating new value. Everyone can learn from them.

Recent magazine articles from QSR Magazine, the Nation’s Restaurant News, and Hospitality Trends point to an explosion in catering, and catering business opportunities for QRSs

We’re in a great industry: no matter what, people have a great love for food. And their love for food is like the air in a balloon – you can crush it on one end, but it comes up somewhere else.
The trick is to be where the air rises.

Successful American restaurants are typically highly capitalized, high concept, sit down affairs.

But with changing times, people get agile. Here come the food trucks, and VendrTV to track them. 

A commissary can help you with needed diversification, and can prepare you for subsequent diversification down the line.

And commissaries can make all kinds of sense if you are rebuilding.

Contextualizing an article featuring Boudin Bakery and its rationale for casual catering - from Hospitality Magazine.

Out To Lunch Catering prepares food with fundamentals in mind. A video interview by MonkeyMedia.net about commitment in the age of transparency.

Sometimes a food concept goes beyond utility and value. Kogi, LA’s Korean Taco Truck, has hit the mark. What makes people crazy about it?

Great marketing support technology for modern bakeries: a gadget that tells their customers when the latest fresh batch is ready. Customers can smell the coffee, wherever they are, via twitter.

Suddenly, virtually every QSR operator is trying to enter the catering business.
Erle answers the million dollar question:
“What’s happening?”

Food cost expert Joe Dunbar with a ‘best of’ list: 
twenty-one points of food cost advice.

In 120 characters or less.

On mile 1000 of her 1500 mile ride against homelessness, Dancing Deer Baking company’s Trish Karter talks about things that matter.

On networking, trade shows, co-opetition...and Chicago in May.