Latest / Chef's PSA Podcast / 2024 Food Industry Trends Ep. 78

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2024 Food Industry Trends Ep. 78 · Chef's PSA Podcast

• 0:00
  Hello Chefs, this is Chefs PSA Podcast.
• 0:02
  I'm your host Andre Natera On today's episode, this is going
• 0:05
  to be a fun 1/20/24 food trends. Stay tuned.
• 0:21
  This episode of Chefs PSA is sponsored by J&R Grills and
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  Go to jrmanufacturing.com/vault. Before we get started, let me
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• 1:14
  Bad Cooks Everywhere. It should be out early January.
• 1:17
  A lot of you have been asking. I'm working hard on it.
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  I'm also working on a couple of other free ebook which I was
• 1:23
  hoping to have in time for Christmas, but that's not going
• 1:26
  to happen. But I will have them also out
• 1:28
  early next year. Those are coming up.
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  They're free. You could also give me money you
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  don't. They don't have to be free if
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  you feel like being generous. It is Christmas.
• 2:11
  Anyway, we digress. Let's get into it.
• 2:13
  So today's episode is 2024 food trends outlook.
• 2:17
  Now how did I come up with these food trends?
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  What research did I do? Well, I'll tell you, the
• 2:22
  research I did is I talked to chefs.
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  I have friends that are chefs and I talked to a lot of
• 2:27
  different chefs. Some of them are very high end
• 2:30
  chefs in the Michelin world. James Beard Award winners as
• 2:34
  well as other are just industry friends, people that are chefs,
• 2:37
  people that message me on Chef's PSA as well as podcaster chef
• 2:40
  friends. Shout out to Emmanuel La Roche
• 2:42
  from Flavors Unknown. We had a long conversation about
• 2:45
  2024. He gave me some good insights as
• 2:47
  well as Chef David Susio from the Susio Talk podcast also gave
• 2:53
  me some ideas as well. So all the chefs that
• 2:55
  contributed, I appreciate it, but ultimately this is kind of
• 2:58
  what I think. So I did this and I'm guessing,
• 3:02
  but I think I have a pretty good pulse on the industry.
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  I talk to a lot of people and I spend most of the my time
• 3:08
  looking at things like that because I have stepped away from
• 3:11
  the kitchen. So it allows me to step back and
• 3:13
  see things from a different vantage point.
• 3:15
  So with that being said, what is my outlook for 2024?
• 3:19
  What do I think the next big food and industry trends will
• 3:22
  be? And by the way, I said food
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  trends, but they're not all food trends.
• 3:24
  A lot of them are just industry trends.
• 3:26
  And the direction that I see the culinary restaurant world moving
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  towards, I also put up a few posts on Chef's PSA Instagram
• 3:36
  page giving a little preview of what these are.
• 3:40
  So some of you have already started getting the wheels
• 3:42
  turning on this, but I have a few that I didn't share.
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  The first one I want to talk about is the four day work week
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  model. Now I've talked about this on
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  the previous two episodes, just sticking my toe in the water,
• 3:53
  wanting to understand it more. And it's interesting.
• 3:56
  I was talking to a chef friend of mine because I've talked to a
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  few chefs that love this idea. They said it's increased
• 4:02
  retention and has really helped their business model.
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  However, I've talked to another chef, good friend of mine and he
• 4:08
  says he operates on the four day business model and none of his
• 4:11
  cooks like it. They all want more hours, they
• 4:13
  all want more days and if anything they've become slightly
• 4:17
  less engaged due to the four day model, he says.
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  They're not learning as much. Again, different perspective.
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  I'm not sure what's right and what's wrong.
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  It's still so very new. Another chef friend of mine,
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  he's not supportive of the four day model because it doesn't
• 4:31
  work for every restaurant. A lot of the chefs that do it,
• 4:34
  they can do it because they have an overabundance of staff.
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  But those places that can't get staff and are struggling or work
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  in settings where there's benefits, where every full time
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  employee FTE hits a certain benefit line item, there's
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  ownership involved. It's not so easy to make the
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  transition to a four day work week model.
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  What do I see happening? My personal opinion is that it's
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  not going to go away, at least not yet.
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  I think a lot of restaurants and chefs are going to use this as a
• 5:01
  competitive advantage to attract talent.
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  I think a lot of people are asking for it because they want
• 5:06
  that balance of life. And I also think it's going to
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  open up the door for people that can maneuver much more quickly
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  and adopt this to position themselves in the marketplace to
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  attract and retain talent and displace talent from those
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  people that can't be as nimble as they are.
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  It's interesting. I'm very curious how this is
• 5:26
  going to play out. I'm watching from the sidelines.
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  I, of course want everyone to win, especially if you listen to
• 5:31
  Chef's PSAI. Want those people to win more.
• 5:34
  But it's something I'm definitely keeping an eye on
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  because it's been a bigger conversation than I realized,
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  especially as we move into 2024. A lot of chefs are already
• 5:43
  moving on this quickly, and a lot of chefs are reaping the
• 5:47
  benefits or paying the consequences of not.
• 5:49
  So we'll see how this goes. Right now I'm unsure how I feel
• 5:53
  about it. The next one is something that
• 5:55
  you all have heard me talk about a lot is AI and administration.
• 5:58
  I'm working on a few AI bots, chat bots for food cost, for
• 6:02
  menu engineering, for menu writing because I do see this
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  displacing a lot of the admin work that the chefs have to do.
• 6:08
  It's not going to completely take chefs out of the office,
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  but it will displace the amount of time that you spend in the
• 6:14
  office and put you in the kitchen much more, at least much
• 6:17
  more than they currently are. Some chefs come in, their admin
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  work is a full time job, 8 hours a day in the office and very
• 6:25
  little kitchen time. I think this will cut that
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  amount of time in half. Now it doesn't mean that chefs
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  aren't going to find an excuse to go back into the office to
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  work on more admin because they are rusty.
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  But I I do think with AI it's going to displace a lot of the
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  admin work. I also see it being a good
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  resource for people that want to use it for building websites,
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  social content creation, you know, getting rid of marketing
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  and PR firms and learning how to do it in house.
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  A lot of the outsourcing for sales, marketing, accounting
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  software, food cost software, administrative assistance.
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  I think a lot of that is going to get put on the side or
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  potentially just disappear in certain areas because AI can do
• 7:08
  it much more efficient. And for a $20 subscription to
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  open a is ChatGPT or Grok on Twitter.
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  Whatever you're paying, it'll save you thousands of dollars
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  paying firms that are doing it for you.
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  And maybe you just hire one person on property to be the AI
• 7:24
  specialist that now can handle all those things.
• 7:27
  That's a good position. Actually, every this is my new
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  prediction. I just thought of it right now.
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  Every restaurant needs an AI specialist that can now do the
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  work of five people and potentially downsize the amount
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  of outsourcing you're doing for sales and marketing and
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  advertising and all that social media, whatever.
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  I'm blown away with what you could do with AI.
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  All the little comic images that you see on Chef's PSA Instagram,
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  I make those with AII, make them daily and it's quick.
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  I've become quite efficient at it.
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  I do work on this all day so it might not be easy for everybody,
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  but once you understand it, I think you could save a lot of
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  money by learning how to do a lot of these things in house and
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  having an AI specialist on your team.
• 8:08
  The next food trend I want to talk about is immersive culinary
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  experiences and Noma piqued my interest with this as they're
• 8:14
  traveling to Noma Mexico, Noma Japan and so on and so forth.
• 8:18
  I know the restaurant, Del Saler de con Roca travels and they
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  partner with the bank and they do these pop ups all over the
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  world and I see that happening more and more.
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  A friend of mine did a pop up and he partnered with an event
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  company and I want to say he also had an art exhibit
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  partnered with them and they did this you know multi course, 20
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  course tasting menu extremely expensive and they sold out And
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  what's interesting about that is because a lot of the fine dining
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  restaurants sometimes it becomes unsustainable to do it in one
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  location. But if you partner with an art
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  exhibit or an event company and you take that show on the road,
• 8:54
  well now you could have a traveling world class restaurant
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  or a traveling experience. Now imagine you could get
• 9:01
  Alchemist or Noma or Alinea anywhere in the world because
• 9:07
  they're traveling like a concert.
• 9:09
  I'm starting to see that, and I definitely think that's going to
• 9:11
  start picking up steam more in 2024 as well as beyond.
• 9:17
  It seems like a pretty good business model.
• 9:19
  If you could have your traveling circus of chefs, so to speak,
• 9:22
  and go to different cities and do that, it could be a cash cow,
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  right? You're selling 200 and $5500
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  tickets, putting on a crazy event one night only.
• 9:32
  Definitely something to think about for chefs, especially
• 9:35
  world class chefs that have the opportunity to do that.
• 9:37
  And if you have a team around you, why couldn't you take the
• 9:39
  show on the road? I don't know.
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  Something to think about. Next one, I want to talk about
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  Mexico and Mexico City in particular.
• 9:47
  I think Mexican food is having another moment, and I know
• 9:49
  they've already had their moment, but I think we just
• 9:52
  scratched the surface of the different styles of Mexican
• 9:55
  food. There's everything in the
• 9:57
  Yucatan. Mexico City has different
• 10:00
  flavors. Veracruz has different flavors,
• 10:02
  Oaxaca, and we're starting to discover that there's a lot of
• 10:05
  different flavors that are unexplored in different regions.
• 10:08
  There's also the breaking of tradition that you're starting
• 10:11
  to see in Mexico City. A restaurant in particular that
• 10:14
  I discussed with my friend Emmanuel from Flavors Unknown is
• 10:17
  Masala and Mais in Mexico City, where you have two different
• 10:21
  cultures blending flavors. So Mexico, flavors of Asia and
• 10:26
  India all blended together in the Middle East and you have a
• 10:30
  new type of cuisine. And I think Mexico City is
• 10:33
  really pushing the boundaries on what people's perception of
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  Mexican food is, and it's creating a new type of Mexican
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  food. And I think people need to keep
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  their eye out on it. It's like Mexico said, we're not
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  done yet. We got a lot more to show, which
• 10:45
  leads into the next trend, fusion.
• 10:47
  I don't think it's by the way, I think fusion is a terrible word.
• 10:50
  And you know, in my era when we came up, fusion cuisine was like
• 10:53
  it was really bad. It went sideways and it became a
• 10:57
  pejorative moving forward when everyone would say that they
• 11:00
  were doing fusion Cuisine. However, I think it's coming
• 11:03
  back rebranded. There's a new PR team behind
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  fusion Cuisine. You're starting to see it.
• 11:09
  It's a little bit more authentic in terms of the people that are
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  doing the fusion cuisine. You're seeing a lot of couples,
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  like I mentioned masala and mais.
• 11:18
  Or maybe you have Vietnamese and Filipino through Marriage.
• 11:22
  Shout out to East Meets Wings and Kevin Trong.
• 11:24
  I went to go eat there, Kevin and Rosie doing great things
• 11:27
  here in Austin. You see these flavors also in
• 11:30
  BBQ. Now you're having Mexican style
• 11:33
  BBQ or African diaspora style BBQ, Middle Eastern style BBQ.
• 11:39
  It's authentic to them because it's the blending of the two
• 11:42
  cultures in a very authentic way that doesn't feel cheesy or
• 11:46
  gimmicky how it did before. So I definitely take a look out
• 11:50
  for fusion cuisine. I definitely think that's coming
• 11:52
  back in a better way in a way that hopefully it'll help us
• 11:56
  forget about the bad fusion cuisine of the 90s.
• 11:58
  Let's see the next one. This was really interesting.
• 12:00
  So I talked to several chef friends of mine and they were
• 12:03
  talking about the local movement being disrupted.
• 12:06
  And they're seeing this a lot right now in their restaurants
• 12:09
  because local became such a hot topic and a lot of restaurants
• 12:12
  started moving to buying local produce.
• 12:15
  What ended up happening is there's shortages from the local
• 12:18
  farms. The local farm can't keep up
• 12:20
  with the demand of the amount of restaurants that want to use
• 12:23
  local. 1 friend of mine said if I buy strictly local, I will
• 12:27
  wipe them out and they will only give me two days worth of
• 12:29
  produce for the size of the restaurant that I have.
• 12:32
  I'm also getting pushed back from chef saying that the local
• 12:35
  quality of product is not as good as some of the commodity
• 12:39
  product that they're getting and the local farms can't keep up
• 12:42
  and they're running out and so the chefs are really struggling
• 12:45
  with the local farmers. It's interesting to see how the
• 12:48
  farmers are going to pivot or how the chefs are going to
• 12:50
  pivot. Either way, it's definitely
• 12:53
  becoming an issue because the farms can't meet the demand that
• 12:55
  the chefs need to operate their restaurants.
• 12:57
  So even though local's not going away, I think it's going to have
• 13:01
  to be rethought a little bit what is local and what isn't
• 13:03
  local on your menu. And people have to understand
• 13:06
  that not everything is going to be local due to cost, due to
• 13:09
  quality, due to seasonality, due to supply and demand.
• 13:13
  The next one was interesting because some people commented on
• 13:16
  my Instagram post about them no longer serving alcohol.
• 13:19
  And I know this has been a trend and the younger generations of
• 13:22
  people coming up is a lot of them are alcohol free.
• 13:24
  So there's a big movement to have non alcoholic beverages on
• 13:29
  the menu. So it's no longer wine and beer
• 13:31
  centric. There's now interesting
• 13:33
  mocktails and things like that, a very thoughtful beverage
• 13:36
  pairing for people that don't drink and it's not impacting
• 13:39
  their bottom line because they're still able to serve
• 13:41
  something that replaces those alcohol sales and it's still
• 13:45
  interesting and still complements the menu.
• 13:47
  Well, licenses are hard to get sometimes.
• 13:49
  A lot of restaurants open without liquor licenses because
• 13:52
  sometimes liquor licenses are very difficult to get.
• 13:54
  And you, if you don't know the right people, it could be a very
• 13:56
  long wait. The next one is Food Stories.
• 13:59
  Now this one kind of ties in with some of the other things
• 14:01
  that I spoke about with Fusion, if there's an interesting story
• 14:04
  as to why you're serving the Fusion.
• 14:06
  But one of my chef friends said to me, he mostly works on
• 14:10
  stories, philosophy, narratives, narrative driven cuisine and
• 14:14
  seeing how much that is a part of what you're doing.
• 14:17
  I think it's Dominic Kren that writes a poem with the menu.
• 14:20
  That that's a pretty cool story, right?
• 14:22
  So you could read the poem and understand what you're getting.
• 14:25
  You know, you think about what Noma did for so many years with
• 14:27
  time and place and everything is forged within X amount of radius
• 14:31
  around the property. Stories are important.
• 14:33
  Stories make food taste better. There's a connection with the
• 14:36
  chef, there's a connection with the food, there's a connection
• 14:39
  as to why something is being done.
• 14:41
  And I think chefs that focus on the story are going to have a
• 14:45
  significant advantage over those that don't.
• 14:47
  Your server in your restaurant. If there's a story behind the
• 14:50
  dish, they are more likely to sell it than if it's just Chef.
• 14:54
  Just like spaghetti chicken Alfredo.
• 14:56
  I'm sorry, not spaghetti. We digress.
• 14:58
  Last one I'm going to talk about, and I did 9 deliberately,
• 15:01
  is Chef Podcast, industry podcast.
• 15:03
  I'm seeing these pop up everywhere.
• 15:05
  My friend Chef Susio messaged me and said Chef Podcast is the
• 15:08
  trend. And it is.
• 15:10
  There's this one, There's Chef's PSA line.
• 15:12
  Cook thoughts. I have another one called Run
• 15:14
  the Pass. I plan on having more chef
• 15:17
  podcasts eventually where I have guests on.
• 15:19
  So yes, industry podcasts are going to be a trend, but Chef's
• 15:24
  PSA is still your five star favorite podcast.
• 15:26
  Don't forget that. Stay loyal.
• 15:28
  I'm loyal to you all. Stay loyal to me anyway.
• 15:31
  Why did I deliberately leave #10 off?
• 15:33
  Because I want to know what you all think.
• 15:35
  Let me know in the comments. What did I miss?
• 15:37
  What do you think? What did I get wrong?
• 15:40
  Granted, I'm throwing darts. I have not read any of the
• 15:44
  typical food blog or typical food magazines.
• 15:47
  Opinions on what 2020 is going to look like.
• 15:49
  This is just my opinion, so maybe I'm wrong.
• 15:52
  Anyway, you know what to do. If you want to support the show,
• 15:55
  make sure you leave five stars. Hit the subscribe button.
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  Nothing less than five stars. Go to chefspsa.com, You get the
• 16:01
  books, you get the merge. I got you covered.
• 16:04
  Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year.
• 16:06
  Let's make it a great 2024. Hit the porno music.