Latest / "Mise En Place" Culture First™ / PULSE! Today’s Hotel, Restaurant & Bar Industry News Deep Dive | 10/06/2026 Episode Edition
Transcript
- Brad Peters: Welcome to Pulse, today's hotel, restaurant, and bar industry news. A deep dive from HRB Universal, navigating your industry, with insights from leaders from True Food Kitchen's shocking Chapter 11 bankruptcy to Chick-fil-A's defiant stand against AI drive-throughs, the hospitality industry is at a massive inflection point where every single operational choice is make or break. Yeah, I mean the ground is just completely shifting under the industry right now. Welcome to Pulse. Today's hotel, restaurant, and bar industry news deep dive, brought to you by HRB Universal. We are delivering the critical updates, trend analyses, and operational intelligence you need to stay ahead in hospitality. Exactly, because the margin for error has effectively hit zero. It really has. Every single piece of intelligence we're looking at today points to this like brutal reality. You either adapt with, you know, surgical precision or you just become a cautionary tale. Right. And I want to speak directly to you, the listener, right now. Whether you are, say, managing a single high volume dining room floor or maybe overseeing a regional portfolio of boutique hotels. Or sitting in the C suite making those massive global supply chain decisions. Yeah, exactly. Consider this deep dive your ultimate executive briefing. We have a massive stack of sources today. Huge stack. Ranging from, you know, C suite strategic memos and food safety data reports. To culinary trend briefs and daily operational news. Our mission today is to cut through all that noise of daily operations. And connect the macro level dots. Right. We are taking the raw data, the commodity spikes, the tech integrations, real estate contractions, and translating it into the actionable intelligence you need to actually lead your business into tomorrow. So we're seeing a complete bifurcation in how the industry is trying to survive this pressure cooker right now. Two completely different paths. Yeah, let's start with the aggressive technology adopters because the moves happening at the enterprise level are fundamentally rewiring the supply chain. Okay, lay it out for us. So Albertsons is pushing a massive, I mean massive, expansion of its OpenAI partnership. Wow. And at the exact same time, Walmart is launching these deeply integrated app features for in-store item location. Right, making it frictionless. Exactly. And Kroger is currently rolling out updated staff uniforms that Insiders are heavily signaling are built for wearable tech integration. Aaron Okay. Stop right there because wearable tech integration sounds like corporate buzzword bingo to It does sound like that, yeah. What does a tech ready uniform actually mean for a frontline grocery or, you know, a C store worker? Are we talking about like AR glasses or just a better pocket for a barcode scanner? Think less smart glasses and more haptic feedback and biometric routing. Haptic feedback. Yeah. Like a video game controller. Yeah, exactly like that. A tech integrated uniform in an enterprise retail or a warehouse environment often involves subtle wearables. Okay. So wrist mounted or belt clip terminals that connect directly to a centralized inventory AI. I see. If a worker is pulling items for a delivery order, they aren't looking down at a clipboard or even like a clunky tablet anymore. Right, that slows you down. It does. Instead, they are receiving auditory cues or physical haptic. buzzes, vibrations, that guide them down the optimal path in the store or warehouse. Wow. So it literally nudges them in the right direction. Yes. It shaves seconds off of every single pick. Aaron Which I mean that scales massively when you apply it to beverage warehouses. The reports we're looking at show staggering efficiency boosts from this voice picking technology. Aaron It's revolutionary for warehouse ops. Put yourself in the shoes of a warehouse associate pulling pallets of heavy liquids for eight hours a day. Historically you're reading a manifest Driving a forklift to aisle four. Right. Finding the skew, checking it off. It is physically and mentally exhausting. And mental exhaustion leads to mispicks. Exactly. Which then leads to a restaurant receiving, you know, diet coke instead of Sprite syrup. Which is a nightmare. It triggers an entire cascade of operational failures at the unit level. So voice picking physically changes the job. The associate wears a headset. Okay. An AI routing system, which already knows the exact layout of the warehouse and the real time inventory levels, speaks directly into their ear. Like a GPS for the warehouse. Precisely. It tells them the most mathematically efficient route to build their palate. It reduces their physical footsteps by miles per shift. That's incredible. And they confirm the pick by speaking a check digit back to the system. Hands free, eyes up. It's a pure efficiency play that strips the friction out of the labor matrix. I buy the efficiency argument for moving boxes, sure. But the data shows we are pushing AI much further up the chain, right into the actual creation of the food. yeah. It's getting deep into the culinary side. Aaron Like Crush Dynamics and Atomic 47 Labs are reportedly using artificial intelligence to enhance fermentation processes. It's wild. I need you to unpack the science here. Fermentation is essentially well, letting yeast eat sugar in a controlled environment, right? Fundamentally, yes. Aaron Powell So how does an AI enhance what is at its Core of biological process. It's all about predictive modeling and real time sensory adjustment. Fermentation is notoriously volatile. Right. It's alive. Exactly. A microbrewery can make a spectacular batch of beer because the brewmaster is physically there, tasting it, smelling the esters, adjusting the temperature by like half a degree based on intuition. Aaron The artisanal touch. Right. But when you try to scale that to millions of gallons, you lose that human intuition. Aaron So what are these labs doing differently? What they're doing is embedding hundreds of microsensors inside these massive fermentation tanks. Okay. These sensors measure pH, dissolved oxygen, sugar depletion rates, and temperature fluctuations at the millisecond level. So they're feeding that massive stream of biological data into a machine learning model. Precisely. The AI analyzes that data against thousands of past batches. wow. It can predict an off-flavor developing 24 hours before a human palate could ever detect it. That's insane. So it catches mistakes before they even happen. Exactly. If the AI sees the yeast as getting too stressed and producing too many fusel alcohols, it automatically adjusts the cooling jackets on the tank to drop the temperature by a fraction of a degree. To slow down the metabolism of the yeast. Right. It takes the artisanal magic of a master fermenter and scales it to an industrial level. It guarantees absolute product consistency, which, as you know, is the holy grail for any beverage or food brand. That brings up a massive philosophical tension, I think. We are using AI to perfectly mimic human intuition in the brewery and using routing algorithms to turn warehouse workers into hyper efficient pickers. Yeah. Hyper automation. And then a new AI playbook for restaurants drops at the Create event, basically telling operators to automate everything. Right, that was the big push. But Chick fil A just came out and planted a flag in the ground. They made a highly publicized, definitive statement that they will not be putting AI voice bots at their drive-thru. A very bold move. They are also remaining family owned to protect their traditional culture. Their CEO confirmed that. Okay, let's unpack this. Sure. It feels like we are watching two completely different sports. On one side, grocery and logistics giants are playing money ball with AI data. Yeah. And on the other, Chick-fil-A is playing traditional baseball, relying entirely on human charisma. Is Chick-fil-A shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring AI at the drive-thru or Is that human element their actual impenetrable moat? What's fascinating here is that it is the strongest moat in the quick service industry. Really? Absolutely. Even against the AI efficiency. Absolutely. Chick-fil-A understands something that the brands racing to install AI speaker boxes don't. Which is? The transaction is not a friction point to be eliminated. The transaction is the product. wow. I love that. Unpack that for a regional operator who is currently looking at their Labor PL and dreaming of firing their drive-thru cashiers. Right. It's tempting. But if you are selling a relatively commoditized product, let's be honest, a fried chicken sandwich is a widely available item, your competitive advantage has to be experiential. It has to be how you make them feel. Yes. Chick fil A's entire brand equity is built on making the customer feel acknowledged, the eye contact, the my pleasure, the human walking up to your car window with the tablet. It's real hospitality. Exactly. If you rip out that human and replace them with a synthetic voice that perfectly upsell a large fry, you have successfully lowered your labor cost by a fraction of a percent. But at what cost? You have instantly commoditized your brand. You are now indistinguishable from the burger place next door. Chick-fil-A's strategy is brilliant because they are aggressively utilizing technology, but keeping it strictly in the back of house. Automate the invisible, humanize the visible. That's the operating thesis. They use incredibly sophisticated data models to predict drive-thru volume, optimize their prep lines, and manage their supply chain. Sure. But they refuse to let the technology touch the guest. Aaron Which aligns perfectly with this new industry report breaking down how AI is going to impact hospitality jobs. Yeah, that report was really eye opening. Aaron Because the prevailing narrative is that, well, AI is coming for everyone. Right. The robot takeover. But the data shows that the impact is entirely dictated by where you physically work. Very true. If you are in a dark kitchen or if you're managing delivery logistics, I mean Agas is currently leading the world in Uber Eats delivery volume. They are crushing it. And Amazon and USPS are piloting same day delivery partnerships. If you operate in that high volume, off premise world, AI is going to completely rewire your daily life. You need it to survive there. Right. You need algorithms routing your drivers and predicting your ticket times. But if you are working the floor at a premium casual dining spot, your job shouldn't look like a sci-fi movie. Definitely not. The AI should just be the invisible current running under the floorboards, making sure you never have to tell a guest, sorry, we're eighty-sixth on the sea bass. that's the worst conversation to have with a table. It is. So the AI should be managing the inventory and the data so the human can focus entirely on reading the table and delivering hospitality. Which brings us to the most critical, yet somehow most boring sounding topic in our stack today. Let me guess. Data governance. yes. The sources are heralding data governance as the ultimate key to food safety and data sharing across the supply chain. It is vital. Now, I guarantee half of our listeners just had their eyes glaze over the phrase data governance. absolutely. But earlier you called this the digital immune system of a restaurant. Make this real for a multi unit operator. Why is data governance a C suite emergency and not just an IT department headache? Let's walk through a nightmare scenario. Okay. Hit me. It's Friday night. And the FDA announces a massive E. coli outbreak linked to a specific farm producing romaine lettuce in Yuma, Arizona. man, full panic mode. The clock starts immediately. Do you have that specific lettuce in your walk-ins across your 50 locations? Most operators would start frantically calling their GMs, having them physically walk into the cooler to check the lot numbers on the boxes. Which takes hours. Right. And during those hours you are potentially serving contaminated food. Terrible. Or you pull All the lettuce across the entire company, throwing away tens of thousands of dollars of perfectly safe product out of an abundance of caution. Also terrible for the bottom line. Exactly. That is a failure of data governance. If you have structured, unified data, your inventory system speaks the exact same digital language as your distributor's system. Aaron Which speaks the same language as the farm system. Aaron Yes. And AI can scan your entire supply chain in three seconds and tell you that only locations 12, 18, and 44 received the contaminated lot. The problem is that right now, agriculture and distribution data is incredibly fragmented. It's a mess. The farmer's using one software. The packer is using like an Excel spreadsheet. Or a clipboard. Right. And the broadline distributor is using a legacy SQL database from 1998. And the restaurant is using a modern cloud-based inventory app. They don't talk to each other. Aaron And that's why the Albertsons and Walmarts of the world are pouring millions into this. You cannot overlay a brilliant AI on top of garbage data. It just doesn't work. If your data isn't structured and governed, the AI can't trace the contamination. It's like trying to use a state of the art GPS system, but handing it a map from 1850. That's a great analogy. The actionable step here for leadership is to audit the data hygiene of your vendors. Demand API integration. Yeah. If your suppliers cannot digitally trace their product into your walk in, they are a massive liability to your brand equity. That's a massive takeaway. You can have the slickest AI tools in the world, but if your data foundation is rotten, you're just failing faster. Exactly. But let's look at the physical foundation. Cause tech is only half the battle. Your software doesn't matter if your brick and mortar box is fundamentally broken. And right now, a lot of them are broken. We are seeing a severe margin squeeze hitting the street right now. Global food costs are rising again. We are seeing it hit the massive institutional players like General Mills and Conagra. But the real blood is on the streets in the restaurant sector. True Food Kitchen just filed for chapter eleven bankruptcy. Yeah, that was huge news. They instantly shut her twelve locations. Red Robin is undergoing massive refinancing after offloading over a hundred restaurants. It's a contraction across the board. Guinness is closing its high profile Baltimore brewery. Even Crumble, which, you know, was the absolute viral darling of the last three years, is starting to buckle under its own operational weight. They scaled so fast. Too fast, maybe. I want to dissect True Food Kitchen, because on paper, they had everything. They really did. An incredible brand ethos, health conscious menus, and massive consumer buzz. How does a brand with that much cultural cachet end up in chapter eleven? It comes down to the brutal math of their specific unit economics. Walk us through that math. So True Food Kitchen operated on a highly complex scratch kitchen model, relying on incredibly fresh, premium ingredients. Right. When global commodities spike. The price of premium produce and specialized proteins goes through the roof. It absolutely crushes your food cost. But that's only the food cost side. The labor required to execute that menu is astronomical. Exactly. You aren't just dropping frozen fries into a fryer. You have an army of prep cooks washing, chopping, and preparing highly perishable items every single morning. Yeah. The prep hours alone are staggering. And your yield loss, the amount of food that spoils or is prepped away is massive. Combine high food costs with sky-high prep labor. And then house it in what they typically built. Which were these massive, beautiful spaces. Massive. Six thousand to eight thousand square foot dining rooms in premium real estate locations. The rent must have been unbelievable. Astronomical. When consumer traffic dips even slightly due to macroeconomic pressure, the fixed costs of that giant dining room and the variable costs of that complex prep matrix completely swallow the profit margin. You're describing a hollowing out of the middle. You can't be a massive labor intensive box charging mid tier prices anymore. It's an impossible business model today. And this isn't just an American phenomenon. Look at the C-Store fluff in our Intel today. Reliance Retail and 7 Eleven just dissolved a five-year franchise agreement in India. Right. Convenience stores are really struggling to gain any foothold there. Why is that? I mean, 7 Eleven works everywhere else. Because convenience is entirely dictated by culture. Okay. Expand on that. In the US, convenience means pulling your car up. To a brightly lit box, grabbing a packaged energy drink and a taquito and leaving in three minutes. Right. Frictionless. In India, the consumer habit is completely different. Fresh, hyper local street food is abundant, inexpensive, and deeply ingrained in the daily routine. That makes sense. And the Kirana stores, the small family run neighborhood shops, they offer deep personal relationships and even credit to local families. Aaron You can't beat that level of community trust. You really can't. You cannot take a sterile packaged goods model from Dallas, drop it into Mumbai, and expect the consumer to abandon their cultural buying habits just because the sign says seven eleven. It's a complete failure to adapt unit economics to local realities. Contrast that failure to adapt with the brands that are aggressively expanding right now, because the contrast is wild. It's night and day. While True Food Kitchen is filing for bankruptcy, Chipotle just casually opened its fifteen hundredth Chipotle drive thru. They are unstoppable. And Wonder is raising insane capital to shake up off premise dining. Burger King is completely shifting its franchise strategy to bet on local operators. Let's look at Burger King. Why move away from the mega franchisees who own 300 units and pivot toward the guy who owns like three? It's the agency problem. What do you mean? When margins were fat, a mega franchisee could manage 300 stores from a corporate office using high level dashboards. Right, looking at spreadsheets. But in today's environment, we're Every basis point of food cost matters, you need hyper local accountability. You need someone in the building. Yes. A local operator who owns three stores is physically standing in the kitchen. They are watching the fry station to make sure the team isn't over portioning. those extra fries add up. They absolutely do. And they are managing the labor schedule down to fifteen minute increments to avoid overtime. They have personal skin in the game. So they care about the penny pinching. Burger King realizes that surviving thin margins requires an operator who treats a dropped hamburger patty like a dollar bill falling out of their own wallet. Here's where it gets really interesting. We're seeing True Food Kitchen, a brand with massive buzz, file for Chapter Eleven. Meanwhile, Chipotle is casually opening its fifteen hundredth drive thru, and Wonder is completely reinventing off premise dining. Yeah, it's a massive shift. It's like a brutal game of musical chairs, but the chairs are real estate footprints. Are the days of the Massive six thousand square foot casual dining room officially dead? If we connect this to the bigger picture, the dining room isn't dead, but the mediocre dining room is. Ooh, okay. Explain that. Look at Fogo de Chow. They are thriving right now, and their CEO explicitly credited their success entirely to a focus on people. Right, because Fogo is the opposite of wonder. It's a massive dining room, huge labor cost with gauchos walking around carving meat at the table. Exactly. How do Fogo and Wonder both succeed in the same economy? Because they occupy the absolute polar opposite ends of the spectrum. They both offer extreme value, just in different ways. Precisely. Wonder provides the extreme value of hyper convenience and culinary variety, right in your living room. Because Wonder licenses menus from high end chefs, right? Like Bobby Flay? Yes. And they strip out the dining room using centralized, highly standardized thermal equipment for rapid firing. Maximum convenience. And Fogo. Fogo de Chow provides the extreme value of a theatrical high touch event. When a customer leaves their house today, they don't want to go to a boring average dining room. No, they want a spectacle. Yes, you are paying for the theater of the gauchos slicing the picania right at your table. If you are operating today, you must be ultra convenient, like Wonder or a Chipotle, or you must be an undeniable experience, like Fogo. Do not get caught in a dead center. Exactly. The dead center is where bankruptcies happen. This shift in consumer expectation isn't just happening in retail restaurants either. It is completely blowing up institutional dining. absolutely. We've got major reports on Sodexo and Aeromark. Campus dining is being radically reshaped because Gen Z students are demanding retail level quality. Aaron They won't settle for the old cafeteria food. Aeromark just rolled out this concept called the Godega in schools. The Godega is brilliant. Yeah. It's a play on a New York bodega dropped right into an educational campus. I love that. Institutional feeders used to operate on the premise of a captive audience. You lived in the dorm, you had a meal plan, you had to eat the cafeteria slop. Right. You had no choice. That is entirely over. Gen Z has Uber Eats on their phones. If the dining hall is bad, they will instantly order a burrito from three miles away. So Airmark is forced to compete on the open market. Yes. The Godega offers curated, high quality grab and go items, energy drinks, and hot retail style food. They have to operate like a Premium sea store, not a nineteen fifties mess hall. We are also seeing Colorado schools benefiting from voter-approved meal funding, and Chef Stegner is partnering with Quest Food Management to elevate that food. It takes incredible leadership to pivot a massive battleship like Eramark or Sedexo or a public school system. It really does. And looking at the C suite moves this week, it's clear the industry is hunting for a very specific type of leader. The guard is changing. We see Dana McNabb taking over as General Mills CEO. Russ Torres heading Curie Dr. Pepper's coffee division, but the two things that really jumped out to me. Yeah. Nestle's CEO publicly stating that curiosity and humility are the keys to promotion. And Sean Sloan becoming the chief of store operations at Win Dixie. What's special about Sean Sloan? Sean started as a grocery bagger. See, that is the defining leadership trait required for 2026. Operational empathy. Operational empathy. Mm-hmm. I like that. We just spent 20 minutes talking about data governance, AI fermentation, and real estate matrices. And it is very easy for a CEO to sit in an office and manage a spreadsheet. Very easy. Mm-hmm. And very disconnected. But when you have a chief of operations who literally used to bag the groceries, they understand the physical friction of the job. They've lived it. They know what it feels like when the point of sale system crashes during a rush. They know how a poorly designed uniform actually feels after an eight-hour shift. The Walmart CEO summed it up perfectly this week. He said, We price the product, not the person. That is a profound statement on consumer trust. Because people are sick of dynamic pricing. Exactly. We've seen massive backlash against algorithms that raise the price of a burger just because it's raining or because it's 6 p.m. It feels like extortion. The consumer is exhausted. They feel like they are being gamed by the brands they patronize. Walmart CEO is drawing a line in the sand. The price is based on the cost of the goods. Not on an AI trying to extract maximum margin from a desperate shopper. It's a long-term play for loyalty. Over short-term algorithmic gains. So the operational takeaway for block two is clear. You need to stress test your unit economics immediately. If you are a 6,000 square foot concept relying on high prep, you need to figure out how to add experiential value tomorrow. Or shrink the footprint. Right. If you are expanding, Consider localized franchise models or off-premise optimized footprints. But let's say you can't move your building. You are locked into a 10-year lease. How do you combat these rising food costs? You have to fundamentally re-engineer the product itself. Which brings us to our final block. Menu innovations and consumer preferences. This is where it gets really creative. The culinary shifts happening right now are massive, and they are entirely driven by the operational realities we just discussed. Chef Daniel Hum, the icon behind Eleven Madison Park, is launching a new namesake eatery and he is entirely eschewing red meat. A huge statement. And we are seeing a massive surge of steelhead trout replacing salmon on menus everywhere. The lodging conference this week was absolutely dominated by F and B directors talking about these exact protein swaps. It's everywhere. Even Tinda, an Indian squash, is suddenly jumping from home kitchens to high end dining. Let's dissect the protein swaps because this is where culinary art meets the PL statement. Break it down. Daniel Hum dropping red meat is brilliant brand positioning around sustainability. Absolutely. But let's look at the financial mechanics. Because beef is crazy right now. Premium beef is one of the most volatile commodities on earth. The yield loss on butchering, the shelf life degradation, the sheer cost per ounce, it destroys margins. By shifting to high-end complex plant-based dishes. Hum is trading an expensive, volatile food cost for a highly controllable one. All while still charging a premium tier price based on his culinary execution. Exactly. And the Steelhead Trout Trend is the exact same playbook for the mid tier operators. Aaron Tell me about the trout, because salmon is a staple. Why mess with it? Salmon has always been the reliable workhorse of the seafood menu, but supply chain issues and environmental factors have made salmon pricing incredibly erratic. You can't budget for it. An operator cannot print a new menu every three days to keep up with salmon's spot prices. Steelhead trout provides an incredibly similar flavor profile, a beautiful pink flesh that plates exactly like salmon, but it is far more sustainable to farm and the pricing is incredibly stable. So it's a stealth margin saver. Exactly. The guest gets a premium piece of fish and the chef gets a predictable food cost. But the guest only accepts that swap if you tell them why it's there, right? Which Brings up a fascinating dynamic with another massive trend. I know what you're gonna say. Pizza chefs actively moving away from traditional wood fired ovens. Now, as someone who loves a Neapolitan pizza, this breaks my heart. I know it hurts the soul. The wood fires the soul of the pizza. Why are these master pizza YOLOs abandoning the wood for electric deck ovens? It comes down to the brutal reality of the labor market and municipal regulations. Okay. Hope so. Operating a wood fired oven is not just cooking. It is a highly specialized trade. It's an art form. A master pizzaiolo has to constantly read the ambient humidity in the room, manage the physical logs, predict the heat zones of a nine hundred degree stone, and rotate pizzas every twenty seconds. That's intense. Those artisans are incredibly rare and they command massive salaries. If your lead pizzaiolo quits on a Friday morning, your restaurant literally cannot open on Friday night. You're just paralyzed. You cannot train a 19-year-old line cook to manage a wood fire in an afternoon. So it's a massive operational bottleneck? Massive. Add to that, major cities are cracking down heavily on wood smoke emissions. So the equipment manufacturers have stepped up. What are they doing? The new generation of high-end electric deck ovens are marvels of thermodynamics. They feature individually controlled heat zones. You can set the deck stone to seven hundred fifty degrees and the top ambient heat to eight hundred fifty degrees. And it will hold that temperature flawlessly for twelve hours, regardless of how many pizzas you throw in it. So it takes the guesswork out. It bakes a phenomenal pie, it complies with zero emissions laws, and most importantly, you can train a line cook to operate it in two shifts. The operational consistency simply wins out over the romance of the wood fire. So what does this all mean? We are talking about swapping salmon for trout, ditching the romance of wood fired ovens, and putting beverages and cartons and pouches to reduce plastic. Are we sacrificing the soul of hospitality for the sake of a spreadsheet? Or is this just the natural evolution of survival? This raises an important question. Just does. Because innovation and efficiency do not inherently destroy a restaurant's soul. It comes down to how you frame the value to the consumer. The storytelling. This is where storytelling becomes your most vital operational tool. Let's look at the Intel on menu excellence. Michael Mina just launched a new menu that translates the surrounding landscape of the Bellagio Gardens directly onto the plate. That's amazing. London's Langham Hotel is totally redefining high tea. A skyborn chef is helming Autolanghi's Edinburgh kitchen, bringing all that local flair. Californios achieved Michelin stardom by deeply honoring Chef Valcantu's Mexican heritage. Graciela was just named NYC's top Argentinian steakhouse. Exactly. Yep. None of these places lack soul. They are leveraging their heritage and their narrative to build massive perceived value. Storytelling justifies the menu engineering. Exactly. Look at the fast food chicken wars. Popeyes releases another new sandwich to compete, which is fine, but it's just product. Look at what Bojangles did. that was genius. Bojangles rolled out a program for certified biscuit makers. That is one of the smartest labor and marketing plays of the year. Making biscuits from scratch is hard, messy work. By creating a certification program, Bojangles gamified the labor for their staff. It gives them pride. It gives the employee a title, a sense of mastery. It drastically reduces turnover at that specific station. But then they take that internal training and market it to the consumer. Setting the gold standard. They are loudly telling the world, our biscuits are so authentic, you have to be certified to bake them. It adds incredible perceived value to flour, butter, and buttermilk. It's the exact same reason the history of the tartan, you know, the Fact that this iconic French dessert was created by two sisters making a mistake and dropping a pie is still told in dining rooms today. People eat the story. They really do. Jordan Johnson's Philly fish sandwich is a sensation right now because it's deeply tied to his specific culinary narrative. Eric Rippert's new book isn't just about plant-based recipes, it's explicitly tied to mindfulness and his Buddhist philosophy. The ACFEF culinary knowledge bowl is open for applications to push that culinary education even further. The food is just the physical manifestation of the story. And if you fail to tell a story, the consumer will reject your pricing, no matter how good the product is. Which perfectly sets up my favorite piece of intel this week. The marketing landscape is getting vicious. Letal US, the discount grocery chain, is running an entire highly funded ad campaign explicitly mocking a New York City bakery for selling a loaf of rye bread for sixty dollars. That Lidl campaign is the canary in the coal mine for the entire industry. It really is. It perfectly encapsulates consumer exhaustion. Over the last four years, the industry has pushed premiumization to the absolute limit. We put truffle oil on everything. We added edible gold leaf. We charged $25 for a cocktail. And the consumer accepted it for a while. But a $60 loaf of bread represents the breaking point. Consumers will still pay top dollar. They will line up for Californios or a flawless steak at Graciella, but they demand experiential value and deep authenticity. Yeah, they will viciously mock a sixty dollar loaf of bread that is just expensive for the sake of being expensive. We are also seeing Target pushing circular economy goals, and produce brands supporting breath cancer awareness. Consumers want to know their money is doing something real. They want authenticity or they want pure unadulterated entertainment. The beverage intel proves this perfectly. Pandan is blowing up on drink menus right now. It has this incredible nutty flavor, but let's be real, it's surging because its bright color turns the cocktail vibrant green and looks incredible on social media. It's very visual. La Planchada is finding massive success by educating consumers on lesser-known Mexican spirits. That's the authentic educational route. And SISL doubled their revenue through expansion using strong branding. But then you have Liquid Death, releasing a vampire themed energy drink. Completely ridiculous, but it works. Monster Energy just dropped Dubai Chocolate Java Monster. Nutella is entering the frozen waffle space. Handheld frozen sandwiches are defying trends with massive twenty twenty six growth predictions. It is pure novelty and chaos. It is polarization. You either have to be deeply authentic and educational like La Planchata, or you have to be wildly entertaining and disruptive, like A vampire energy drink. Right. If you are sitting in the middle selling a generic energy drink or a standard margarita, you are invisible. The middle is dead. The mediocre dining room is dead. The standard menu is dead. So the actionable takeaway for your food and beverage program? Audit your menu tomorrow for those stealth margin killers. Look at your volatile proteins. Swap them out. Can you swap beef for a high end, heavily storied plant based option? Can you swap wild salmon for sustainably farm steelhead trout? And most importantly, are you investing in the storytelling? Take the Bojangles approach. Exactly. Train your staff on the heritage of the ingredients. A cheaper ingredient with a great story will always outsell an expensive ingredient with no soul. The spreadsheet keeps the lights on, but the story is what actually fills the seats. I want to leave you with one final provocative thought before we sign off today. We have spent this entire deep dive. Looking at the massive forces reshaping our industry. We are automating the back of house with AI. We are stripping out dining rooms in favor of hyper-efficient off-premise models. And we are engineering our menus to survive global commodity spikes. It's a lot of change. If this trajectory continues, what does the restaurant of 2035 actually look like? Will it be a completely faceless, AI-driven dark kitchen dispensing mathematically perfect algorithmic meals to our doors? Or Will the pendulum swing so far back that ultra premium, entirely unplugged, human-only dining becomes the ultimate luxury? Think about where your brand fits on that spectrum and start building toward it tomorrow. It's definitely something to think about. That wraps up today's edition of Pulse. Before you get back to your floor or executive suite, make sure to check out the other powerful shows in the HRB Universal Network. Kitchen to C suite. Your definitive roadmap for advancing hospitality careers from entry level up to executive leadership. Mise en plus. Culture first leadership and organizational strategies focused on safety, compliance, and building top-tier workplace culture. The Recipe for Results Podcast Extra. Fast, high-impact extras packed with operational tactics and actionable solutions. 86ing the bad habits, cutting out systemic operational flaws, bad leadership habits, and inefficient practices across hotels, bars, and restaurants. This podcast is supported by the generous commitment of our sponsors, and we extend a special thank you to HRB Universal. Their dedication to providing comprehensive resources and promoting excellence is key to empowering professionals across the culinary and hospitality industries. We also want to acknowledge the Plate and Poor Collective Equity Partner Program. This initiative exemplifies a true commitment to fostering shared success and equitable growth within the food and beverage sector, helping entrepreneurs build a more inclusive, and thriving future. The journey to the C-suite is fueled by innovation, relentless dedication, and the right network. We encourage you to engage with the resources and support offered by our sponsors. 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