It’s getting a lot harder than it used to be to walk down a grocery store aisle and tell what will give you a buzz – at least at first glance. For starters, there’s the growing proliferation of alcoholic versions of sodas from childhood, like Not Your Father’s Root Beer, or Crabbie’s Ginger Beer. But the trend also moves the other direction, as more and more foods and beverages without alcohol draw on the flavor profiles of beer, liquor and cocktails.
The Republic of Tea, for example, now offers The Sonoma Teas Collection, which is inspired by Sonoma County and includes flavors like red wine with orange and currant. The teas are free of caffeine and alcohol, but contain grape skins for the antioxidants. Cuvee coffee now offers a beer-flavored coffee in a can, reminiscent of dark coffee stouts. Even Starbucks tested a Dark Barrel Latte last year.
To read more, click here.
In today’s interconnected world, there are more and more ways to decide what’s for dinner (or lunch, or breakfast, or brunch, or a midnight snack, or…you get the idea). There are brick-and-mortar bookstores riddled with cookbooks from seemingly every popular restaurant or bakery, not to mention every food network star and popular blogger. It’s also easier than ever to Google a dish and find countless recipes for it, each with a rating, time estimate, detailed instructions and lengthy comments section. Or you can subscribe to one of the many meal kit companies like Blue Apron, and have the ingredients delivered to your door along with the recipe.
The food delivery market is a crowded one, with new competitors emerging every day. Grubhub, which owns Seamless, may control a large portion of that market, but all that competition took a toll last year. In 2015, the company’s growth slowed significantly and their stock value followed suit. In response, Grubhub declared that they would move from handling logistics only to actually delivering the food.
Nearly four months after eliminating tipping at the Modern, trendsetter Danny Meyer says that the first full month without tips was the restaurant’s most profitable ever. On a recent podcast of Freakonomics, Meyer declared his surprise that the two-Michelin starred restaurant had benefited so quickly. He expected that, while they would ultimately see the benefits through lower turnover and more equitable pay, the process would be slow and have initial hurdles. Instead, back of house applications have increased nearly 270%, server application shave increased 25 to 215% over three months, and there are more guests walking through the door than ever.
It is now nearly impossible to ignore meal-kit companies like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh, which continue to plaster subway cars with advertisements and encourage huge investments to start-up competitors. The latest is Hungryroot, a meal-kit delivery company that wants to fill several niches at once: healthy, vegetarian, and quick.
paigepapers.com 