From ??? To Table: Coming To A Chain Near You

The IFC comedy show Portlandia has a sketch in which a young couple at a restaurant are given a great deal of information about the chicken in their dinner. Beyond the farm, the restaurant knows the chicken's diet, the chicken's name: Colin, and even that yes, Colin did have a lot of friends and was quite a popular chicken. All kidding aside, the trend of restaurants becoming more aware of (and sharing) where their produce and meat comes from seems to have limits. After all, its not as though you can walk into a chain restaurant and expect that same level of knowledge, right?

Actually, you might be surprised. In a chain restaurant, the scale gets larger, but the process itself isn't dramatically different. Farmers and ranchers provide the food to distributors, who in turn can provide the quantities that chain restaurants need. The larger scale and need for consistency across dozens, if not hundreds or restaurants in a chain changes the things which a larger enterprise will require from the farmers who supply it. The same need for communication and the need for information still applies.

Raymond Martin, Vice President of Culinary Development at BJ's restaurants provided me with an example; the Denver steak. The Denver steak is a recently-developed cut taken from the shoulder of a steer, from a region that usually finds itself butchered into chuck steaks. The challenge was that once you take the Denver steak from the shoulder, you can no longer take the chuck steaks out: "they're not growing cows with new muscles" Ray said, adding that the challenge then became how to use the remainder. Suppliers saw the leftover chuck as waste, and that drove the cost of each Denver steak up.

Ray mentions that it was only through speaking with the ranchers themselves that he was able to realize that this steak could be featured on the menu because the surrounding chuck was already used in other items on the BJs menu. This isn't knowledge the companies that supply the restaurants directly are often aware of, but it's exactly the kind of information that the ranchers know. And it's knowledge like this that can be the key to getting new items on the menu and on your plate.

And the advantages from speaking with farmers can even show up at fast food restaurants. Gabe Segovia, the Manager of Culinary Innovation for El Pollo Loco offered another take on the benefits he gets from knowing more about the produce that El Pollo Loco buys. "The advantage to speaking directly with and visiting a farm is the expert knowledge you can gain on a specific product."  Gabe also notes that understanding how avocados are grown and how they are affected by seasonal change, differences between growing regions, ripening standards, the fruit texture and oil content are all factors that affect what winds up on the menu, to make the most of those minute changes.

Speaking with the people who grow and raise the food that winds up on your customers' plates can have benefits even if you run a chain of dozens of restaurants. A larger scale might change the things you ask for, but keeping the lines of communication open is one way to ensure that what gets served is part of the best dish it can be. And in all likelihood, I think I'm probably better off not knowing what my chicken's name was.

 

 

The author would like to thank Gabe Segovia, Raymond Martin, and the US Farmers and Ranchers Alliance for helping to make this article possible. More information can be found at USFRA.org or at FoodDialogues.com