Chefs are stressed! Are you OK?
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The World of Chefs:
'Exhausted at work' and 'emotionally drained': Why chefs are leaving the hospitality industry. One in 10 chefs suffered mental distress! The 2023 Umbrella Wellbeing report, which recorded New Zealanders' perceptions of their workplaces and wellbeing, warns that long working hours and poor workplace cultures have adverse health outcomes, with New Zealand faring worse than Australia.
Chef Jamil Selem - a rising star from Merida Yucatan is cooking a storm in Mexico. “They pay attention to my movements. I invite them to get closer and ask anything they want,” he confides. “People are very interested, and I love to share a little bit about what I know.”
Private Chefs come to be savoured during the month of Ramadan! Dallas Mavericks are paying to fly out a private chef to cook vegan meals for Kyrie Irving... as the star point guard continues observing Ramadan during the NBA season
Chef Kira Meenke says Premier League footballers' favourite meals are BBQ steak & prawns (sounds to me like surf & turf)."Some football players really don't like healthy food, so my job is to make the unhealthy dishes as healthy as possible while finding that balance."I wouldn't say my style is fine dining - I want to make them feel like they are home, I like to make foods that will enhance the flavours."
A 20-year-old Private Chef Andrew Wong in HK , that's a bit too early, isn't it! Check for yourself, the food does look interesting and he's gone through Le Cordon Blue in New Zealand!
Meet Madona's private Chef Pia Hambour! And not anywhere else but with Gordon Ramsay at his new TV show screening in Australia.
The first Indian Female Chef Garima Arora to win 2 Michelin Stars! Her refined cuisine view of Indian food, sums it well: ‘We don’t do curry’! “My use of spices in my cooking is delicate, refined, nuanced … we don’t do ‘curry’. If I went back home and asked Mum to make me a curry she wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”
Hospitality Industry news:
‘Aldi’s Next Big Thing’ is returning to TV screens in April (in the UK). The six-part prime-time show, which kicks off with the ‘dinner’ episode, sees artisan suppliers pitch to win a ‘life-changing’ contract and have their product land on shelves in over 1,000 Aldi stores nationwide.
Very weird alliance, not sure exactly what to say but is quite interesting. A hospitality school is merging with a healthcare provider! “Through the Alliance, EHL Hospitality Business School will provide us with a professional network of industry innovators whose outside-of-the-box thinking will guide us in improving our healthcare delivery for generations to come,” said NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst Chief Experience Officer Pierre Pham.
2024 is looking quite positive for HOSPO businesses! Workforce housing company Target Hospitality (NASDAQ:TH) reported Q4 FY2023 results beating Wall Street analysts' expectations, with revenue down 17.2% year on year to $126.2 million . The company's full-year revenue guidance of $417.5 million at the midpoint also came in 1.9% above analysts' estimates. It made a GAAP profit of $0.29 per share, down from its profit of $0.31 per share in the same quarter last year.
World's 50 Best Restaurants in Asia released, definitely wroth the read, some real eye & mouth-watering venues out there. Ekaa in Mumbai & Ultraviolet in Shanghai top my list! Then it's Gaa in Bangkok (the chef mentioned earlier as she just won 2 Michelin stars this year).
America’s Loneliness Epidemic Comes for the Restaurant. Restaurants are more about filling to-go bags than filling chairs! The restaurant recovery is not a simple story of universally positive outcomes. American restaurants are shifting from independent operators to chains, from slow food to fast(er) food, from east to west, from city centres to suburbs, from lunch and dinner to breakfast and late night, and from eat-in to take away.
Have the new vegans had enough of being called ‘soy boys’? I suspect the reason is far simpler? ?? But there are signs that veganism’s growth is tailing off. Plant-based meat companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger are suffering from declining sales. The Meatless Farm company recently ceased trading before it was rescued from administration when a competitor, VFC, acquired the brand, while the vegan brand Oatly and the food manufacturer Heck have scaled back some products.
Are Restaurants & Hospitality businesses due to charge SURGE pricing? Isn't that what lunch specials are? And happy hour? What is next? Double-price Fridays and Saturday dinners? As far back as 2018, the posh London restaurant Bob Bob Ricard adopted a model where prices fell at times of lower demand.
To me, pretty restaurants conjure scenes of ethereal and elegant, soft and serene, and warmly lit spaces. When it comes to “pretty,” some restaurants might feature singular, stunning elements like an ornate chandelier or rare piece of art, but there’s no denying that the following eight restaurants offer the whole pretty package—tied with a flawless bow. Check out the prettiest restaurants around the world!
Colliers releases data on Hospitality in APAC . 2024 will continue to witness a recovery in travel, with hotel demand across the region continuing abound. Hotels across Asia Pacific witnessed a revenue per available room (RevPAR) increase at the end of June 2023 compared to same period in 2022 but this remained circa 9% behind that of 2019 levels, according to STR.
The Hospitality Development Landscape Is Flourishing: Julienne Smith, chief development officer, Americas at IHG Hotels & Resorts, says that “the U.S. remains a vast development opportunity across our portfolio and accounted for nearly 40 percent of IHG’s signings as of Q3 2023.” One notable undertaking was the launch of Garner, a growing midscale conversion brand. This is in line with a downshift in new-build projects, given that “the cost of construction, financing, and availability of new construction debt financing is very limited and very challenging,” says Jonathan Falik, founder and CEO of JF Capital Advisors, which specializes in strategic and capital market advising for the hospitality industry.
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FoodTech Updates & Trends:
Better Bite Ventures has opened up applications for the latest funding round of its First Bite scheme, which offers early-stage investments to food tech startups in the Asia-Pacific region. The new round will focus on crops that most threaten the region’s climate. This edition of First Bite will be specifically focused on five categories: rice production, palm oil, cocoa and coffee, fertilisers, and food waste. Startups that are selected for the early-stage investment programme will receive between $50,000 and $150,000 to help get their projects off the ground.
Sharing a few resources courtesy to Daniel from FoodTech Weekly. The Ultimate FoodTech Resources guide . How to pitch to media guide . Have a read, these are quite useful and great saves for later / when needed.
Korean based Hanwha Foodtech Acquires US Robot Pizza Firm ‘Stellar Pizza’ from the US. An interesting exit in the Robotic space which has been very quiet (needless to say pretty dead with transactions recently).
DigitalFoodLab has created a FoodTech Index of 22 publicly listed FoodTech companies such as Oatly, Beyond, HelloFresh, and Ocado. 2022 was a shaky year for FoodTech with a re-balancing 2023 and growth in the sector of roughly 14% over the past 12 months.
Agrifoodtech startup investment drops 50% , and accounts for just 5.5% of global VC dollars. The decline is global, particularly for Asia, which did not recover its pre-Covid totals and raised only $3.8 billion, and the US, which saw its share of agrifood tech funding drop to just 30% of global funding when it usually accounts for at least 40%.
Single-use plastic packaging to be banned in the European Union member countries . Forcing the market (finally) to use recyclable or NON-plastic packaging. We have seen a few great companies in Australia popping in this space including Great Wrap & ULUU both from from StartMate . Sway in San Fran also makes a seaweed-based, home-compostable alternative to plastic packaging, and has recently landed a $5M Seed round, investors incl. BAM Ventures, Alante Capital, and Third Nature Investments.
German biotech startup Kynda has introduced what the company says is the first-ever vegan, zero-waste, mycelium-based food solution in Europe. The company teamed up with sustainable food brand Raging Pig to launch ‘Kynda meat’, a highly nutritious (37% protein in dry matter, all 9 essential amino acids, rich in high-quality fibre and vitamins), low-cost burger patty made from food industry by-products through just 48 hours of fermentation.
Bene Bono raised a round . An interesting idea which I have yet to see flourishing except when delivered by the retailers themselves. In Australia we have Harris Farm Markets (grocery shop with a focus on farmed produce) that started the trend of the ugly produce section - now these are across all grocery stores in the country and are usually 30% or so cheaper than usual veg & fruits.
Cauldron of Australia has bagged a $6.25M Series A in a round led by Horizons Ventures and joined by SOSV, In-Q-Tel and Main Sequence. The company develops continuous fermentation tech that cuts COGS by 30-50% for its customers, compared to traditional batch fermentation, the company claims. The company, which has 25K liter capacity, now plans for a 500K liter facility.
Animal Free diary is still hot! More investments are seen in the sector. Bon Vivant in France raises a substantial round led by Sofinnova Partners and Sparkfood, to accelerate its precision fermentation offering for the dairy industry. In Australia Eden Brew has partnered with the country's largest diary producer (anecdotal and logical at the same time).
Random stuff:
I got inspired by Danial at FoodTech Weekly to share a few random finds.
Here is an interesting article for 150 Best Questions to Ask to Get to Know someone better. My favs:
Last thought: enshittification a term coined by Cory Doctorow! ‘Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.’
CHEFIN update:
Closing remarks:
What do you think of The Bear? Have you watched it, do you relate to the feelings expressed in the series???