To get your product on the plates of student diners, give chefs and foodservice directors recipes that work in their kitchens.
“No recipe? No need for a new product.”
It can be that simple.
Chefs and directors are inundated with responsibilities. Unless your product’s foodservice enablement kit includes recipes to scale, designed for their working environment, they just don’t have time for it.
Yet a recipe means something entirely different to different chefs. We met with Chef Dan Follese, founder and owner of Food Trend Translator, to break down the fundamentals of recipe development and how to tailor them to K-12 and C&U.
First, some universal truths:
Bring the ideas to them.
Directors care about innovation and creativity, meeting student demands, and seeking versatility for cross-menu utilization. But that doesn’t mean they have time to sit and invent or explore the likes of TikTok for the latest craze among students.
So develop easy, scalable recipes ready for the realities of BOH staffing and evolving student tastes. Focus on basic elements like flavor, ease of execution, and presentation. And don’t skimp on the photography! Custom, high resolution shots convey the product’s real potential and can serve as a quick guide for plating.
Use recipes for ongoing content strategy.
Recipes are an important part of your brand’s sales enablement kit as you work to get your product into non-commercial foodservice. Especially in K-12 and C&U, where recipes are seen as part and parcel of menu inclusion and cross-daypart application.
This goes for how you communicate directly with operators, but also how you can better support broker, GPO, and distributor partnerships.
Do your homework to know what equipment they have in their kitchens.
If you’re coming in for a cutting, for example, ask about what they use and make sure you have leave-behind recipes that can be accomplished with equipment already on-site.
Focus on K-12:
Work with what they stock.
Reality: “If I don’t have ingredients in the system, I’m not going to use the recipe.”
How-to: It’s one thing to get your product in the door. It’s another thing to assume that directors will order multiple specialty items in order to use it.
Ingredients in your recipes need to be considered pantry staples and “in the system” already, or just tear it up and go home. K-12 kitchen staff will never source a bunch of new products just to match your amazing recipes. Given this reality, it’s best to start with pantry staples and develop your recipes from there.
Stay ahead of the “retherm and serve” curve.
Reality: K-12 foodservice directors are desperate for employees – they hire staff who can perform “retherming & serving” tasks and often need to do the jobs of multiple people, given staffing shortages. Not necessarily trained in culinary arts, these teams need simple, executable recipes that can easily turn into a breakfast, snack, and lunch menu item for an entire school year.
How-to: Recipes don’t have to be complicated to be a success. Provide directors with plus-one ideas for new dressings and dips, and ways to incorporate heat-and-serve or thaw-and-serve products down the line.
Know your regulatory requirements.
Communicate the nutritional equivalents so directors can easily obtain subsidies. Work with a culinary professional who can help tailor recipes to meet compliance needs while thinking through efficient menu inclusion. It’s a lot easier for a K-12 director to menu your product if you give them recipes for meals that meet balanced requirements, not just one or two.
Focus on C&U:
Culinary forward.
Reality: C&U directors and exec chefs generally see a higher level of trained culinary skill in their staff, so they operate very differently than K-12. They often have teams of culinarians, belong to peer networking groups like ACF, and can push and pull between familiar foods and innovation. Bring trend-forward recipes to them.
Tips for recipe development:
Now you see how your recipes should be developed specifically for each the K-12 and C&U environments and not always both. Here’s how to get started.
Time the trends.
Reality: Trends take around 12-18 months to surface as big enough to force menu consideration.
How-to: Consider major menu categories in addition to daypart (e.g. sandwiches, soups, pizza, burgers, salads), so you can build a perception of versatility.
Menu innovation lives in 3-6 week cycles, typically, and especially when introducing new items. So if you do the math here, you’re needing to get out in front well ahead of the menu planning cycle.
Know your ratios.
Reality: Use ratios in recipe development to set up a notion of ease and simplicity for the kitchen staff.
How-to: While conventional recipes use specific ingredient measurements, culinary ratios are a fixed proportion of ingredients to one another. Is the ratio a 1:1, 2:1, 3:1? Instead of measuring by cups or pounds, ingredients are defined in “parts” relative to each other in quantity. By using ratios, production can be easily scaled to the desired amount.*
Speak their language.
Lastly, communicate the recipe makeup, identifying whether the part is an ingredient (mix-in), a component (fold-in), or a build (finished item).
Now you’re ready to sell.
