Celebrating Easter with smaller, luxurious treats

23-3-2021

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Orbisk waste system | Food waste monitor provides insight into your waste

16-3-2021

Orbisk has developed a fully automated food waste monitor. The waste collection point of F&B-companies will be equipped with scales and a smart camera, which will record exactly what is thrown away and what amount. Based on the collected data, bundled in clear online reports, you can optimize the supply, purchasing process and your menu and thus save up to tens of thousands of euros per year! 

Our colleagues from Van Spronsen & Partners Hospitality Consultancy and –Hospitality Administration have been telling their customers for years: data is knowledge! (in Dutch: meten is weten). By keeping track of your turnover on a daily basis, you get “grip” based on data so that you can estimate how much you will approximately turnover on a certain day in a specific period. As this food waste monitor shows this knowledge is also highly effective for reducing food waste! In the past, we have written about a similar product, named Winnow. These systems are very suitable for the larger professional kitchens.  

Reading time: 2 minutes 

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Impact Shakers | First European awards for sustainable and inclusive startups

16-3-2021

Inspired by the doughnut economics model, applications for the very first Impact Shakers Awards, opened on March 1st. All European startups and scaleups with a positive impact on society and the environment may apply. It is the first time that more than 40 impact ecosystem players from all over Europe, including incubators, accelerators, investors and networking organizations are rallying behind the same cause.  

The Impact Shakers Awards are inspired by the doughnut economics model, which maps human prosperity according to a social foundation and an ecological ceiling. An international jury will pick winners in twelve categories: Energy, Water, Food, Health, Education, Income & Work, Peace & Justice, Political Voice, Social Equity, Gender Equality, Housing & Networks. Those start-ups and scale-ups who want to enroll: you can till subscribe till the first of May!  

Reading time: 3 minutes 

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Trends we spotted | Week 10

15-3-2021

At horecatrends.com or hospitalitytrends.eu we spot many national and international trends on a daily basis. We pick the most interesting ones to write about, the other trends we use in our weekly column ‘Trends we spotted this week’. 

With this week links to articles about amongst others automated voices to take orders at a drive-thru and AmazonFresh opens their first checkout-free grocery store outside the USA in London. 

The riverside igloos at the terrace of the Coppa Club will return this spring! As the restaurants are opening again at April 12 in the UK, they might be a safe and Instagrammable place to meet in London. And we spotted the ‘Global travel trends report’ by American Express. With trends we can totally relate to!  

Stalk & Spade, an entirely meat-free fast casual concept will open just outside of Minneapolis this spring. Let’s see if we will spot this kind of fast casual concepts in Europe in the future. And the Easter mainstay Cadbury teamed up with the Goose Island Beer Company to release a Creme Egg-flavored stout for Easter. 

An interesting development: edible holograms created by the Khalifa University, could be used to show that a food item hasn’t been tampered with, or to prove that it isn’t a counterfeit product. And Starbucks is set to release its latest limited-edition coffee blend, to celebrate its 50th-anniversary. Fifty years already!  

Click on the title if you like to read the full article. Enjoy reading! 

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Juicy Marbles | Plant-based Filet Mignon steaks on the market

12-3-2021

Juicy Marbles from Ljubljana, Slovenia makes history with the first marbled steaks made from plants. With a patent pending on the name, Meat-o-matic Reverse Grinder™ 9000. The founders of Juicy Marbles have been able to mimic the muscle texture and marbling of meat by aligning and layering fibers from the bottom up with all-natural ingredients. 

Did you see the images of this Filet Mignon? It looks like a real Filet Mignon, we hope it will be available in the supermarkets in the Netherlands soon. We would love to taste it! If it’s really the first plant-based Filet Mignon? We recently also wrote about a plant-based version made of wagyu meat, called ‘Waygu’. This product by the Canadian company Top Tier Foods (TTF) is making a limited debut in the US with hopes of rolling out at 4,000 sushi locations nationwide. 

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Dark Kitchens in 2021

12-3-2021

Our colleague Marguerita Vogelsang of Van Spronsen & Partners hospitality consultants blogs about Dark Kitchens, she thinks the question is not whether the trend will become big in the Netherlands, but it is more about when this will happen. It is however a different type of entrepreneur who seems to be suitable for this type of concept. 

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VinaStraws | Cereal straws to exchange your plastic straws

11-3-2021

As of July of this year a new law will prohibit the use of single-use plastic items such as plates, cutlery, straws and cottonbud sticks in Europe. So all restaurant, hotel and bar owners have to check that they don’t use plastic packaging anymore. Over the years we’ve spotted a lot of substitutes, like Stroodles, Wheat straws and many more! Now we spotted another one: Cereal straws. They can be used in cold or warm beverages and after finishing your drink, you can eat the straw. The Cereal Straws are made of rice and tapioca starch, 100% biodegradable. 
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Limited edition Hemelwater jenever | Worldwide scoop for Hooghoudt: genever created with rainwater

8-3-2021

A first for Hooghoudt: the distillery with its roots in Groningen (The Netherlands) succeeded in producing gin from rainwater. Hooghoudt aims to reduce the use of scarce drinking water, the Hemelwater gin is based on Hooghoudt’s Premium Jonge Graanjenever recipe. By adding a variety of natural flavors such as juniper, iris root, fennels seeds, cardamom, star anise, elderflower and pear, the ultimate soft and pure gin is created. This 700 runs limited edition Dutch gin is very unique as gin has never been made from rainwater before.  

In 2016 we spotted the beer made from rainwater at brewery the Prael. The bitter blond beer, comparable to an IPA, was brewed in collaboration with the beer brewery Hemelswater (to be translated as water from heaven). A huge success, Code Blond even got attention outside the Netherlands. 

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Trends we spotted | Week 9

8-3-2021

At horecatrends.com or hospitalitytrends.eu we spot many national and international trends on a daily basis. We pick the most interesting ones to write about, the other trends we use in our weekly column ‘Trends we spotted this week’.

With this week, links to articles about amongst others about a Japanese-Style Basque Cheesecake from Basuku, it sounds delicious! And Orbital Assembly plans to start building private Voyager space station with artificial gravity in 2025, the first hotel in space.

A link to an article about the Dutch initiative Share That Kitchen, they want to become a kind of Airbnb for professional kitchens. And ‘Quatreau’ CBD drinks launched in the US, it sounds like a Hard Seltzer drink with CBD and we wonder whether these kind of drinks will come to the Netherlands as well.

PepsiCo is shaking up the cocktail mixer category with the launch of Neon Zebra, a new line of non-alcoholic cocktail mixers in 7.5oz mini-cans. Create 2 cocktails with one can in an instant! And an exceptional payment in the spirits industry, a transaction in Bitcoin between a supplier and distributor.

Onmateria created a Green Box. The Green Box, an amenity kit designed to tackle plastic waste in the hotel industry. And in 2025 the first Nobu Hotel in Germany will open in Hamburg, The Elbtower Hamburg.

Open for 1 month in April 2021: Candytropolis Sugar Rush, a safe, open-air, walk-through family adventure in California. And we loved this ice cream: ‘Not Fried Chicken’ Ice cream! We think it might inspire Dutch ice cream creators to make kroket, bitterbal or frikandel ice cream. Very #Instagrammable!

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Instagram trends | #bluerice

4-3-2021

We have written about blue tea before, in 2019, about the tea of Crusio tea. By using the blossom of the Butterfly Pea, the tea will naturally turn blue. The same tea can be used to cook rice, and you will have an Instragram hit #Bluerice! We tried it at home and although it didn’t alter the taste much, it was a bit unnatural colour for rice. We can already see some applications like blue rice porridge, blue rice pudding and of course blue pasta. Some lemon in the tea and you’ll have purple tea or rice and pasta! By the way if you search for #bluerice you will also spot blue sushi, or rainbow sushi! We didn’t check if this is made all naturally. 

Click the following links to see some posts about blue rice, including one recipe. 

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Virginia Gold Peanut Coffee | The world’s first caffeinated coffee alternative made of peanuts

2-3-2021

Virginia Gold Peanut coffee is the world’s first caffeinated coffee alternative made of peanuts. For what we have read it’s the latest coffee craze in the US and we understand it isn’t coffee, but it looks like it and is delicious. Check out the reviews in the press, for example the FoodNetwork Magazine writes: “It tastes like a less acidic version of coffee, with just a hint of nutty flavor”. We here in Europe have to wait though, we only spotted it in the social media and articles in the US. We also understood that they aren’t shipping to Europe yet. We love to try it though, don’t you?

Reading time: 2 minutes  

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Trends we spotted | Week 8

1-3-2021

At horecatrends.com or hospitalitytrends.eu we spot many national and international trends on a daily basis. We pick the most interesting ones to write about, the other trends we use in our weekly column ‘Trends we spotted this week’.

Great images of the food and interior of restaurant Condividere, the informal haute cuisine by Ferran Adrià and London is embracing the power of the pedestrian once again this summer! Westminster City Council have elected to repeat last year’s plan to turn swathes of the capital into outdoor dining and drinking spots.

McDonald’s revealed a global packaging redesign and we spotted a new sustainable, delivery app aiming to revolutionize restaurant takeout packaging, JYBE. 

Top Tier Foods (TTF) in Canada is going to roll out a vegan version of wagyu beef, called ‘Waygu’, at 4000 sushi locations. And Nestle plans to produce rice-based KitKat, the KitKat V.

AiFi, an expert in frictionless autonomous shopping, will partner with Wundermart to roll out 20 autonomous convenience stores in the first quarter of 2021.

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Mountain Tap Brewery is offering COVID-19 proof dining in gondola’s this winter

26-2-2021

During the first lockdown we had the first restaurant in the Netherland to serve food corona proof in small greenhouses for 2 persons. Which was a great choice as we have a lot of big greenhouses all over the Netherlands. It has been used in several sizes and at different locations in the Netherlands. As are the dining pods which are used as hotel rooms or as small private dining booths during winter time and which are also corona proof. Now we spotted Mountain Tap Brewery, located in the mountain ski resort town of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where winter low temperatures often reach below freezing and snow piles up by the feet. Faced with the likelihood of extremely limited capacity for indoor seating due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mountain Tap Brewery brainstormed a creative use of its spacious patio to accommodate winter guests. In the autumn of 2020, the brewpub transformed several out-of-use gondola cars into private seating booths and installed them on the patio. It might be an idea for all the restaurants located in ski resorts in Europe as well. We have been spotting gondel sauna’s and in 2009 we wrote an article about world’s smallest restaurant the Genussgondel in Fiss, Austria where you could enjoy dinner in a gondola lift. With a maximum four people, you enjoyed a three course dinner with a spectacular view over the Tyrolean mountains. When I started skiing in the seventy’s, the first lifts we used were open ‘bins’ in Italy, those could be used outside by après ski bars to keep social distance! 😉  ^Marjolein 

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Restaurant Basiliek* changes opening hours and interior after reopening

23-2-2021

One Michelin-starred restaurant Basiliek in Harderwijk (The Netherlands) will change its opening hours at the moment they’re allowed to reopen and welcome guests again. The interior of the restaurant will change as well. The COVID-19 pandemic provided the couple who own the place, Tabitha and Rik Jansma, with new insights with some changes as a result. ‘Something that we wanted for a longer period of time’.

We are curious how many restaurants, bar or hotels will apply changes within their concept. We suppose that the popular meal sharing concepts disappear after reopening. Just like COVID-19 is crucial for the open jars of nuts on tables. Restaurant Basiliek will also change the number of guests, which is something every restaurant has to deal with and where the concept is decisive regarding to the revenue of the restaurant. Sadly enough, this is something we have been testing with the ‘6 feet distance’. The decision to apply new closing hours is choosing for more private time, and it is great if your concept can carry this decision. There is no information provided about continuing with delivery and take-out meals in their press release, but we are very curious how concepts will apply this within their operations. Are you changing your concept, let us know!

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French chef Cyril Lignac will be the new chef of the restaurant at the Amstel Hotel

23-2-2021

And we will make a reservation when it is possible! For everyone who has eaten at one of his restaurants in Paris, chef Cyril Lignac opens at the beginning of 2022 at the legendary Amstel Hotel! We have enjoyed our diners in his restaurant Le Chardenoux and Aux Prés, but he has three other restaurants called Ischia, Le Bar des Prés and Dragon. It is great to hear that this new chef will open a new culinary hotspot in Amsterdam, although we have enjoyed the switch of the kitchen of the restaurant at the Amstel Hotel to more simple and comfort dishes.

The restaurant at the legendary Amstel Hotel, owned by Katara Hospitality and managed by InterContinental Hotels & Resorts, becomes the first restaurant of the French celebrity chef, tv-star and author outside France. The restaurant, which is scheduled to open in 2022, will be based on Lignac’s successful formula in Paris.

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