Our Point of View on the Near Future and COVID19

When Changing Tastes founder Arlin Wasserman got his degree in Public Health thirty years ago, it was the in the midst of the HIV and AIDS crisis, including the United States placing immigration restrictions on people with the disease, along with the national mobilization to reduce deaths from smoking. 

At the time, ending smoking in public places like restaurants and bars was seen as posing an impossible challenge and perhaps even a death knell by the hospitality and restaurant industries. The economic downturns of 2001 and 2007 were also considered to be impossible challenges by our industry. 

Now, as we face the Coronavirus pandemic together, we know this moment is a bitter one. Our collective response to COVID19 has all but closed America’s restaurants, dining halls, and hotels. This is being done as a necessity to protect our public health but is a severe hardship for some of the hardest working people in our country, as well as a half million restaurant owners. 

Our response at Changing Tastes, has been our response in the past when faced with other necessary and impossible challenges, is to offer our point of view, and provide a template for a sustainable and successful future.

Knowing how both diseases as well as healthy behaviors are spread, continues to provide valuable lessons that underpin our work, our point of view, and how we continue to define new ways to make necessary and impossible changes happen. Founder Arlin Wasserman and our team continue to bring forward innovative and profitable solutions to impossible challenges like the Plant Forward culinary strategy, which Arlin created in 2009 as he tackled the challenge of the amount of meat served by the foodservice industry as a way to address climate change through menu design. More recent efforts include addressing how to shift what we eat and plant in our landscapes, how to choose sustainable methods as we harvest the bounty of our oceans, and how to grow the restaurant industry.

We firmly believe that these current circumstances will prove to be a unique and opportune moment for the foodservice and hospitality industries. This crisis is a moment in time, and it too will pass, before our industry comes back even stronger to again set the tastes for the public and serve up something better. 

Over the next few months, we can come together to make a positive impact as our industry recovers and evolves into a much better one. Throughout this century, after each economic downturn, the restaurant and hospitality industries have returned and recovered first, and strong, and garnered an even larger share of the meals we eat. What we see now, is a unique  opportunity to move in new directions and make significant changes that are both profitable and sustainable and, that give our diners and guests an even greater reason to share a meal with us, now more often than before. 

Eating out is the first thing American’s spend money on once they have money to spend. They will again, as they are free to begin to leave their homes, find a new normal, and celebrate over a shared meal. We will be there to help them tell their stories of bravery and impact that this new chapter brings with it. Dining out is a way that people can enjoy an entertaining and affordable luxury, one that is more practical, filling, and less frivolous than others. Eating breakfast or lunch outside of their homes more often is one of the first things Americans do once they start commuting to work. When we are all back in the workforce, and after our collective time eating in, we think the return to restaurant life — and eating in — may be an even more substantial celebration of our reemergence and recovery. As we work towards that very near and better future, Changing Tastes will continue to provide insights and advice for success. When the industry is again fully open for business, and it will be soon, we know it will look different. 

How different it will look is up to us and the actions that we take now. 

Many of you have asked us for advice and specifics about the best ways we can implement new and better practices that our customers will accept and enjoy. Our advice is: now is the time to make those change while there is a pause in our operations and before diners come back.

The current collective pause in the demands of daily operations provides a chance to create entirely new menus and dining concepts, retrain our staff, integrate new ingredients, change the way we do business with producers and suppliers, and ultimately welcome back guests that are looking for something new after too many days of their own home cooking and eating alone. 

As we begin to plan for the near future, we advise everyone in our industry to read the signals and not the trends. Our journeys over the past few weeks to America’s grocery retailers reveal what we’ve known to be true over the past months: gluten free products and fake meat are what’s left behind on the shelves, and the panic buying of canned tuna isn’t a change in preference, but just a transfer from warehouse to basement and pantry.

 The public’s interest in having us cook for them is stronger than ever. While take out sales over the past few weeks may seem meager, they are a strong signal that Americans would rather have us decide more often on the menu, the recipe, and where to get ingredients, than cook for themselves.

The things we change now have the ability to shift the shape of both land and sea. Some of the things we see include:

• Making the many changes to our menus and the ingredients we use if only we had time to reset. This includes a return to more innovative scratch cooking that expands the current plant-forward focus.

• Expanding interactions with growers, ranchers, and fishers — which have proven to be indispensable —and running our operations to work with a larger diversity of ingredients and sources that are aligned with the state of the harvest and the season.

• Increasing the use of ingredients produced domestically and cultivating our domestic capacity to produce more of the foods we eat, insulating us from future disruptions such as public health risks, climate change, drought, social disruptions, and trade conflicts.

• Changing supplier practices to improve the livelihoods of the essential workers who harvest our food. 

• Maintaining our new levels of hygiene and ending our reliance on disposable plastic and other single use products.

Our industry has weathered many storms and Changing Tastes has been there with solutions and responses that are always effective. When faced with necessary and “impossible” challenges, we continue to rise to the occasion and provide a point of view that is a template for a success. This pause gives us the ability to create a new normal that will be better than the same old same old that we were working on changing anyway. We look forward to working together with all of you to make this vision a reality in the coming months. There’s more to come.  

The future, thanks to the changes we choose to make, will be delicious. Come back often to learn more and to let us know what you are thinking about or to be sure you hear more from us click here.

In the meantime, Salud! and we wish you and yours only the best of health and a bright future.