We visited the central market of Rungis, also examples of brand new restaurant initiatives, circularity, sustainable logistics, banquets, restaurant formats or large spaces for eating and drinking, virtual food brand managers, etc. We immerse ourselves in French innovation thanks to the generosity of its companies and associations to learn what is cooking in the kettles of the French food service with an eye on its immediate Olympic games and urgent environmental responsibility.
As interesting as the frenetic schedule of visits to outstanding examples of technological application, strategic organization or alternative business model were for me the lessons that I continually learned from my group mates, all of them at the same time experts in their dedication and attentive, decisive and intelligent when it comes to understanding, relating and projecting possibilities.
Thanks to the mission, we spoke with some representatives about the recent withdrawal of the bill that sought to require the identification of those dishes on the menu that had not been prepared in the restaurant itself.
Okay, it's not easy. It is practically impossible to prepare everything in the establishment. You can make mayonnaise, but also oil? Is it possible to make bread, also flour?
That's without going into qualitative evaluations, because no one doubts that there are many homemade croquettes infinitely worse than other industrial ones.
Plus, there is stigmatization. Add the highlighted “Not Homemade” label next to any statement in your letter and you will immediately see how sales of this item decline because the negation is hardly read as an attribute. Positive proposals, on the other hand, are received better. Instead of proposing meatless Monday, start the week by announcing a delicious, comforting and healthy legume stew on the menu and you will see how many people sign up for the adventure.
Surely these and others are the objections that have led influential representatives of the restaurant industry and its related sectors to pressure for the law to be withdrawn.
I therefore understand that legislators will have to rethink the regulations so that the way to guarantee traceability and the right to information about what citizens eat in restaurants is more friendly.
Because the client must have the right to choose, but also to have clear premises to be able to do so. This is the idea of one of the most fashionable trends in food in recent years, the concept of the so-called clean label. They even guarantee that we know in which sea the whiting we bought at the market swam and how it was caught! And that's how it should be, of course, to avoid fraud and promote our responsibility.
But, just as we have the right not to be fed Milli Vanilli, we can also prefer the blue pill that allows us to remain in a happily irresponsible ignorance, they will tell me. Absolutely agree, the right should never be an obligation.
Before continuing, and for the record, a server absolutely defends the possibility represented by the development of the fourth and fifth ranges (that is, manipulated or entirely processed products) of quality for the hospitality industry, for the sustainability of bars and independent restaurants, for the business of our agri-food industry, for the sustainability of primary production and even for the conservation, valorization and revitalization of our local gastronomic heritage.
I guess those who make these products must also be interested in showing off their brand. Otherwise they would lose value and competitiveness in the hands of a possible hospitality distribution that today also seeks to gain positioning.
I suppose that those who prepare quality cannelloni for restaurants are interested in being known by name so as not to lose visibility buried by private labels or distribution brands.
If we compare again with what we buy in the supermarket, notice how Casa Tarradellas proudly highlights on the label that it is the one that makes the Hacendado pizzas. And it doesn't seem to have gone badly for him.
But the restaurants themselves are interested in highlighting where the products they offer come from. Explain, for example, to your customers that this wonderful cheese is obviously not “homemade” but purchased from Molí de Ger. Or that the extraordinary wine they recommend is made with grapes from vineyards from plot 3.9, planted a long time ago in calcareous stone soil on red clay, and aged for 12 months in oak in the Abadal winery.
And so everything.
