Christmas has come and gone. New Year’s Eve soon followed. Mid-November through December and into the New Year is one of the – if not the most – busiest times in the catering business. This is make or break time for many catering business throughout the country. It is what distinguishes the professionals from the amateurs. For those of you who survived the rush with a smidgen of sanity left, I congratulate you.
We are now in 2013, although some of us have one foot still in 2012. It always takes some time to adjust. Nevertheless, as a caterer, there is no time to rest. The New Year brings different opportunities and challenges. You know what that means. Yep, you got it. New trends in food, drinks, and services. If you are a part of the catering industry, you know how important it is to have your finger on the pulse of what’s cool and hot, and what’s not. Therefore, trends of any kind are essential in maintaining a leg up on the competition. Cooking, and catering for that matter, is rapidly becoming a youth and young person industry. We saw signs of it in 2012. In 2013, I predict that the youth presence will be even greater. It is much more than a trend.
Published on May 15, 2012, Jeff Gordinier of the New York Times wrote a great article on the youthful transformation of the restaurant and food industry. Focusing primarily on food and music festivals, such as the Grub Crawl, Gordiner writes, “It can’t be an accident that many of these places and personalities resonate with fresh-out-of-college food hunters who seek transcendence through a Korean taco just as their Generation X forebears once sought it through the Smiths, Run-D.M.C. or Fugazi.”
Gordinier’s sentence is one of those sentences that forces you to take a step back and reflect. Food, it seems, is the new cool. While it is not replacing music as the go-to harbinger of cool, it is nevertheless supplementing it so that the two go hand-in-hand. Soon, high schools will be full of budding chefs, not budding musicians. The article is definitely worth a read. You can read it here.
There is certainly a youthful explosion occurring in the industry. From chefs to restaurants and festivals to television, food has hit a new stratosphere and the catering business will be right there in the thick of it, going along for the ride. We have seen ripples of it in 2012. Can we take it to the next level? Will 2013 see the birth of the catering cool?
–Rich
*Image courtesy of Anna Langova
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