Sanitation / Product Life Cycle

The day started with an extended adventure into ServSafe and sanitation. Yesterday we visited viruses, bacteria and parasites. Today we said hi to fungi like molds and yeasts, which tend to spoil the things we like about food, but are not necessarily toxic. Fungi can be allergenic, however.

Then there's biological toxins -- seafood toxins can't be smelled, tasted, or cooked/frozen away. If you eat the liver of a puffer fish, you gonna die, whether it's grilled or made into ice cream. Mushroom toxins are only found in the wild, can't be cooked away, and can make you, uh, hallucinate. Or kill you.

Overall, food is the safest it has ever been in the history of man. However, due to modern distribution and the modern scale of the food industry, when there IS a problem it tends to loom large. Modern contaminants include chemical (cleaning fluids, machine lube), toxic metal (acids in a copper pot, lead from pewter) and simple physical (anything from some dirt or glass to Shanequa's press-on nail.) And of course, being that's it's 2009, lip service had to be paid to Food Terrorism -- 3rd parties and disgruntled employees who desire to sabotage the food supply. I love how Islamic terrorists and some kid who is pissed at getting paid minimum wage are some how equated in the vague and vaguely paranoid readings of ServSafe.

And then we saw a film, with some of the worst acting since Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. Does a guy with a (fake looking) weeping sore, leaning over a cauldron stirring the sauce, REALLY need some manager-type with a tie and mustache to come over and tell him to get the hell out of the kitchen?

The other half of the class got into marketing and product life cycle, engaging in some wonky vocabulary. Customer behavior -- what makes for a positive purchase decision. One is searchability -- the customer must be able to find your spot, whether that's by google or by walking around the corner from your office. A customer will judge by the perception of similar restaurants. Then there is something Richard called 'credence qualities' -- only if something goes wrong or a special request is given does a customer see if the establishment is good by their behavior to said challenge.

Service quality was quantified in a series of 'gaps'. Particularly the gap between where I am and where I want to be. There is a knowledge gap: what I think the client wants versus what the client actually wants. (People say they want healthy. People actually eat McDonalds.) There is a delivery gap: what is supposed to be delivered versus what is actually delivered. And of course, the communication gap: what we say we are going to deliver versus what is really delivered. Nothing like raising expectations sky high (Ray's World Famous Original Pizza!) then delivering something else (mediocre deli pizza).

The product life cycle can be applied to a restaurant, a chain of restaurants or, um, an actual product. Start slow, grow into your market, reach saturation and try to keep steady, then decline and die or change. A company like McDonald's has been riding the 'maturity' part of the curve for long time, avoiding decline by introducing menu items and advertising like crazy against competitors. Twenty five years ago they introduced a 'Big Mac,' and with one silly song everyone knew exactly what that was, overcoming the knowledge gap pretty handily.

A big company in decline would be KFC, who changed their name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to try to accommodate fried food's bad. Recently, they've been advertising that they have 'a cook in every restaurant,' trying to overcome the perception that their food is pre-fab and made by minimum-wage poorly-trained expendable cheap labor. Their market has been eaten away by other chains like Boston Market, who spin fast food chicken in a very different way.