Niche Food

New Cookbook App: New Italian Pantry

Renowned chef Sara Jenkins of NYC’s Porchetta and Porsena respectfully disagrees – and created her app New Italian Pantry to officially put an end to premeditated cooking.
 
First, she selected her sixteen most-used ingredients – stuff with a long shelf life like olive oil, dried pasta, and Aleppo pepper. Then she packed the interactive cookbook with 75-plus recipes based on those staples.
 
So stock your shelves then generate recipe suggestions by either telling the app what you already have or going to the grocery store and basing dinner on whatever is fresh. Each recipe comes equipped with videos, photographs, auto-generated shopping lists, and built-in timers for soup-to-nuts hand-holding.

(Via Netted by the Webbys)

How Can Restaurant Balance Credit Card Fees While Keeping Cashless Customers Happy

Dining is rapidly becoming a cashless experience. Last year, 81 percent of the money spent at full-service restaurants in America was charged to debit, credit or pre-paid cards, up from 72 percent in 2006 and 66 percent in 2004. At quick-service restaurants, many of which only started taking cards in the early 2000s, just 37 percent of sales were charged in 2012, but the trend toward plastic is the same. At the same time, customers’ insistence that restaurants take cards has allowed companies like Visa, MasterCard and American Express to charge ever-higher merchant fees, leading some restaurant owners to question the value of plastic. These fees often range from 2 percent to 3.5 percent of the bill — a significant chunk to a restaurateur running a business with a profit margin in the mid-single digits

Catching Up With Anton Nocito Of P&H Soda

“Retail is such a weird animal. Sometimes people will stock the syrups because they love the labels, and they never taste them,” he says, “Restaurant people don’t care what it looks like, just what it tastes like.” There’s a full list on their site, but Nocito confesses to a favorite: “The Modern is just killing it with a hibiscus cocktail they have.” The company has been working with a distributor for its northeast retail business, which requires producing large volumes of product and adjusting to a tighter margin, since they’re now selling to someone who has to make their own profit on the product. And if the distributor goes out of business, you can lose a lot. When this happened to P&H, they lost some product; friends who used the same distributor lost more than $40,000. Nocito is still doing all of the production himself, despite the increased volume. “Once you go to a co-packer, the quality really goes down,” he explains. Plus, soda syrup is pretty easy to scale up as recipes go. “If you were using three pounds of hibiscus, you’ll be using 30 pounds,” he says, “And a bigger kettle.”

Farmigo Launches

via Brooklyn Based

Farmigo, a new online farmer’s market, is launching today in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and they’re looking for a few good food communities.

Here’s how it works: an office, school, neighborhood group or even an apartment building works together to form a food community. You just need a minimum of about 30 members, or 30 orders per delivery and a set pick-up and delivery location. One member (or a few) takes responsibility for coordinating with the Farmigo team to determine which producers you’ll work with, and handles the pick-up and delivery of the produce. Farmigo creates a custom shopping experience for your community 

Food Truck Industry To Grow From 615M To 2.7B In 5 Years

From Mobile Cuisine

Emergent Research, Intuit’s partner on this research project, forecasts the food truck industry to continue its rapid growth. By 2017 food trucks will generate about $2.7 billion in revenue. This is a fourfold increase from the 2012 food truck revenue estimate of $650 million provided by the National Restaurant Association.

Seven Careers That Revolve Around Food

The  Brazen Careerist blog has a list of seven careers that revolve around food. I think food blogger and food start-up founder should be included.

1. Analyze Food as a Food Scientist Food scientists develop innovative ways to create safe, durable and tasty food. Instead of a kitchen, you’re usually found in a lab or a processing plant, improving packaging methods, experimenting with new preservative techniques or studying food-related illness. In short, you make the world a more healthy, nutritious and flavorful place to live.

Walmart Launches Food Subscription Service Goodies.co

Walmart’s experimentation with subscription-based commerce continues today, with the public launch of Goodies.co, a food subscription service featuring boxes of sample-sized treats shipped monthly. The service is the latest to emerge from @WalmartLabs, the retailer’s Silicon Valley-based innovation lab focused on quickly building, launching, and testing new business models that may or may not make their way to Walmart.com or Walmart stores at a later date.

Urban Remedy: A Juice Subscription Service Launches

Science Inc. has announced the launch of their latest operation, Urban Remedy, a wellness-focused startup that delivers juices, meal replacements, and healthy snacks. The company launches with $1 million in seed funding from Science and a group of angels with experience in the beverage industry.

Committed to health and healing, Founder Neka Pasquale directed her energies into Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Acupuncture, which reinforced her understanding that food is medicine.