Making the cut

If you really want to know what’s for dinner, ask a chef. They are the professionals who make the calls about which food items make it to the menu.

Chefs who prepare menus for restaurants, supermarkets and foodservice providers are taking notice of an increasing demand for fresh-cut fruits and vegetables.

“The quality of fresh-cut produce will make or break the guest experience in our restaurants,” said Peter Glander, executive chef for Ruby Tuesday, which has 750 restaurants. “Ambience is important. Our chicken is important. But if the produce on the plate is not of good quality, the guests will pick up on that very quickly.”

Chefs are looking for the same qualities in produce that diners seek — fresh appearance, color and flavor — and share with diners the desire for ease of preparation and long shelf life.

Walter Zuromski, president and culinary director of Chef Services Group in Lincoln, R.I., said fresh-cut often makes it onto his menus over whole commodities because of “consistency, time and space savings, while uncut produce takes up more space and cooks lack knife skills.”

Now, chefs do not make their decisions in a vacuum. Chris Wilson, corporate chef for Texas- based United Supermarkets, relies on a variety of other opinions to decide which fresh-cut items are on the menu in the company’s 51 stores. Store operations and merchandising staff play major roles, as do technical factors.

“When designing menus, I look for items that would make a large seasonal impact as well as give us consistent yields and time/labor savings benefits,” Wilson said. “Shelf life and logistics also play a large part in what we decide to bring in. Is shelf life long enough for us to bring them into our warehouse, ship them to all of our stores in a timely manner while allowing a maximum number of days in the store prior to expiration?”

How all these factors come together to affect menu selection boils down to something called “chef intellect,” said Glander, who defines it as combining culinary artistry and business to make the best recommendations for the menu.

For example, Glander would like to add specialty items such as purslane to the Ruby Tuesday salad bar. “But I don’t know anyone who is growing it in the volume we might need. I could get someone to grow it in volume, but do the guests like it? Right now, I don’t know and that’s where guest research comes in,” said Glander.

Each chef, through customer feedback and kitchen trial and error, has a list of favorite and not-so-favorite fresh- cut menu items. For Zuromski, popular items include cut lettuce, romaine lettuce mixes and other lettuce mixes.

“It’s very popular to have a completed lettuce mix. It succeeds because it’s more profitable to buy greens mixed together than four cases of greens to match the mix. The time and safety factor is huge in this category,” he said.

In United stores, Wilson’s fresh-cut menu favorites include quartered red potatoes, trimmed green beans, trimmed Brussels sprouts, peeled/cubed butternut squash, diced onions, diced celery, pico de gallo mix, peeled shallots, cut lettuces and salad blends.

“Many of these items have succeeded because of popularity with our guests and the amount of production time saved at the store level,” Wilson said.

At Ruby Tuesday, the biggest items for fresh cut are the standards: broccoli, cucumbers, carrots, mushrooms, lettuces and green beans that are prewashed and cleaned. However, the roster of produce does not yet include any fresh-cut fruit, which they are now researching.

Several years ago, United tested de-stemmed cilantro and chopped green onions, Wilson said, but poor shelf life put an end to the trial of those two items. Zuromski has not had much success with sliced tomatoes.

“The shelf life is two days at best and they become soggy and soft in texture from the high water content,” he said. “Technology is improving this concern.”

The relationship with the supplier is an essential part of getting fresh-cut items on the menu, and then, plate. For Wilson and United, the choice is to “go local,” as they work with Sun Coast Farms, a Dallas-Fort Worth area company. Wilson can make needed adjustments and examine samples with relative speed.

One final factor in menu selection might be the most important of all for a business, and that’s economics. With fresh cut, it often comes down to a simple comparison: how much will it cost to buy whole vs. fresh cut?

“You may not use cut onions or sliced tomatoes if you don’t sell a lot of sandwiches,” said Zuromski. “You have to take a look at the return on investment to measure the best direction to take certain parts of the recipes and outsource those cuts.”

                                                                                      –By Lee A. Dean, Fresh Cut Contributor

Pictured:

Top: Walter Zuromski, Chef Services Group

Middle: Chris Wilson, United Supermarkets

Bottom: Peter Glander, Ruby Tuesday