Summer Fun
Some of my fondest memories growing up are visits to amusement parks. Every summer, I would take part in at least one trip – where I would come back exhausted and sunburned. To this day I equate summer with visits to the roller coaster and junk food capitals.
The amusement park that I most often attended was Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. While it’s grown considerably since my youth, millions of visitors a year are having the same experiences I grew up with. The park is the featured story in this issue of Fresh Cut: There are more than 70 foodservice outlets inside the park, and more owned by the parent company just outside the park – everything from impulse-buy carts to full-service franchise restaurants.
But as society as a whole is gravitating toward healthier items, amusement parks are not seeing that trend in the same way. It seems that when consumers are on vacation, they want to throw away their diets and eat junk food. It’s a sentiment I understand, and am probably prone to, but there may be opportunities for fruit and vegetable producers to grow sales at parks.
Many processors are marketing their products in conjunction with cartoon characters and kids’ movies – some of the same characters that walk around in costume at amusement parks. This cross-marketing could help children equate the fun of the amusement park with the healthy foods they love to eat, instead of the less healthy snacks.
The story of Cedar Point is interesting because it is a seasonal operation, open only from May to October. That means each foodservice outlet has to be closed up and winterized, then opened up – all of them on the same day. And with a seasonal staff, that means a lot of training to protect the food safety chain.
On the topic of food safety, you’ll also find an article in this issue of Fresh Cut on the partnership between technology producers and processors. As an example of this, Verdelli Farms, a processor of bagged spinach in Pennsylvania, is working with Hanson Technologies to create products for the fresh-cut industry that test for contamination within hours of processing.
