CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
The food service industry has changed tremendously over the past couple of decades (Belasco, 2007). Demographic changes are a driving force in the evolution of the food service industry (Friddle, Mangaraj, Kinsey, 2001). As noted in the latest Standard & Poor’s report on the restaurant industry, “graying baby boomers” with high disposable incomes have the propensity to dine out (Shand, 2008; Puccia, 2012); they do not seem to have the time to cook, and their children and grandchildren seem to lack the interest (Friddle et al., 2001; Belasco, 2007). The contemporary changes in labour markets and customer needs, technological advances, increased competition, and globalization, all present us with important patterns to consider when rethinking how hospitality entities do business and organize themselves in the more-than-ever dynamic environment (Blum, 1996). Innovation in the food service industry is a combination of technological innovation with social and cultural innovation (Earle, 1997). Classical cuisine knowledge and skills are being challenged on a daily basis by competing chains and independent outlets pressured to simultaneously improve delivery speed and reduce costs, all the while providing quality. Preparing food “from scratch” is more and more often considered counter-productive and impractical, and traded for the use of “convenience foods” (Frei, 1996; Belasco, 2007) The college student market growth has been bringing about an expansion of university food service operations and an increasing demand of diverse, fresh, healthy, tasty, and readily-deliverable on-campus food options (Kim, Ng, Kim, 2009). The use of convenience foods in university food service operations is also increasing, intuitively, since convenience foods are the ones to facilitate timely mass delivery of culinary diversity with minimized production efforts. According to On Campus Hospitality (2013), university dining facilities in the US make up a $21.9 billion market in continuous evolution and revolution; paradoxically, very few explorations of this sub-market exist.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.