Menu Talk with Pat and Bret is a collaboration between Restaurant Business senior menu editor Pat Cobe and Bret Thorn, senior food & beverage editor of Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality.
The corporate chef of the onsite giant shares insights into how consumer tastes are changing, and also how they’re staying the same
Listen to this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or SoundCloud.
As senior director of culinary development and performance for Sodexo in the United States, Rob Morasco is in charge of creating the food for more than 13,000 foodservice locations in corporate cafeterias, hospitals, senior living facilities, high schools, universities, airline lounges, oil platforms and more.
Obviously, what his clients want, what their customers want, and how Morasco goes about developing it have all changed dramatically since the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Obviously there’s more takeout and delivery, and that means that Morasco, to fulfill Sodexo’s commitment to reduce its carbon footprint, has to be conscientious about all the packaging he has to go through now.
He also has to find ways to get everyone to taste new menu items while socially distancing, as well as to adjust to the changing tastes of his diners.
Morasco said that while some consumers continue to focus on items that are better for themselves and better for the planet, they’re also helping themselves to plenty of comfort food, because they need it these days. He’s found that that’s true with people from every generation. Senior living facilities are asking for grain bowls and bao buns, and college students are eating chicken parm heroes.
In this edition of In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn, we discuss how Morasco and the people he’s feeding have adjusted to the changing times.
In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn · Sodexo research & development chef Rob Morasco feeds people from a social distance
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]
Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
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