Why Food Chain Transparency Matters to Restaurants

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

Restaurant servers know they are going to be asked the question eventually.

What ingredients do you use?

Are there nuts? (For the customer who might be allergic.)

Is there gluten? (For the gluten conscious.

Dairy? (For those who have lactose intolerance.) 

And any other number of things.

Consumers are more conscious about what they eat than ever.

Another customer might wonder where their coffee was sourced?  

And their follow-up question: Was it sourced sustainably? Is it Fair Trade certified?

Restaurant servers already have plenty of things on their plate (pun intended) without worrying about getting to the bottom of answers like this on the fly.  

When a server is prepping for his shift he wants to be ‘in the know,’ about everything so that he can commit it to memory along with the ‘specials,’ for that day and get the accurate -- truthful information--to the customer.

This doesn’t seem all that complicated, except that recently we have seen in the news that sometimes the source of the food itself might not even be clear.

The cases that make it to the news are probably the most extreme cases, but they shed light on a serious issue in the food industry. When the origin of our food makes big news--people think about it. And it becomes a cause for concern.
Can we trust our food?

Here is a case in point: The world’s largest sandwich food chain has recently been called into question about the source of its tuna. The New York Times refers to this case as The Big Tuna Sandwich Mystery.

The article suggests that the simple can of tuna that sits on most of our shelves and that we order at some of our restaurants can be “mysterious, questionable and scandalous.”

What might be scandalous about tuna, you say?

This. 

The chain has faced a class-action lawsuit alleging that the tuna wasn’t tuna at all -- that the tuna sandwich was “bereft of tuna as an ingredient.”

Something was indeed a “little fishy,” in this case.  This subjected the sandwich chain to lots of press (not the kind any restaurant is looking for.) And it meant that multiple news outlets were doing things like sending samples of tuna to labs to be tested to try to get to the bottom of the mystery.  

The challenge here is that once someone questions something like the origin of food -- it can be difficult to prove a case. As one person pointed out, “‘the further you get the fish from the bone, the harder it is to recognize what fish is.’”

THIS is the problem. It is why in the future traceability technologies will matter a great deal to all of us, including restaurant owners.

Imagine, if, rather than subjecting the brand to the damage that allegations and rumors and hearsay might bring about, restaurant owners could simply point to the truthful ledger of the food's journey from the source to the plate?

Fortunately this is the direction for the future of food chains. 

Traceability technology will make it possible for there to be a fully transparent ledger and so when something ‘looks fishy,’ everyone can get to the bottom of the case quickly.  

What is traceability technology? A great example is Blockchain technology. This “technology is actually a specific kind of database where every piece of information daisy-chains together in chronological order.  This database history is permanent and irreversible. . .” This creates a “ledger,’ and means that everything is documented permanently along the way.  

What does this mean for restauranteurs? Simply put, “peace of mind.” So when someone questions the origin of something, the answer isn’t cryptic or confusing, it's right there for everyone to see.  Even when events like food recalls happen, the restaurant owner remains in the driver's seat as they can quickly and easily point to the source of concern.  This matters a great deal as one article points to a recent poll where “16% of respondents would purchase another brand and never purchase the recalled brand again, with another 17% saying they would avoid all brands owned by that product’s manufacturer.”

So, in the future as the server’s are prepping for their night's work, and working to get to the bottom of all the questions that might be asked about the food they are serving, they will sit in the driver’s seat too.  

They will know that what they are learning about the food they are serving is the verifiable truth.

And they will not need to repeat the answer that ‘the sandwich artist’ at the sandwich chain said when she was asked about how she responds to customer concerns about the origin of tuna. 

This sandwich artist said “...when customers will bring it up (the question of the origin of the tuna) ...we just go, ‘I don’t know. What kind of cheese do you want?’”

Instead, in the future, when someone asks a sandwich artist, a food server--or anyone else-- what’s the origin of my food, they can say, “Well let me tell you, I know the truth.”

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Shannon Mullen O’Keefe and Mark A. Irwin contributed to this article.