Takeaway: Restaurants are increasingly using various sauces and dips to provide customers with the ability to construct their own flavor profiles built around existing menu items.
This modular approach creates customized options without a large incremental increase in cost or delivery time.
Particularly for Generation Y – the “customize-me” generation – sauces and dips are a point of entry, whereas older consumers simply see them as increments.
However, to ensure new flavors don’t fizzle out, research and testing are crucial to avoid excess product on hand.
One constant? Chicken is the most popular core product for sauces and dips at quick-service and fast-casual restaurants.
* * * * *
Excerpted from QSRMagazine.com, “One Sauce Doesn’t Fit All” By Barney Wolf, August 2010
Using ketchup to dip or slather french fries is a long-established American tradition. The pairing has not only provided consumers with a distinct flavor, but it has given diners the ability to choose how much of the condiment to use, based on their own tastes.
Mass customization allows customers to be involved in making decisions regarding the design of an end product, often by using technology or flexible manufacturing processes.
One early example was Burger King, whose “Have It Your Way” campaign was used to differentiate itself from McDonald’s, the biggest mass burger operator at the time.
In the late 1970s, McDonald’s was looking for ways to provide consumers with wider choices as a change of pace. He came up with the idea of fried chicken nuggets with dipping sauce. Mickey D tried more than 100 sauce ideas until barbecue, sweet and sour, and hot mustard sauces were selected. The product, Chicken McNuggets, and its dips in prepackaged cups, went into tests in 1979 and were added to the national menu in 1983.
Sauces have played a valuable role in cuisine for centuries.
In the classical brigade-style kitchen, modernized by noted French chef Auguste Escoffier, the saucier is third in rank behind only the chef de cuisine and sous chef.
Modern sauces have their roots in the classics, Even mayonnaise, which we call a dressing, is classically considered a sauce. Mustard goes back to Roman times, and American ketchup was once dubbed a “table sauce.”
The growing interest in international and ethnic cuisine—thanks to media, immigration, and the ease of international travel—combined with bold, ethnic cooking by creative chefs bring many more sauces and dips to the attention of consumers.
Edit by AMW
* * * * *
Full Article:
http://www.qsrmagazine.com/articles/features/144/sauce-4.phtml
* * * * *
The Homa Files 
Leave a comment