Every restaurant has its own taste. They have their own secret recipe that makes that different from other restaurants. Since the taste factor could prove as a beneficial competitive advantage to restaurants, they take too much efforts to hold on and to standardize their taste.
One important step for any hotel business is to ponder on how to occupy space inside a consumer’s mind, which is called ‘Positioning’. It can also be termed as a consumer’s perception of a hotel and its taste of food with respect to competing restaurants. That is why every time you try the same dish at one hotel, you will notice that the food taste would remain the same.
Since different dishes have different tastes based on the ingredients used, the cuisine category it falls on and the location of the hotel, restaurants thrive hard to retain its taste secrets within its boundaries.
Restaurant owners have believed for ages that Consistency in all aspects of the business – especially in taste and in quality–
leads to success of the restaurant. They believe that standardisation of taste becomes even more critical when the restaurant has many branches spread across cities or countries. If not for standardization, the ‘goodwill’ or ‘brand equity’ earned at one branch can be easily lost at another.
The main benefits that restaurants reap by taking efforts on standardisation of taste are:
Brand image – It takes years to build a good brand image, which can be destroyed in a matter of minutes. A good brand image requires consistent quality output. This can only be achieved through a tried and tested standard procedure and standard tastes.
Consistency of product –This is the backbone of ‘brand image’ and includes all aspects of the restaurant business – taste, quality, presentation, ambiance, and service.
Cost effectiveness – Standardization helps pre-plan and forecast requirements. When we know beforehand what we will require and its quantity, we can benefit from economies of scale, esp. for non-perishables.
Saves time – A standard process helps complete regular tasks with ease, leaving no room for ambiguity and errors.
Though the food industry has a very creative nature, standardization at an industry level for certain things may be difficult to achieve, as- recipe, cooking styles, serving practices, etc. Irrespective of the difficulties, restaurants choose to follow up standardisation of taste as it proves to weigh the benefits more than its cons.
This technique of standardising taste was successful but now considering the change in taste preferences among the public, people prefer to eat at their homes and not at restaurants. They no longer prefer the aesthetic ambience at restaurants rather they wish to try out different food options with different tastes. Since restaurants follow their standardisation of food policy, People have now slowly shifted towards Home-cooked meals where every day the meal enlightens them up with new flavours and new tastes. People now prefer healthy, nutritious, immunity boosting food everyday rather than the same old food taste from restaurants, and this has given space for home chefs to grow and explore by selling home-made meals to the public.
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