2022NRA: Insight into the trend of the restaurant industry

The National Restaurant Association Show 2022 (NRA 2022), held at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago on May 24, wrapped up perfectly.

The main focus of the event was the return of food vendors, with many technology brands and kitchen equipment suppliers making an appearance at the show to provide additional attractions.

Easy Hundred Inc., an emerging startup exhibiting at booth #654, showed the results and potential to restaurant operators and restaurant entrepreneurs from all over the world, and during the exchange, we summarized and concluded several major trends in the future of the restaurant industry.

Trend 1: On-line food service supply

Restaurant O2O change is an industry trend. The North American restaurant supply chain is constantly experiencing integration and restructuring, and extending from offline to online. The Internet pattern of the industry has become the widely-accepted acknowledgement of contemporary restaurant people.

Easy Hundred Inc. has been established since 2019, focusing on the online North American restaurant supply chain, aiming to make dining easier with technology. As the first product of the company, www.ez100.com has accumulated 6,000 restaurant users in North America and expanded its business to all 48 states.

This year, ez100 has followed the development trend of North American food containers and added many new elements to the existing services and products. In February, ez100 launched its customization service, which can provide restaurants, dessert stores and tea and beverage stores with exclusive customized products and logo design and printing. EZ100's personalized restaurant products not only highlight the brand value, but also attract customers' attention more easily, turning the product packaging into a "walking billboard" of the restaurant and increasing promotion.

In addition, ez100 also has a series of new products on the shelves, such as sugar cane pulp bowls and kraft paper bowls, that focus on environmental protection. The demand for eco-friendly food containers is growing in the U.S. market, and we have also explained in detail why more and more restaurants are willing to use eco-friendly food containers in our previous article (related reading), so it is foreseeable that more restaurants will be willing to use beautiful and eco-friendly food and beverage consumables in the future.

Besides ez100, which is gradually maturing, Easy Hundred also showcased a new product that is currently in its budding stage - 2Supply, a B2B trading platform for the North American restaurant supply chain, which also received widespread attention from exhibiting suppliers, restaurants and other restaurant operators. The product also received widespread attention from exhibiting suppliers, restaurants and other restaurant operators.

Trend 2: Meatless (Plant Protein)

The technology of plant protein is constantly innovating, and, as we saw from the product demonstrations at the exhibition, both the technology and the products are getting better and better.

The technology of plant protein has started to optimize cooking, taste and flavor, which is the inevitable trend of plant protein in the future.

The Israeli food company Yo Foods Ltd. has launched "Yo!", a brand based on the concept of plant-based eggs, which consist of two parts: egg whites and egg yolks, and can be made into one-sided omelettes and poached eggs. The egg whites are made from peas and the yolks are chickpea-based and colored with carrot powder.

Next Gen Foods features a plant-based chicken for chefs, called "Tindle," a versatile raw food that can be processed by chefs into a variety of things, meatloaf, meatballs or shredded meat, which gets its flavor from a mixture called "lipi", a mixture of sunflower oil and natural flavors to simulate the taste of chicken fat.

Trend 3: A more important customer experience 

The post-pandemic dining experience has changed dramatically, and restaurants are faced with the challenge of optimizing the restaurant-diner "relationship".

On the one hand, customers are demanding more new flavors and new menus.

Minnesota's MegaMex Foods has introduced "Tres Cocinas", a chili sauce that helps chefs add authentic flavors to Mexican cuisine, with three different chili sauces offering different textures while helping restaurants save money and streamline their offerings.

On the other hand, how to improve customer loyalty and stickiness, especially for fast food brands, is also an important topic.

PAR Technology, for example, offers solutions for enterprise restaurant brands that enable back to front integration, creating a more seamless functional integration link in the restaurant infrastructure, providing loyalty and stickiness solutions, and giving diners a more full channeled experience.

Trend 4: Automated back-of-house kitchens free up labor

In addition to the usual delivery robots, a new generation of automation solutions for restaurants can already help liberate some restaurant brands from labor shortages, including cooking robots, kitchen appliances with wireless connectivity, enterprise-level cooking management that automates temperature and time, and solutions that help mediate BOH staffing issues.

Examples include advanced mixers for adult cocktails and the growing number of non-alcoholic cocktail mixers. Robots that make mixed alcoholic beverages have become increasingly sophisticated, with New Jersey-based J & J Snack Foods Corp. launching a line of spirits and fruity base drinks based on its Icee and Slush Puppy machines.

Since 2020, the pandemic has accelerated the change of direction and process of the food service industry, and the change of the general external environment has made many restaurants face a lot of difficulties. However, it is gratifying to see that many companies and restaurant-related practitioners in this exhibition are using technology to gradually rejuvenate the originally traditional restaurant industry. We will continue to work hard to change the restaurant industry with technology.