As Tater Tots® hit the Big 60, the Idaho Potato Commission celebrates six decades of tot-inspired menu creativity.

When Tater Tots® began arriving in grocery stores in 1954, they quickly caught on as a snack food, a side dish and the foundation for casseroles at dinner tables across America. (Tater Tots are a registered trademark of Ore-Ida, a division of the H.J. Heinz Company).

Across the next 60 years, foodservice operators capitalized on tot popularity, enthusiastically integrating them into menus ranging from quick service to white tablecloth. As these bite-sized potato croquettes officially move into middle age, the Idaho Potato Commission (IPC) salutes the tot as both an inspired potato product and a springboard for potato creativity.

A popular Louisiana-style restaurant goes from roadside stand to Cajun cuisine sensation.

True tastes of the bayou are surfacing throughout the South, and Cajun Steamer Bar & Grill is happy to take the blame.

For years, co-founder Jeff Thompson has been pouring his Cajun heart and soul into the growing chain of restaurants, but he admits that it all began from his own selfish interest.

When Thompson moved to Birmingham from Louisiana in the early 1990s, his first order of business was to assess the local dining scene. That’s when he discovered a glaring void that made it virtually impossible for him to call Alabama home.

“There was no Cajun food at all, and I just can’t live without my crawfish!” Thompson says, laughing through his thick Louisiana drawl. “It was either do something about it or go home. This was a deal-killer.”

Thompson took matters into his own hands, setting up a modest roadside stand and selling crawfish from the back of a trailer hooked up to his truck. It was anything but fancy, but his winning formula of fresh seafood sold at reasonable prices proved that the market was ready for authentic Cajun cuisine.

“It was pretty simple—just a couple of tables and some umbrellas—but you wouldn’t believe how excited people here got over it,” Thompson says. “It was as if I had introduced them to a whole new culture, like they’d never had crawfish before—not the fresh kind, anyway. That little stand still brings back fond memories for me; it still brings a smile to my face when I think about all the people I met. That’s when I could start calling Birmingham home.”

In this final of three installments focusing on employing an effective interaction strategy to increase loyalty and sales in your program’s student-run foodservice outlets, influencing four customer perceptions—“Fresh,” “Trust,” “Mystery” and “Ownership”—is key to success.

By Renee Zonka, RD, CEC, CHE, MBA

Last month, I wrote about how to teach the new “interaction economy” in the classroom and implement it in your program’s foodservice outlets while promoting the benefits of doing both. In this final segment of my three-part focus, I will touch on achieving desirable perceptions among foodservice customers—the successful eliciting of which can create value to the customer by enhancing his or her loyalty to your program’s operations and branding.

The concept of a new interaction economy replacing the “experience economy” was introduced in 2008 by InterAction Metrics, an Oregon-based company specializing in customer-experience optimization and customer-interaction management. Some of the following insights and advice come from the white paper published by that company, while most is the result of our experience in teaching the main tenets of the interaction economy in the School of Culinary Arts at Kendall College. Our goal is to arm students with the training and know-how to deliver unparalleled customer service so that they may excel in their foodservice careers.

Says this educator, ratios trump recipes in helping students learn. The first of a two-part series on teaching culinary arts through ratios in practical culinary labs.

By John Reiss, CEC, CCE

Are we training students the right way or the wrong way? That’s a loaded question, and one that culinary educators can easily become quite defensive about. The knock in culinary education often comes from professional chefs who say we aren’t training students to be seasoned and productive when they graduate.

Having taught in the industry for more than 25 years, I have often pondered and debated with peers over best practices for preparing students to be job-ready when they finish their studies. I have come to the conclusion that maybe there is a better pedagogical approach, one that involves the use of culinary ratios.

We often teach students practical competencies through the aid of recipes. Why? It’s true that recipes are important to some extent in the kitchen, but most professional kitchen work relies on intuitive cooking, standardized techniques and procedures and proper mise en place, rather than recipes.

Foodservice educators across North America earn recognition for their creativity in the culinary classroom.

The Idaho Potato Commission (IPC) recognized three educators in the 2014 CAFÉ-Idaho Potato Commission Innovation Awards at the 10th-annual Leadership Conference of the Center for the Advancement of Foodservice Education (CAFÉ) in Salt Lake City this summer.

“Our involvement in encouraging innovation and creativity among culinary instructors and students is very rewarding to us as well as the recipients,” says Don Odiorne, IPC’s vice president of foodservice. “After all, one of the goals of our Idaho potato growers is to reach the next generation of farmers, too, and equip them with the skills to continue to learn, progress and succeed in a changing world.”