The Year of the Rabbit has come round, Chinese New Year has been and gone — so is it time to start planning the business for the year ahead? Let us be the helper your food and drink business needs. Qashier presents 5 food and beverage trends for this year that will help your business succeed. Let's see what they are.
5 food and beverage trends
Demand for convenient food packaging keeps rising
From an interview with Foodnavigator, Tyson Foods expects consumers to look for products in convenient packaging. Through the COVID-19 pandemic a great many people had to carry the housework alongside their job, which is what drove the popularity of ready-to-cook (RTC) food. Even with COVID-19 measures eased and outlets trading normally again, the appetite for part-prepared food is here to stay.
If your restaurant or coffee shop has a signature dish, perhaps it is time to think about making the packaging more appealing. ToastBox, for instance, came up with packaging for a chicken curry base that customers can take home and finish cooking themselves. Good packaging is also a way of solving a problem: through the COVID-19 pandemic, when restaurants could not seat customers indoors, many had to fall back on single-use plastic packaging for hygiene. To keep things convenient for customers, food and drink businesses should look at designing packaging that is both appropriate and long-lasting. The Les Amis group in Singapore, for example, has moved to biodegradable plastic and compartmented food boxes to cut down on single-use plastic.
Food and beverage trends – technology in the kitchen
The Peak reported that through 2023 most restaurants invested in modernising their kitchens with technology, alongside making them more efficient and more sustainable, cutting the heat used in the kitchen and paying closer attention to food waste.
Even in 2024, food waste remains one of the problems that comes with running a restaurant. Countries in Asia account for 53% of the world's food waste, with more than 25% of that coming from South East Asia. This year, food and beverage brands are looking for ways to tackle food waste with technology. One approach is to trim the menu across the various platforms they run on; another is to use a restaurant POS system — Qashier's POS, for instance — which tracks and updates stock and ingredients automatically, so the outlet can order just enough and never far more than it needs. The system that sends orders through to the kitchen helps too, because the kitchen cooks exactly what was ordered and far less food is wasted.
Spicy food is popular again
From an interview with a leader in the spice market, the McCormick brand says spicy food is enjoying a considerable revival. Most Asians love hot, spicy food, and many are now looking for heat that goes further and tastes stranger than what they are used to — snacks and sandwiches with chilli, pepper, paprika and ginger are very much in fashion. In Thailand in particular it is well known that people like strongly flavoured food, so it is all the better that more visitors from abroad want to try bold Thai flavours.
Countries outside Asia have taken to spicy food too, probably because national tastes are converging. A report from Global Food Forums says spice blends such as mala, and other spices, will be extremely popular. Travel is back to normal now, so it is hardly surprising to see so many people wanting to try new flavours. If your food and drink business has not yet brought its menu up to date with the trend, we think it is time to experiment with adding something hot and spicy.
The trend towards new dining experiences
The restaurant review app Yelp and ADM, a company working across many national cuisines, both stress that the appetite for new dining experiences has been a strong trend recently. With restaurants able to seat customers again, many people are keen to try something new. Yelp reports that most customers expect a good experience when they eat in, and ADM reports that more than 74% of consumers want to try food from other countries.
What customers want is an experience beyond the same old queue, order, eat. If a food and drink business wants to offer something different, it can use technology such as ordering and paying by QR code, which gives the staff more time to focus on looking after the customers in front of them.
You can probably picture your dream restaurant by now.
The trend towards collecting your own order
Content from Forbes – 4 major food business trends in 2023 says that a great many people have switched to collecting their food themselves rather than using a delivery service, because they would rather not pay the delivery fee. Some of that is inflation, and some is simply that people find ordering ahead through an app and collecting it themselves rather convenient. Even so, food delivery is still forecast to grow in 2023 and take as much as 0.91 trillion US dollars, so it matters that food and drink businesses widen the ways a customer can get their order.
So as well as offering delivery, a food and drink business should add a collection option to help customers save time and money. You can see plenty of outlets adding it, and even the delivery apps — FoodPanda and Grab among them — now offer self-collection as a choice for customers watching what they spend.
With the shop management system from Qashier, an outlet can connect and manage the delivery accounts it has signed up to, and handle its menus through our system in one place. Order tracking, online or in the outlet, saves a good deal of time because orders can be sent to the kitchen with a single tap, which gives staff more time to handle customer collections — and gives the owner more time to develop the outlet to keep up with food and beverage trends, which never stop changing.
A short-lived trend, but a change for the long term
If the goal is to grow sales this year, a business should start looking for new ways to get there. Trends rarely last long, but using technology to run a food and drink business will keep yours going sustainably over the long term.
Qashier has plenty of ways to help an outlet do more: QR code ordering, table management, staff management, building good relationships with customers through loyalty programmes, stock management, data analysis and cashless payment. Every one of those features runs on a single device.
An outlet can also set the system and the hardware up in as little as 10 minutes, with no technical knowledge needed at all — anyone can do it. And if an outlet needs help, we have a support team on hand 7 working days a week.
Qashier, your business partner
Qashier’s restaurant POS system comes with online shop management suited to running restaurants, drinks outlets, cafés or a small food kiosk. It is easy and convenient, because it is a tool with a wide range of functions that make the work simpler, and once it is installed you can be up and running in minutes. It is a thoroughly modern restaurant management system that helps you run the outlet efficiently. If you like the sound of it and want to push your business forward, ask us for more details on Line Official: @qashier.th or call 02-544-0267