3 Ways the Foodservice Industry Will Change
Tags: Food, Cooking, Health Foods, Chefs, Future Of Food

This way.

The food industry has been “innovated” upon over and over again in the same direction. Delivery companies are innumerable at this point and all they’re trying to do is bring you more of the restaurants that don’t deliver. These are all great efforts, but besides that, how do they benefit our future? I’m stumped on finding that answer. At Yuma, we believe in something different. Something totally different.

Scrap the whole industry and start from scratch.

The industry, as we know it, is not working. It’s saturated with fast food that’s detrimental to our health and all they’re doing is making it more accessible to us. They’re basically saying: be lazy, eat crap, give us your money. Our idea is to scrap the whole industry and start from scratch. Get on that drawing board and find another direction. So we did.

Open Market

There’s no need for another pizza joint or burger parlor. We’re opening the market wide open. 60% of the fast food market is dominated by pizza. There’s absolutely no variety out there. And we’re suckers for it.

The fastness of the fast food market induces this staleness in variety. To serve quickly means to limit the options that you can serve. Good food takes time to prepare and we need to remember that. If you’re always on fast gear, you don’t have time to slow down and look at what’s around you. It’s a galloping blind horse. It’s a bottleneck.

With Yuma, we hope to open new opportunities to culinary enthusiasts. A platform that allows them to bootstrap a food business in minutes. They can publish their menus and make it accessible for everyone to preorder delicious dishes. We started recently in Montréal, Canada with ~13 menus and we already have food that you can’t find anywhere else. It’s home-style food from the best local chefs that come from all over the world. Their creations extend from their own minds and experiences, jamming together to give rise to endless variety and diversity. You can also find genres of food that are presently hard to locate, such as vegan and vegetarian options. Gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free options also. With an open market, everyone’s needs will be met by a chef’s specific skills.

Increase Time Efficiency

We currently think that the fast food market is fast. I hate to break it to you, it’s not. We’ve seen the food courts at lunch and people are always piling on top of each other while they wait. The time it takes to get to the place, then wait to place an order, sit down to eat or take it to-go is all in all a 1–2 hour endeavour. Easily.

You come back home from school or work and you take a peek into your fridge. Your stomach growls in anger. Now you have 3 options:

Cook whatever you find in your kitchen. Order fast food online or by phone. Put your shoes back on and go on a fast food hunt.

You could be doing more with your time. With Yuma, we’re instilling the concept of preordering. Planning your meals ahead will save you so much time. Having several meals in store — you can take some to work, school or eat when you’re back home. Just pop it into the microwave and it’s done in 3 minutes. You’ll be done eating in, say, 10 minutes. That’s 13 minutes dedicated to food. Now, you can relax or focus on what’s important in your day.

Preordering Lowers Food Waste

We’ve been seeing a lot of initiatives towards lowering food waste around the world. Still, it’s not solving the issue completely. We’ve found a better solution. If we preorder our food, not only do we save our time, but we also contribute to lowering food waste. There’s a deadline to place an order when preordering. Therefore, the chef knows exactly how much has to be cooked for that day. Having knowledge of their sales on a future day is magic. It helps the chefs prepare the best food in the most economical fashion.

The only challenge is that preordering is not a familiar concept to people. Most people think of their food as “I want it here and I want it now!” We’ve all been victims of this privileged mentality, but we need to be patient with our food in order to get the best results.