The Caterer Blog

Had a spit my coffee out moment - Nescafe? - earlier editing a news story for the web.

Nestlé chief executive and chairman, Peter Brabeck, has argued a ban on advertising confection to kids is unjust, as is his right.

Ofcom however feels what it is doing may help counter the nations' problem with obesity, especially amongst kids, but singling out confection as a main culprit is controversial, there's no doubt.

Still, where I take umbrage with Mr Braebeck - and this is a personal view - is the rather desparate swipe he has made to deflect attention from this central arguement by, bizarrely, attacking computer games as a legal entertainment that, quote, "lead to violence".

The excellent hotel-focussed blog site Hotelchatter has posted an interesting posting about how the Arizona Biltmore Resort has launched a series of podcasts to advertise its restaurant, spa and other amenities. This sounds like a good idea to me: if you could capture your chef on camera waxing lyrical about the new menu he has compiled, wouldn't that be a great message to send out to your customer database?

Independent Internet reviews are on course to make hotel and restaurant star ratings obsolete, according to new research among 5000 travellers by architects Woods Bagot.

Almost 58% of their respondents said they now resort to consumer reviews when looking for a steer on where to stay.

The research challenges the assumption that only web-savvy youngsters head online for hotel feedback. Over two-thirds of people aged between 35 and 54 reported being more inclined to check peer comments about accommodation on tripadvisor.co.uk and other sites.

Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that, the more you travel around the world, the more you appreciate the inconsistencies in regional ratings systems.

Of course, user-generated reviews bring problems of their own, with an emerging trend towards operators planting fake reviews for their own properties.

Talk’s cheap. Really dirt cheap sometimes.

Take Sainsburys for example. At present it’s championing itself as a supporter of local farmers, running adverts of impossibly content tomato-growers living on the kind of farms that Windy Miller might find saccharine-sweet.

Then, at the same time, it’s employed Jamie Oliver to wax lyrical about its New Zealand lamb, apparently oblivious to the fact that supermarkets’ predilection for shipping the meat 11,000 miles rather than buying it in their own back yard has meant local farmers are getting around £10 less per lamb compared to this time last year. With each ewe producing 2 calves, you can work out what that might do to the economics of a farm with 500 sheep.

I ranted a few days ago about company branding overusing the term local to the extent where it now has less credibility than spandex. But I’ve found a buzzword that I think irks me even more: fresh.

Some food companies have cleverly rewritten the dictionary for the term, making it out to no longer mean ‘recently caught or picked’, as you might assume, but instead to mean ‘not frozen’.

Pizza toppings are now ‘fresh’, boxed sandwich fillings are now ‘fresh’.

Brilliant. On those lines of understanding you could go on to classify all the following as fresh: week-old underpants, roadkill, foodborne botulism, Red Rum.

Last night saw the return of trashy BBC1 drama Hotel Babylon to our TV screens, with its usual mix of hokum storylines, hammy acting and "celebrity" appearances.

But, showing a commendable knowledge of the hotel sector, the writers got in a mention of your favourite industry bible, Caterer and Hotelkeeper, with a character pretending to be a reporter writing a feature on the hotel.

Perhaps it's not so bad after all...