EVENT PREVIEW: The Caterer Middle East Conference

The advisory panel for Caterer's Food & Business Conference. [L-R] Markus Thesleff, Cyrille Troesch, Duncan Fraser-Smith, Russell Impiazzi, and Naim Maadad.

Supplier Issues
To no one’s surprise, the relationship between restaurants and suppliers came up. Fraser-Smith dangled the possibility of direct sourcing to get his colleagues’ input. Was the idea of such a practice worth it?

“For me direct sourcing does one of two things. One, it gives you access to better quality product, and two, it keeps the local imports and suppliers competitive in their rates,” said Fraser-Smith.

“We speak to a lot of new chefs coming to open restaurants here and the first thing they say is, ‘we are going to get all our produce from France’ and we have a little chuckle because we know they are going to have a very hard time making that happen.”

Story continues below

But is it possible to do so? One of the challenges is that you need to have a certain volume in order to make it worth it and you have to have HACCP permissions to store the product.

“If you want foie gras, for example, you speak to a supplier in France and say, ‘I want 10kg a week’, then he is just going to laugh at you,” said Troesch. Fraser-Smith jumped in at this point and put forward the idea of hotels and restaurants forming ‘co-operatives’.

“Okay, if we all order foie gras let’s build a cooperative around the ability to direct source whether foie gras or truffles. We order 100 kilos a week and distribute it out,” he suggested.

Maadad disagreed and said the industry is not strong enough to do so. “We’re not that keen yet, and I think operators want to compete rather than co-operate.”

They all also said that receiving product from suppliers is a challenge as sometimes the receiving clerk, mainly at hotels, is not properly trained on what to accept and what to send back — which is another nod to the lack of standards and training in the industry.

Thesleff said some sous chefs will even accept low quality product, because they are scared of telling their head chef or GM and think they’re letting the team down.

Impiazzi however, said his chefs send product back because they have been trained to judge what is good quality, and encouraged to take decisions. He said: “We need to define the line between cost, quality and operational issues.”

However, Impiazzi said the relationship with suppliers is a two-way street. “You have to be transparent with them as well.”

Article continues on next page ...