5 Catering Trends 2023

We’re already a month into 2023, but it’s never too late to plan for the year ahead. Which is why this month, AC Services is looking at five emerging trends in UK catering businesses.

Menu Size Reduction

With the cost-of-living crisis, the message seems to be getting through that less is more when it comes to items on the menu. One of the consistent messages from Gordon Ramsey’s restaurant rescue programmes has always been reducing the size of the menu. Why, because a shorter menu is far easier for the kitchen to cope with. The consumer can have too much choice!

Shorter menus have significant benefits. They reduce waste as a smaller range of items need to be purchased. This also enables an increased focus on the freshness and availability of ingredients. In turn this allows better control of costs.

A 2023 trend is the 9 course a la carte menu, with only 3 choices each of starter, main and dessert.

Premium Side Dishes

Here the aim is to keep the mains to as low a cost as possible. Why, because consumers will calculate value based upon the advertised price of the main course. They then feel they are in control of deciding whether they want a side dish.

The side dish could be justified as a treat, sounds attractive or because they have decided it’s a necessary part of their meal. The last one is key. What is not happening here is cutting back the mains to say just the protein and charging extra for everything else.

This trend allows chefs to keep costs down for the core menu, but also show their creativity in this week’s side dishes with greater margins.

Flatbread Sharing

This trend is not for everyone perhaps, but flatbreads are increasingly appearing on menus usually as starters. They are a low cost option which are easy to make to order for most kitchens. With a range of toppings, dips and sauces they become an easy sharing course for groups or couples, who perhaps didn’t intend to have a starter.

It’s the warm flatbread, which is the trend. It harks back to the old tradition of offering a bread basket before a meal so the guest finishes the meal happily full!

2 Specialised Catering Trends for 2023 and 1 Certainty

An interesting trend to watch in 2023 is going to be the apparent upsurge in roadside dining. This had seemed to have died with the end of Little Chefs and Happy Eaters. The space in the market seems to be consistent menus with easily accessible dining rooms that aren’t fast food. The wider economic situation is of course similar to what fuelled the original trend in the 80’s.

A more localised trend is catering businesses asking their clients to help fund their development through crowd-funding. This comes in part from the various campaigns to save the local pub, which often use crowd-funding to raise necessary capital. The big plus of course is that it also builds the community clientele for longer term survival. And it taps into the support of those who dine infrequently, but want to do it locally.

Whatever the trends for 2023, the certainty you can rely on is that AC Services will be here to assist catering businesses in South West England and South Wales with servicing their Rational ovens.

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