Dan Berthiaume

Fair Food Choices Take in Ethnic Variations

September 2, 2010

FROM RETAILWIRE:
Brad Wolverton of The Washington Post describes the summer fair as "an annual eating extravaganza that seems to guarantee every American the freedom to leave their diet at the door for at least one day." Is there a significant opportunity to broaden the range of ethnic foods found at fairs to retail food stores?      [more...]

I don't know if fried meat on a stick is an item people are likely to eat at home, but there is definitely room for greater ethnic variety in retailers' food assortments. A better example than county/state fairs might be casual dining restaurants such as The Cheesecake Factory, which routinely generate two-plus-hour wait times by serving a wide variety of ethnic foods in huge quantities. Mix-n-match dishes combining multiple ethnic traditions, while probably horrifying to purists, are also a big draw at many restaurants. Deep fried Snickers bars might be better left for eating on the food pavilion next to the bumper cars while a live performance by a one-hit wonder from 1974 wafts in the background.