Next to actually offering plant-based food to your guests, educating your staff, is the most important thing to ensure satisfied customers and increase revenue with the vegan food options. Whilst it is of course important that everyone around your business is well-informed about vegan food, your options and what changes that brings to the operations, we want to focus our attention in this article on the two most important types of staff: the ones preparing the food and the ones being in direct contact with the guests. Keep in mind that in some cases these are the same people.
Chefs / Cooks / Kitchen Staff
Just to state the obvious upfront: ensure that everyone in the kitchen knows how to prepare the vegan dishes according to their responsibilities. But besides that, there are more reasons why kitchen staff and especially chefs should be knowledgeable about the vegan diet.
Just imagine a certain ingredient of a dish has to be replaced either because it’s not available or because the guest has an allergy to it. There are just too many ingredients that are not fully vegan even though one expects them to be. Two very controversial ones are honey and white sugar for example. Now imagine your chef runs out of sweetener and substitutes it with honey. If the vegan guest finds out, trust us, they won’t be delighted.
Another thing that some vegans are especially picky about is being ensured that during the cooking process there was no chance for cross contamination. This applies for the usage of knives, cutting boards but also includes avoiding frying in the same deep fryer as meat or fish.
Lastly, cooks need to be knowledgeable to be able to answer the amount of questions about the dishes: ‘where does it come from? what’s inside? how is it made?’ are just some examples of common questions from guests.
Waiters / Baristas / Servers
Anyone, who is communicating and directly serving your guests should know about the vegan options you have, their ingredients and how they taste. Making sure employees try the dishes themself is important to guarantee that they are also positive about the plant-based options and recommend them to your guests.
As the ‘face’ of your business, waiters should understand the vegan lifestyle and the differences between plant-based / vegan / raw vegan / vegetarian and which food groups are avoided within these different eating styles. This helps your staff to be able to answer questions about the dishes, and to quickly accommodate special requests.
Additionally, servers should be trained on their ‘soft skills’ in regards to handling plant-based diners. No one wants to eat in a restaurant where you are not taken serious because of your dietary preferences. One should also avoid any discussions about the reasons for the dietary choice with guests. This is easiest when staff is able to fully ‘understand’ the plant-based eater profile: their reasons for their eating behavior are either based on the fact that they want to avoid animal suffering, boost their health, protect the environment or ensure world-wide food security – or several of the reasons. Because of this, avoiding things like plastic straws or stuffed animals as decoration are definitely going to contribute to a positive dining experience for a vegan.
Lastly, staff training needs to warrant proper communication skills by waiters and servers. No matter how hard we try, things go wrong. Sometimes more often than other times. That’s okay. However accidentally having diary milk or pieces of meat in a ‘vegan’ dish is fatal for a vegan and therefore it is important that mistakes like these are being taken seriously, apologized for and made up for. Only someone who can actually empathize with a guest will be able to handle these kind of situations well and ensure that the guests will be returning and in the best case – leaving a positive review, recommending your business in their networks and giving a tip!
So what’s the best way to educate your staff accordingly? Communicate! Speak with them, inform them, ask them questions and give them feedback. If you wish to we offer more formal approaches or can help you becoming a better ‘teacher’ with a few simple guidelines and information.
Like it? Share the article here!
Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on whatsapp