Chef cooks up assistance on-line – The New Zealand Herald

These days Gavin Lovett is more used to dissecting
recipes on screen than in the kitchen. The chef-turned-businessman
has developed a tool to help restaurants cost their menus and
discover the nutritional content of their recipes with the click
of a button.

Inputting ingredients into Lovett’s My Recipes website allows
chefs to cost an entire menu within hours, as opposed to old
pen-and-paper methods which could tie them up for days. It also
breaks the recipe down into its nutritional components, comparing
each against their recommended daily intake amounts. After 10
years cheffing here and in Europe, Lovett decided he had hit
on an area where the industry needed assistance.

He estimates 90 per cent of restaurants do not cost their menus
properly, despite the vital connection this has to running a
profitable business.

Although menu-costing software isn’t new, My Recipes provides
ingredient costing and availability specific for New Zealand
at market prices which are updated from suppliers daily.

It is also thought to be the first to incorporate nutritional
analysis, and Lovett believes food outlets will be required
to provide this information more and more as consumers become
more health-conscious.

The website can also help 10,000 food outlets track down their
closest supplier for specific ingredients.

Lovett is targeting the service at la carte restaurants, cafes,
caterers, school lunch rooms, hospitals, rest homes and holiday
camps.

He came up with the idea while working as a head chef at a cafe
in Holland. In a bid to reverse the fortunes of the struggling
cafe, he set about costing a new menu from scratch. The process
took one month, and saw turnover doubled as a result.

Returning to New Zealand three years ago, he thought this sort
of exercise could help improve on the average 20-month lifespan
of Kiwi restaurants, and explored the concept of an online costing
tool with Dunedin-based dietitian Amber Strong.

Meanwhile, under the company name Menu Du Jour, Lovett got the
ball rolling creating menu covers and layouts, designed to detract
attention from the price and promote the most profitable meals.

He also started importing dissolvable food labels from the US
for chefs to label containers.

Up until a year ago, this was all done after hours while working
as a fulltime chef at the InterContinental Hotel in Wellington.
Now he works alongside five other fulltime staff at the company’s
Albany office, and has a network of consultant chefs around
the country who can develop recipes for clients – a service
well used at a time when head chefs are in short supply.

My Recipes was launched last month and has 120 members so far,
who pay 0 for a one-year membership.

The Auckland University of Technology has expressed interest
in incorporating My Recipes into the curriculum for its hospitality
management and culinary courses, as has the Manukau Institute
of Technology.

Future plans include adapting the service for overseas customers,
while expanding the site for household use could be just months
away.

by Georgina Bond