A Week in Chef's Whites:
What the Kitchen Can Teach
About Innovation.
By Gretchen Griffith

“Don’t play with your food.” It’s one of the countless corrections heard from many parents while their children sit through an agonizing meal of foods that were seemingly better suited for creating art than for consumption.

		While I’m fortunate enough to recall few childhood instances in which this was the case for me, I still saw the irony in finding myself, many years later, struggling alongside my Mom to determine the most artistic plate presentation for a maple glazed filet of salmon, steamed forbidden black rice with glazed sweet potatoes, and braised baby bok choy. We were inductees at the Culinary Institute of America’s (CIA) Basic Training Boot Camp, a weeklong food enthusiast program challenging us to become well versed in the fundamentals of cooking.
In the kitchen with my Mom.

It was a dream for both of us, being avid cooks for as long as we could remember. Just as my Grandmother fostered a love of cooking in her children, my Mom, in turn, ignited my passion for cooking at an early age. Recognizing this passion, my family enabled my Mom and me to travel to the CIA’s campus in Hyde Park, New York, this winter and join other enthusiasts for an exhilarating, exhausting, and inspiring week at “the world’s premier culinary college.”

I took so many things, large and small, away from my incredible week at the CIA. While many of my learnings can be best applied in the kitchen, several aggregate themes surfaced, many of which have applications to business and new product development.

Constraint Breeds Creativity

Prior to my trip, I considered myself fairly resourceful in the kitchen. I create weekly meal plans to maximize ingredient usage and minimize weeknight “what’s for dinner” stress. Most days I eat leftovers for lunch. I make bread when my bananas get just a little too brown. All said, I now realize that my efforts pale in comparison to those of professional chefs—they take resourcefulness to another level making use of everything.
		Chef Crispo critiquing a team’s plate.

Leftover vegetable scraps or meat and seafood bones/shells? Keep them on hand for stocks. Those drippings left in the bottom of the pan after searing? It’s called fond, and serves as a flavor-packed base for a wide variety of complementary sauces. There seems to be a use or application for everything, a mindset traceable back to the early hominids, the first masters of food preparation.

Though yield and food cost are key drivers of this resourceful behavior, there’s an element of ingenuity at work here, too. As is the case in so many business applications, constraint breeds creativity. Yet it’s interesting to note that, while many companies struggle to innovate after only a few years in a given market, chefs have been innovating with many of the same basic ingredients for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Find Organization Amidst Chaos

		Thanks to reality TV or perhaps personal experience, we’ve seen restaurant kitchens that are seemingly chaotic. Upon closer examination, however, there’s often harmony in this apparent chaos.
Our class toques.

A pioneering French chef (and founding restaurateur of what’s now the Ritz-Carlton) named Auguste Escoffier brought organization, simplicity, and efficiency to the professional kitchen during the 19th century. He devised the kitchen brigade system, featuring function-specific stations and clear-cut responsibilities for kitchen workers to ensure that efforts aren’t duplicated.

Though our Boot Camp group didn’t formally use this system during our week together, we were taught a concept that likely evolved concurrently to Escoffier’s contributions: mise en place. Translating to “everything in place,” it refers to having all the ingredients and tools necessary for a dish prepared and ready to use. Sounds simple enough, right?

In the midst of preparing several dishes each day in the company of 14 other enthusiasts, two CIA student assistants, and our Chef Instructor, there were several occasions where I found myself ill-prepared for the immediate task ahead. Our Chef Instructor was kind to advise and help in these times of “crisis,” but it became vividly clear just how vital organization, and efficiency are to the success of any restaurant operation.

On a similar level, how many times have we heard about companies that have stumbled through the innovation process without foresight or adequate preparation, only to end up with poor results? Successful product introductions don’t happen by chance, but rather through diligent preparation and an organized, efficient process… even when there’s chaos.

Due Diligence Has its Rewards
The major assignment in our course was to develop and prepare a menu featuring an appetizer and entrée, including two vegetables and one starch, all of which should encompass and demonstrate what we’d learned. What could we possibly prepare that would impress a professional chef?

It’s so easy to overlook the considerable efforts taken by chefs to conceptualize a menu, appropriately and innovatively marrying flavors, textures, colors, and cooking techniques, all the while considering their customer base. After much deliberation, consultation with our Chef Instructor, and time spent researching various recipes and books, we settled upon an Asian theme. We assembled a food order of needed ingredients and roughed out a production schedule to which we’d attempt to adhere. All that was left to do was prepare our meal!
		Our Boot Camp’s final day buffet.

It’s equally important to make sure that a quality new product idea is “fully cooked,” and not merely pushed through impulsively. Due diligence has its rewards, as we fortunately discovered at the end of our week.

Presentation is Everything
We can all likely remember an occasion where a meal unfortunately was served on a dirty plate. Hopefully we also can recall a food experience bordering on the transcendental. While extreme, both examples underscore the importance of presentation and art of menu and plate composition.

		Several pages of my Boot Camp materials binder were empty plate templates provided for us to sketch out plating ideas for our menu development project. Each day we received critiques not only on the taste of the food we prepared, but also on the visual appeal of our “plating.” Hence my shared agony on our final day in the kitchen over how to achieve height with a salmon filet, showcase perfectly sautéed halves of baby bok choy, and mold rice into a portion-size form that could hold its shape.
The infamous salmon, bok choy, forbidden rice, and sweet potatoes.

Consumers turn their noses up at meals that aren't presented well—they’ll never know that a meal tastes great if it's not presented in an appealing way. The same theory applies for a consumer’s relationship with products. A great product won’t resonate with consumers without proper positioning, branding, shelf placement and compelling packaging. Just as hours of preparing a great meal can be wasted if the final dish isn't presented well, years of product development can be wasted if the idea isn't properly marketed.

With a great sense of relief and satisfaction, I can say that our resourcefulness, organization, diligence, and artistic eye paid off at the end of the week. Not only did our conceived appetizer and entrée look and taste great, but we also received the utmost of compliments from our Chef Instructor. He said he’d order our meal at a restaurant and gladly pay top dollar.

What will it take to get consumers to react the same way to your ideas?

Gretchen Griffith is a Project Director at Seed Strategy. Contact her at ggriffith@seedstrategy.com.