Welcome to "Chef's Corner," Daniel Asher's monthly blog, where he delves into the intricate world of food, restaurants, distributors, and all things Foodservice. Daniel is a chef and restaurant owner + the head of strategic relationships & hospitality at Cut+Dry.
Well apparently we are knock knock knockin’ on the New Years’ door and I am having a heck of a time processing the fact that 2025 is literally days away. The space-time continuum continues to elude me and every year seems to hit an acceleration that feels like the Matrix. It is fascinating and creepy, and when I asked my six year old daughter about how she was feeling about this she didn’t skip a beat and just said “Dad, when I’m older you’re gonna miss me being a little kid, so just enjoy it for right now.” How’s that for ruthless therapy? She summed up quite a bit there. I was just asking her if she thought the year went by super fast and she turned it into this nostalgic reflective journey of the fleeting nature of fatherhood. She then demanded we make deviled eggs and “don’t forget the pickle juice like last time” so that snapped me back to real time with an efficient “yes chef!” as I helped her tie her apron. That is when I started thinking about how to approach 2025.
I’m pretty meticulous with my to-do lists both professionally & personally; my need to check off those boxes every day actually made me late to meet my wife on our first date 16+ years ago. I take task completion pretty ferociously and am always looking for ways to boost efficiency, maximize time or create a 27 hour day. The longer day theory hasn’t panned out yet but I’m sure technology will take care of that at some point soon. In the mean-time (see what I did there?) I want to discuss some recent experiences that really got me thinking about how we do things in the Foodservice world.
There’s the concept of sustainability which has been one of my primary drivers in my restaurant sourcing ethos and how I approach the idea of impact. The goal is to make decisions that create a sustainable environment for plants, animals & people. I had an inspiring conversation with Andy Breiter, founding rancher of Grama Grass Livestock and he pointed out that the word sustainable, at its core, means “to be maintained at a certain rate” or “an avoidance of depletion”. Whereas the word regenerative means “the improvement of a place or a system”, “to restore or to heal”, which I think is a much more powerful way to look at our actions as Foodservice folks and as global citizens. I don’t just want to sustain things, I want to help make them better! I don’t just want to highlight ingredients to avoid depletion, I want to highlight ingredients that create a better environment locally and globally. The word regenerative is getting the royal marketing treatment and I see that; the same thing happened with ‘organic’ and then ‘pasture raised’ and then ‘plant based’. There is a lot of marketing spend focusing on regenerative but that’s ok. It is creating conversations that need to happen and shining a light on a trend towards nourishment and restoration, not just keeping things from getting worse. We should be regenerative with our health, with our families and with each other. I also think hospitality needs to be regenerative.
I had the honor of attending the IFPA Supply Chain Collabathon a few weeks ago. It brought together people from across the fresh produce supply chain, from grower to shipper, warehouse to logistics, distributor to restaurant and retail, technology and trucking. There were many activations to help forge ideas around the future of how fresh food moves around the country. I had an engaging conversation with Wiggs Civitillo who just founded Starfish, a traceability platform for digitized data sharing to ensure food safety, compliance and minimizing waste. The key ideas floating around the room had much to do with the upcoming FSMA 204 standards, efficiencies with tracking product, and food waste. I have been very engaged with food waste for years; finding ways to minimize waste in my kitchens, maximize ingredient utilization, and help educate people on how to be better consumers to avoid wasting beautiful fruits and vegetables. 40% of what we grow and produce in America ends up in landfill or compost. It is as much a cold chain & logistics problem as it is a planning and consumption problem. So many ways to be better and so many things to learn about what got us here. It was good to see the conversation centered on this as it not only undermines all the energy, time and money that goes into growing our food, it also speaks to solving hunger and how we can feed all our citizens with what we already have. This is a major theme going into 2025 across all of Foodservice and something I will be speaking to extensively as the months unfold. What does the future of food look like?
I had a great chat about how knowledge is passed along in a culinary environment with Jonathan Watsky. He relayed a story he heard about Chef Magnus Nilsson of Faviken fame in Sweden. When a new stage comes into a kitchen, many times this is an opportunity to train someone on the basics of that specific kitchen, and they are started off on peeling vegetables or processing ingredients for a particular appetizer. The complexity of what this person is exposed to is gradual, so they can learn and observe without being intimidated or their skillset immediately put on display until they have a grip on your kitchen and you have a grip on them. Kitchens are delicate spaces and you want to read personalities and talent before making big shifts in staffing structure. Instead of placing the stage with a pantry cook or having them in a corner cleaning asparagus, Chef Magnus would have them shadow him, so he could show them his particular vision and work with them to pass along knowledge and culture. They would work next to him on the line, plating final dishes that he would then send into the dining room.
Imagine this style applied to a corporate environment - the new trainee arrives and instead of them starting from the bottom, they spend their first week with the CEO, learning from the very top first. The impact this has on culture and buy-in is tremendous, and this cuts down on inaccurate portrayals of that company or incorrect training on how things are expected to get done. I found this played perfectly into the idea of a regenerative team culture, where there is a synergy between the newest hire and the president of the company, both minds & bodies connecting in the trenches before being set loose in other areas of the job. Staffing in our industry is always challenging, and when you find someone great it is worth taking the time and energy to cultivate within them a deep understanding of why you do what you do and how you’d like them to be a part of that story, not just assign them to the last new hire and hope for the best. Good things to ponder and to put into motion.
There’s a lot of things happening with AI across the supply chain, and that is going to frame many things in a new way. Old jobs being revamped or refined and new jobs coming online, as we figure out how bleeding edge tech can be integrated into legacy systems, aging hardware and outdated software. I was at our family holiday gathering last week and my nephew Andrew brought me over to his 3D Printer setup and showed me this really cool plastic turtle he “printed”. It had moving legs and a removable tail and was pretty amazing, in that it took him 30 minutes from design to production, in his basement. This led to conversation about printed food and a chocolatier he has heard about making amazing detailed chocolate sculptures. There is also much investment being put into printed proteins, and very soon we will have all sorts of snacks and nibbles that have been made in a massive high volume commercial printer using extruded pastes and flavor delivery formats. Can you imagine being at the airport and having a giant machine print you a custom spinach mushroom pizza and then fire it off in a stone oven and drop it in front of you in three minutes? These things keep me up at night, but they aren’t that far away.
What will that do to our supply chain, and what about the ingredients? Are we talking about a nozzle dispensing sauce made from organic Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes, or is this all artificial and commodity focused production? Will this contribute to specialized local food economies, or make things more generic & commoditized? How will this fit into a regenerative food economy? Again, more questions than answers. These types of things were like a fictional universe in the Jetson’s cartoons and now here we are. I had a great lunch meeting with Spencer Lomax who just launched Summit Culinary, and we ate at Pizzeria Alberico in Boulder, from the Frasca Hospitality Group. I can’t imagine pizza not being made with their standards of sourcing excellence and craftsmanship, but robot pizza is definitely happening and we will see where it takes us.
Regenerative hospitality is about more than food. It’s about creating systems that restore, heal, and nourish—our land, our teams, and our communities. It’s a call to action, a challenge to think beyond mere sustainability and embrace a vision where every action contributes to a brighter, more harmonious future. Imagine farms that not only feed us but regenerate the soil for generations to come. Picture kitchens that inspire creativity and connection, where team members feel valued and empowered to grow. Envision communities thriving because businesses prioritized care, ethics, and collaboration over shortcuts and profits.
As we step into 2025, let us carry this spirit of regeneration with us. Let it guide the way we work, the way we eat, and the way we live. Because every choice we make has the power to heal or to harm, to sustain or to elevate. Here’s to a year of thoughtful change and bold conversations. Let’s make 2025 not just a year of hope but a year of action—a year where we collectively choose regeneration as our North Star, lighting the way to a future we can all believe in.
Love, Daniel.
