Helping Foodservice Businesses Enhance Front-of-House Presence
while Improving their Operations, Brand, and Profits

Unless you're a foodservice operator who's mastered the art of levitating food, your food is going to come into contact with surfaces. A lot of them. Our food is constantly in contact with something at every point in its life cycle. 

As a foodservice operator, your #1 priority is the safety of your guests and staff. Period. It doesn’t matter how delicious a dish is if it comes into contact with an unapproved surface resulting in illness or injury. Your guests count on your food safety knowledge every time they visit your establishment. And we want you to count on us at G.E.T. to light the way toward excellent tabletop execution, especially when it comes to food-safe surfaces. 

We first heard the now-iconic phrase, "You don't win friends with salad," borne of a The Simpsons episode, nearly 22 years ago. But we're willing to bet that a modern-day rewriting of the phrase would be just the opposite.

Today's diners are more health-conscious than ever. The restaurant industry has responded by adding salads to their menus, in turn leading to more salad bars. Recently, Ruby Tuesday touted their salad bar, and Sizzler upgraded their look in the last few years. Restaurants aren't the only ones incorporating salad bars. College, university, and corporate dining campuses, casinos, and hotels all embrace the healthy self-serve option.

Indeed, you do win friends with salad.

Whether it's summertime in your neck of the woods, or you're lucky enough to have a tropical climate year-round, guests will travel far and wide seeking out hotels and resorts with excellent poolside and patio amenities. Operators want to offer their guests the very best in terms of food and presentation, but glass in pool and patio areas is almost universally prohibited. This can limit the kinds of materials available to operators of mid- and upper-tier hospitality establishments.  

That's why we at G.E.T. curated photo ideas showing all the beautiful ways you can achieve higher-end brand positioning using outdoor-friendly serveware. Float on down the page and drink in some inspiration!

Salad bars, ice cream bars, and frozen yogurt bars may occupy different ends of the health food spectrum, but they all have one thing in common: Ingredients need to be kept at or below 40°F to stay within the temperature safety zone. Bar-style service often goes hand in hand with refrigerated cold wells. Cold wells allow you to use different sized food pans to get just the right configuration of your products depending on what you're serving. 

Foodservice operators have a few options regarding systems that hold food pans in place on cold wells. Two popular options made by Bugambilia® are the Tile and Fit Perfect™ systems, which feature unique, resin-coated aluminum food pans. We're going to compare these two systems to give you an idea of which one might be best for your cold well service because here at G.E.T., we always want our customers to know their options. 

Foodservice operators have enjoyed melamine dinnerware for decades due to its range of applications, stylish yet functional designs, and low replacement rates compared to china. If you're a seasoned melamine dinnerware user, you're probably familiar with the recommended restrictions when it comes to heat exposure. Broadly speaking, melamine plates shouldn't be exposed to more than 160°F, which means it shouldn't be microwaved, put in the oven, or used with heat lamps. 

Here at G.E.T., we've spoken to foodservice operators who have dutifully followed these recommendations, but they don't know why. Fortunately, with our 30+ years of experience and as a leader in the category, we're perfectly positioned to answer the why behind these recommendations. So, what happens if you put your melamine dinnerware under a heat lamp in a commercial kitchen, and what does it mean for your foodservice establishment and guest experience? 

Plenty of foodservice operators know cold bars (aka cold wells) are wonderful tools for accommodating salad, ice cream, frozen yogurt bars, and pretty much any kind of cold food you'd want to mix and match to delight your guests. They're especially popular and useful in high-volume foodservice at college, university, and corporate dining facilities because guests often serve themselves. 

But what if you want to rearrange your cold bar setup? Historically, this has been  cost - and time-prohibitive for operators due to the restrictive nature of commonly used tile systems for housing food pans. 

Foodservice is all about bringing people together around a table and creating experiences that make people happy. Even though the end result is about as hyper-local as you can get - sitting around a table - a global industry works hard in the background to make these great experiences happen. 

Many of the tabletop items used in commercial foodservice are manufactured overseas, then distributed and sold to American restaurateurs. But America (and Europe, for that matter) has some of the most stringent regulations when it comes to food safety, including the products used to make, store, and serve food. So how do we know which companies are making the best products that also live up to American regulatory standards? 

From intimate dining rooms to service for thousands, every foodservice establishment needs beverage service to accompany their menu. Drinks can be as commonplace as tea and water or as complex as craft cocktails. Regardless of your beverage service style, you can't serve drinks without drinkware. 

But do you go with plastic or glass? These days plastic drinkware often looks just as sharp, shiny, and clear as their glass counterparts. And it's super easy to add custom branded logos and designs to plastic drinkware. So how do you choose? 

Both excellent choices, these two materials can impact service flow and your bottom line in different ways. We're going to take a look at plastic and glass drinkware to see how they stack up. We'll cover a few key areas that can have the most impact on foodservice operations: costs, aesthetics, and broken glass' affect on operations. 

Pizza is an iconic, global dish that originated in Naples and is now enjoyed worldwide. It's the perfect blank canvass for chefs and home cooks alike. You can stick with traditional toppings, or get creative with unexpected ingredients like smoked salmon, capers, and field greens, or even dessert pizzas. Whether you like soft flatbread, crispy Neapolitan, Chicago-style deep dish, or enormous New York-style slices, once you decide on your dough, your options for toppings are almost endless. 

Americans eat about 100 acres of pizza a day. With such a high level of commitment to this cheesy delight, let's explore some creative ways for foodservice operators to plate one of the country's go-to menu items. 

Melamine dinnerware has enjoyed recent surges in popularity among foodservice operators thanks to advances in alternative materials design. Now available in an array of styles, foodservice operators enjoy the different décor themes supported by modern-day melamine. From elegant and understated to modern cosmopolitan, melamine dinnerware resembles china but is also break-resistant, dishwasher-safe, and often less expensive than china. 

But of all the advantages melamine dinnerware brings to foodservice, there’s at least one thing it doesn't do well: Melamine dinnerware is not a great candidate for the microwave. G.E.T. is one of the foremost authorities on melamine dinnerware with more than 30 years of experience. We’ll tell you why we recommend keeping your melamine dinnerware out of the microwave if you're in commercial foodservice and what will happen if you microwave it anyway. We all break the rules sometimes, right?