National Restaurant Supply in Tempe, Arizona was the location where the October 3^rd meeting was held and a perfect place for our technology themed meeting with their beautiful demonstration kitchen.  The Eloma chef’s prepared a meal featuring their Combi-Oven Southern Fried Chicken show casing the technology of the Genius T Combi-Oven; we also baked Hope’s Cookies Triple Chocolate cookies for dessert with beverages from Sun Orchard.  A special thank you to all for your contributions and support; it really helped make this a nice meeting for all. 

 

Dawn ­­­­Kennington Bejar, owner of Benedict’s Catering and Café was our first speaker and she shared with us her experience using Groupon to market their cooking classes.  She did a fantastic job with her presentation.  Before she became a restaurateur, Dawn worked in the cosmetics industry for 20 years with the latter part of her career as Director of Sale & Marketing.  It was extremely interesting to hear her perspective and best practices learned from marketing with Groupon.  

 

We Are Copperstate Restaurant Technologies also gave us a presentation about the latest technology of the MICROS Point-of Sale system.  With over 30 years in the industry, they are one of the most successful distributors in the country. 

 

You can look forward to learning more from these presentations and more in the ACF AZ Culinary Library powered by www.kpcompass.com. KP Culinary has been in education for over 15 years and currently being used by over 3,000 schools and institutions we are using the platform and over 265,000 students graduated using KP Education Systems. Our chapter is using this resource as away to connect with our community beyond the meetings as a way to expand the value of our local chapter. 

As this is a controlled learning environment, our chapter is using this platform as a resource hub; a way to share information and bring value to our food service community with measureable results.  In next month’s issue we will be able to share a more information about how we are using this platform for our association.  We have been gathering content for the past four months so when we officially launch, we’ll have a solid base of information to share. 

 

We have also created a Monthly Meeting Planning tool for the 2012 calendar year.  This will help us in the planning of our meetings in a format that encourages community involvement for meeting ideas, meeting locations, vendor participation, contests and challenges and more. 

 

Our next meeting is November 7^th at Macayo’s on Central focusing on alcohol awareness food service.  For more information on what’s happening with our chapter, please connect with us on Facebook @acfchefsofaz. 

 

Madonna Kash

@restaurantmkt

Madonna@restaurantmarketingpartners.com

Restaurant Marketing Partners 

American Culianary Federation 

FoodService Geeks