CALCMENU - Making the business profitable with the right culinary solution.

Savoir cuisiner en gagnant du temps est un des objectifs à atteindre pour tous les jeunes chefs. Quelques raccourcis, astuces et conseils vous permettront d'avoir une longueur d'avance aux heures d'affluence du restaurant. Gagnez un temps précieux tout en servant des plats gastronomiques en un claquement de doigts grâce à ce vade-mecum : Commencez par lire les instructions Dans la précipitation, obnubilés par votre volonté de tout faire en même temps, vous risquez d'oublier la première étape, pourtant essentielle, de la préparation d'un repas réussi : la lecture des instructions de la recette. Avoir dès le départ une vue d'ensemble de la procédure présente l'avantage de vous permettre d'identifier les étapes initiales et les ingrédients à préparer en premier. Multitâche Comme dans toute fonction, la cuisine exige une capacité élevée à effectuer plusieurs tâches à la fois. Cela est indispensable pour pouvoir augmenter votre productivité en un ...

It’s that time of the year again when love fills the air and people turn into the most romantic versions of themselves. Figure 1 Turn your Valentine's Day into a trip down Wonderland with this delicious Queen of Tomato Tarts presentation (photo courtesy of  www.winosandfoodies.com ) From V-Day cards and cuddly teddy bears to blooming roses and heart-shaped cakes, everyone who has someone to celebrate the love month is surely trying to come up with ways to surprise the apple of their eye. If you want to make your Valentine’s dinner more special, don’t just stop at cooking a hearty meal for two. Play up your next moves with an exquisite presentation of the food you’ve prepared so lovingly.  Here are some easy and creative food presentation ideas to delight your dinner date: Tomato Tarts Wonderland’s a bite away with this delicious, easy-to-make Queen of Tomato Tarts. Puff pastry, mustard, and thick heart-shaped tomato slices...

Enggist & Grandjean Software SA , developer of the CALCMENU Recipe Management Software Solutions , launches the new Recipecenter.com , an extensive collection of recipes from around the world -- from amateur to professional chefs and site members who may rate and review recipes online. Our aim is to provide continued customer satisfaction, guaranteed company credibility, and great recipes for you and your families, whenever and wherever you may be. We are solely dedicated to gather, collect and share only the best recipe ideas that will surely tickle your interests! The website also features different recipes everyday on the home page, ranging from simple to complex and classic to modern to challenge and enhance your current cooking skills. If you are a chef/cook, a culinary student, both starters and pros - or maybe just about anyone who loves food, we invite you to join and enjoy the goodness of healthy, easy-to-make yet fantastic recipe...

The food industry professionals understand that it is certainly imperative to use a software for food and recipe management with other information that goes along each item and ingredient. It would nearly impossible to accomplish without using software, though it may still seem as a challenge for some to deal with technical basics. In reality, most chefs would still rather enjoy cooking and preparation rather than organizing recipe collections with a software that confuses the technical with their cooking functionality and artistry. Recipe software should therefore be easy and pleasant to use, eliminating the challenge of actually entering data and optimizing the information of the stored data. CALCMENU is a software that makes it very convenient with more features to offer: shopping lists, automated recipe calculation, exportation of recipes to an external web service, unit conversion, etc. EGS has developed CALCMENU - a suite of R...

CALCMENU will be participating in Igeho , the most important international trade show for hotel and catering industry in Switzerland. Igeho will be held in Basel, Switzerland on November 19-23, 2011. Over 800 exhibitors in different fields such as Food & Drink; Kitchen technology & Cleaning; Delicatessen & Wines; and Restaurant & Hotel Requisites will gather together in Basel for five days. CALCMENU will join top executives and specialists from the hotel and catering industry in Igeho to give you a sneak peek of its newest and the latest offering to the foodservice industry. Watch out for more details about this exciting new solution from CALCMENU!

After defining your preferences in Part 1 , now it’s time to identify the other information needed in managing your recipes in CALCMENU . You can manage the categories, keywords, sources, taxes, texts, units, yield units, nutrient rules, labor and ingredients. In Managing the Merchandise List If you are managing your merchandise list (or ingredients list), I suggest you first create units, categories and suppliers. Units Identify which units you will use when creating new merchandise. Go to Configuration> Manage Units . CALCMENU has predefined units which you can already use. Just click the checkboxes of the units you want to use. It’s so easy! If there is a unit that you want to use but is not in the Unit List, you can quickly create a unit by clicking the Add button. Categories Categories are terms to classify a group of merchandise, recipes or menus. To create categories, go to Configuration> Manage Categories> Merchandise (Recipe or Menu) . You can create categories for...

The USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) recently introduced a new eating guide called MyPlate which replaces the decades-old Food Guide Pyramid. MyPlate is a plate icon sliced into four to represent different food groups. Each colored section is for fruits, vegetables, grains and proteins. A circle icon for dairy is also included in the new guide. MyPlate encourages people to eat more fruits and veggies (should be half of your meal) and reduce sodium-rich soups, bread and frozen meals. The release of a new eating guide is part of the US’ movement to deal with the obesity problem in America. US First Lady Michelle Obama says “ This is a quick, simple reminder for all of us to be more mindful of the foods that we're eating .”* To know more about MyPlate, you can check out this website: http://www.choosemyplate.gov/ . * Reuters.com

Restaurant menus may easily be dismissed as a mere list of food selections until one takes a look at the true power it holds in making or breaking the success of any restaurant business.  The menu directly reflects your restaurant’s personality and concept, and is a major factor in its profitability. It is actually the strongest and most consistent internal-marketing tool your restaurant employs. The menu is the only advertising material for your restaurant that you can be a 100% sure will be read by the guest and will directly influence them on their food choices, as well as the amount of money that will be spent.   Thus, aside from remarkable dishes and ambiance, a well-designed and well-engineered menu should also be on top of a restaurant’s priority list. Treat the menu as if your entire food business depends on it because it really does! Ample planning and research on customer demographics and pyschographics should be done as they directly ...

Along with the advent of “cloud computing” which transforms software from products to more of a service and enables the sharing of resources and information on a wider level, software companies have also began developing software with the same concept and which offers the same convenience.  This type of software is slowly making its way into both small- and large businesses’ systems or even homes. At first thought, such software would seem impractical and costly. But frankly, it’s the opposite. Allow me to give you the facts on this new software technology, Software as a Service, as well as on its perks. Software as a Service veers away from the typical software in a sense that instead of the all-too-familiar setup where you buy, install and use, this software would only require you to avail of a service access, connect and use.  This is because the software that you are using is not actually installed on your computer (thus no confusing installation procedures, installe...

For the first part of this entry, click here . source: dailyspark.com 4. CALCMENU Pro and CALCMENU Enterprise allow you to adjust the nutrient/allergen content in a certain food product/dish. This is handy when you want to make changes in your recipes without altering its quality. Let’s say for instance you found out that a certain recipe has quite high sodium content, you may modify this recipe’s sodium content to fit the diet requirement or taste of your customer. Flexibility in your recipes, i.e. being able to adjust your recipes to help improve the nutrient content in meals, will be beneficial in the long run as nutrient and mineral requirements may change over time. This can be aptly demonstrated by a study conducted in 2004 by Donald Davis, PhD, a former researcher for the Biochemical Institute of the University of Texas, Austin. His findings show that there has been a decline of up to 50% in many minerals, vitamins and nutrients sourced from fruits and vegeta...