The food and beverage industry is at a crossroads. The last few years have seen industry icons exposed for sexual assault and misconduct, restaurateurs taken to task for cultural appropriation and racially insensitive concepts, and food media organizations exposed for discriminatory cultures.
The pandemic has highlighted for the public the issues of staffing and labor, wage theft and disparity, workplace culture and discrimination, predatory technology platforms, ever-shrinking profit margins, and difficult customers that many owners, operators, and employees have always known about.
As the industry faces massive closures and fights for greater federal support, many questions remain as to how the food and beverage industry will respond to the changed social landscape in a post-COVID-19 world.
Will the lessons of social, economic, political, and cultural unrest in 2020 lead to long-lasting improvement in the industry, or will the industry return to its pre-pandemic dysfunction? When restaurateurs look toward the future, what are the changes they hope to see industry-wide and what are the items they plan to act upon to reimagine and rebuild this embattled industry?
