Seizing the Opportunity to Cook Up a Competitive Food Offer
LAS VEGAS — If three days walking the expo floor at the 2024 NACS Show didn't leave attendees feeling a little peckish, chefs Andrew Zimmern and David Chang seemed determined to reignite a love of food in their audience at the show's closing session.
Sitting down for a question-and-answer session with Andrew Kintigh, corporate chef at Ankeny, Iowa-based Casey's General Stores Inc., the two media personalities covered a range of topics that kept circling back to one idea: food is, quite literally, what we make of it.
"We need to lose this box we've put ourselves in where we say, oh, that's an elevated dish or that's restaurant quality," Zimmern said. "I don't care about the labels anymore. Food is food."
Both Zimmern and Chang talked about their journeys to becoming professional chefs. Zimmern started young, asking for a summer job at his godmother's restaurant when he was 14. Though his initial work shucking clams and peeling vegetables wasn't exactly glamorous, he was able to learn from more experienced cooks there and took on greater responsibilities through subsequent summers.
For Chang, his route was a bit more circuitous.
"My dad spent most of his adult life working in restaurants when he came to this country, and he wanted to make sure that I would never work in one," he recalled. "I tried to do everything in my life to not cook, but that siren song was too strong. And what I realized being in the kitchen, and I mean this in the best way possible, [is] it's full of weirdos on a pirate ship."
Both men also discussed their affection for convenience stores, not only as a product of nostalgia but also for their ubiquity when they are on the road filming for their respective TV shows.
Zimmern emphasized the ways a convenience store could turn itself into a hub for the surrounding region. “It's an amazing place for a community to be built because everyone goes through the same door,” he said.
The chefs observed that c-stores have plenty of room to further grow. While the U.S. convenience channel has made strides to compete with quick-service restaurants with its foodservice offerings, c-stores can start to expand their palates, taking cues from their Asian counterparts and embracing both new flavors and quality dishes.
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"High" vs. "Low" Food
To demonstrate the ease with which a convenience operator can take an everyday product like hot dogs or potato chips and create a meal, the chefs were challenged to a live cooking demonstration. They had to make a dish using only the equipment and products one typically finds in a c-store.
Zimmern created an accordion hot dog from packaged dogs and rolls. He augmented the plain dog by cutting it into a spiral to "allow all of the flavors to actually get into the dog." He then used a simple countertop griddle to create a pancake out of cheese, and salt and vinegar potato chips to give the hot dog an additional wrap within the bun, before topping everything with premade coleslaw and chopped scallions.
Chang went in a slightly more unexpected direction, using a blender to pulverize potato chips and instant ramen, then mixing in water and an egg to create a dough for gnocchi. After briefly boiling the pasta pieces in water flavored with the packet from the ramen, he cooked them in a reduced sauce created from dry coffee creamer, creating a simple cream sauce that thickened alongside the gnocchi. Grated beef jerky finished the dish for both flavor and color.
Chang even demonstrated the ways a cook can easily correct a mistake with what's on hand when he used the creamer to firm up his dough after adding too much water to it.
"This is literally how a gnocchi chef that I work with taught me his grandma's way of adjusting your mix," he said. "It's just working with food science and it will never fail you if you know it."
Zimmern pointed out, "This really shows you that there's everything in your store to create something new and different without adding extra SKUs to what is already coming in the door."
Zimmern left the audience with some thoughts to chew on — encouraging them to experiment with texture and flavor in their own foodservice programs — while also leaving behind concerns about what sort of items they “should” be serving.
“This is part of the democratization of food,” he said. "We need to lose this kind of high vs. low aspect of what we eat.”
“If I'm at a fancy restaurant, spending $120 on truffles and gnocchi, I'm still basically eating a cup of noodles and mushrooms, right?” Chang added. “There's no reason that one should inherently be viewed as better than the other. You can still make something super delicious either way.”
The 2024 NACS Show took place Oct. 7-10 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The next NACS Show will be hosted at the McCormick Place Convention Center Oct. 14-17, 2025 in Chicago.
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