How is fresh food not in season locally always available? How sit is processed and sent off across the world so quickly and with such consistency?
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The world supply chain for fresh food products is pretty crazy. I can’t do it all justice here, but just know it does take constant travelling of the food and many practices that keep foods as fresh as they can be for as long as possible.
Same way we have it in grocery stores every week, too. Global logistics network shipping ingredients by ship and plane, different growing regions, greenhouses, means of long-term storing some fresh produce (optimal temp, humidity, air mixture), etc.
They buy it, nearly every day. Its just the logistics of delivery. A truck shows up with their order, the morning prep guys at 6am unload the food and begin prepping it for use later.
If something is not available, they remove the menu item that the ingredient is used for.
Did you know that bananas are shipped unripe and they rely on the shipping time to ripen before they hit grocery store shelves?
Restaurants use a combination of delivery services, supplies, and store purchases to get their supplies.
Top class restaurants will send people to farmers markets and the like at early hours of the morning to pick up fresh produce for the day/week but restaurants will also swing by Costco and Supermarkets to buy certain items as well.
Many use delivery services and suppliers like SYSCO that they can order from like a catalogue.
Chain restaurants like McDonalds have their own internal logistics chains and suppliers to supply franchisees. This is one of the main reasons they weren’t badly impacted by COVID, their supply chains were almost entirely separate from super markets.
Your more traditional restaurants that are trying to represent the cuisine of a few hundred years ago or are themed around local stuff will have seasonal menus for this reason, but otherwise it’s international shipping. I just of the US’s off-season produce comes from Chile & vice-versa, for instance.
Fresh food isn’t what you think it is. Fresh food isn’t ‘fresh’. I mean real food is but we don’t really have any of that in this country unless you know somebody who hunts and gardens
In addition to the supply chains that deliver food to your local grocery stores, there are suppliers who ONLY sell to restaurants.
Especially on the higher end, there are smaller farms that have hothouses so your local fine dining eatery has tomatoes that don’t taste as bland as the ones you get from Ralphs & Kroger.
Some of it is grown year round in greenhouses or in the tropics and then shipped to other locations.
Other crops are only harvested once a year and then stored in nitrogen atmosphere so they don’t ripen until after delivered.
A lot of “fresh” food is actually really old. Apples, potatoes, carrots can all be up to a year old. Lettuce, tomatoes, bananas will be less than 1 month old.
They also have software that tracks how much each dish were sold and predict how much ingredients are needed in future.
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