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In recent times the importance of training and education have been recognised as important tools to foster economic growth within companies and industries in the global marketplace. Unfortunately the UK hospitality industry in general has been unwilling to train and develop its managers. This paper examines the contract catering sector of the hospitality industry in Northern Ireland. It commences by investigating the educational qualifications and training of managers within the contract catering sector and then proceeds to discuss the transference of hospitality skills and practices.

To understand the nature of the catering challenge is hard enough let alone accept it. But I accept this paper's title, believing that caterers must adjust attitudes as they face problems, including those of food, besetting our own country and the world. With my background, I naturally see catering education as a key element in attitude adjustment. Way back in 1964, I was associated with the South of Scotland Electricity Board in organizing a management workshop with the theme “Catering in the Technological Era”. Though this sparked off other conferences with similar titles and led eventually to a book, Catering Management in the Technological Age, much catering activity since has edged but slowly into that age. Our challenge is to get it moving.

The purpose of this study is to explore food safety measures in catering and special event programs, especially with respect to the knowledge and implementation of knowledge of food handlers in the catering sector in the USA.

A quantitative approach was utilized in this study. A questionnaire was distributed to 557 respondents, representing over 40 chapters in the National Association of Catering Executives. The questionnaire was divided into three sections of food safety (food handling, equipment, and personal hygiene). This study utilized t‐tests and ANOVA to test for differences between gender, training, management status, and employment status with regard to food safety knowledge and practices.

Results suggested that employees in the catering industry who work part‐time need more training and development. Management was seen as more knowledgeable than non‐management personnel and was seen to have more training. Overall the study found that there is a need to focus on training for employees, with even greater emphasis for new employees.

The results of this study provide significant evidence that greater emphasis must take place to require proper training of all employees in the catering sector. An educational training program that focuses on the catering sector can be developed by utilizing the usable factors gained from this research.

The present study provides a national survey representing a large geographic area of the USA, and focuses on catering servers, front‐line staff, and management in the special event industry. This study also combines the safety issues of equipment, personal hygiene, and food handling into one study as a whole to examine the overall knowledge of catering employees in the industry.

The contract catering segment of the UK hospitality industry has expanded rapidly over the past decade, yet few contemporary hospitality researchers acknowledge the existence of this significant market sector. Seeks to rectify this by examining the size, scope and market position of the UK contract catering sector. Documents past experiences of commercial and public sector catering units to illustrate the move of contract catering management towards facilities management. Discusses future trends in an attempt to determine the future role of contract catering management within facilities.

Omnichannel sales have provided new impetus for the development of catering merchants. The authors thus focus on how catering merchants should manage capacities at the ordering, production and delivery stages to meet customers’ needs in different channels under third-party platform delivery and merchant self-delivery. This is of great significance for the development of the omnichannel catering industry.

This paper formulates the capacity decisions of omnichannel catering merchants under the third-party platform delivery and merchant self-delivery mode. The authors mainly use queuing theory to analyze the queuing behavior of online and offline customers, and the impact of waiting time on customer shopping behavior. In addition, the authors also characterize the merchant’s capacity by the rate in queuing model.

The authors find that capacities at ordering stage and food production stage are composed of base capacities and safety capacities, but the delivery capacities only have the latter. And in the self-delivery mode, merchants can develop higher safety capacities by charging delivery fees. The authors prove that regardless of the delivery mode, omnichannel sales can bring higher profits to merchants by integrating demand.

The authors focus on analyzing the capacity management of omnichannel catering merchants at the ordering, production and delivery stages. And the authors also add the delivery process into the omnichannel for analysis, so as to solve the problem of capacity decision-making under different delivery modes. The management of delivery capacity and its impact on other stages’ capacities are not covered in other literature studies, which is one of the main innovations of this paper.

Chinese participation in the catering industry is conspicuous in Britain, but there also appears to be an emergence of young Chinese adults diversifying into other occupations and sectors in the British labour market. This paper seeks to gain an understanding of where young Chinese adults are positioned in the occupational structure, why they are situated there, and their attitudes towards their current jobs. The findings indicate that as a result of the interaction between structure and culture there is an emerging bimodal distribution of young Chinese adults in the British labour market with a tendency for young Chinese adults either to work in the professions and other white collar jobs or conversely to be employed in the service sector (that is, the Chinese catering industry).

Given the principal characteristics of hotel and catering industry employment – low pay, low job security, high labour turnover, often arbitrary management – it is a matter of some interest that the industry is unionized to only a limited extent. Offers a brief summary of the principal reasons advanced for explaining low unionization in the industry before proceeding to focus on the attitudes of hotel managers towards these explanations. Reports research based on interviews with managers in Scotland, during which individuals were asked to respond to a range of points with a view to ascertaining the continuing relevance or otherwise of the findings of previous research. Principal findings are that a tension exists between a general, if reluctant, acceptance of the need, by managers, for union representation in the industry and a belief in their own managerial efficacy which makes unions irrelevant to their particular circumstances.

The process of industrial relations which has developed in the offshore catering industry is not significantly different from that evident in conventional onshore‐based unionised industries. Data obtained as part of a survey of industrial relations in the Grampian region (1982) covering five of the nine offshore catering companies in the Northern Sector of the North Sea, show that such companies operate in an atypical industrial environment represented by unusual work/lifestyle patterns. A two‐tier system has evolved to meet the communication requirements of a transient and scattered workforce: the management‐workforce relationship in offshore installations being informal, while the onshore relationship between management and trade union officials is far more formal. While the adoption of collective bargaining in this industry is a fairly recent happening, it can be readily explained in terms derived from “traditional” British industry.

The UK catering industry has significant economic importance, creating employment for more than two million people and developing an annual turnover of around £14,000 million, much of which is earned from visitors to this country. Not only is the industry large, it is expanding to satisfy the greater and extremely variable demands being placed upon it.

The given case deals with the fact that primary objectives of services producers and marketers are identical to those of all marketers: to develop and provide offerings that satisfy consumer needs and expectations, thereby ensuring their own economic survival. To achieve these objectives, service providers need to understand how consumers choose, experience, and evaluate their service offerings. It also talks about employing innovative techniques at the basic level by optimizing available resources offering quality service at value based pricing, thereby, increasing customer retention by developing the trust of the consumer.

Graduation or post graduation level students studying subjects pertaining to the services aspect of marketing, namely innovative service offerings, value for money, service experience and evaluation, challenge of integrating the 4 A's of services marketing and offering them in sustainable quality, promotional or communication mix for services and consumer behaviour.

Today's dual-career couples, single-parent families, and two-job families are realizing a burning consumer need: more time. Individuals in these and other non-traditional family configurations are overstressed with their work and home obligations and find that dealing with many of life's everyday tasks is overwhelming. For many customers, all types of shopping have become “drudgery or worse.” The antidote to this time deficiency is found in many new services that recover time for consumers. One such professional service is catering. The present case study deals with grass root level innovations in this service offering that adds flavour to our lives.

Understanding the catering services offering and its features in evolving consumer's world; analyzing the importance of optimizing available resources and offering customer satisfaction, ensuring marketers own economic survival; realizing the significance of value offering and related value based pricing for services; comprehending the importance of word of mouth in post experience evaluation in services; the effect of quality and quantity consciousness in marketers while offering catering services; and understanding obstacles and challenges faced by small and medium service industries at the initial level.

Teaching notes.