Prioritizing health, nutrition and wellness is a long-term trend, but how can any hotelier distill this multi-decade progression into one or two action items that can elicit measurable results over the next few quarters? You may not have a spa or capital for wholly new programming, so start small with food and beverage — an operation that nearly all hotel guests experience during their stays.
When it comes to food, the term "biohacking" encompasses any and all additions to the plate that can literally hack the eater’s (or drinker’s) internal biology to elicit a positive health benefit — "superfoods" as a synonym in this regard. Typically, these are smaller additions seldom comprising the bulk of the caloric intake but that help catalyze the macronutrient processing of the primary meal components.
Ingredients considered superfoods include garlic, tumeric, apple cider vinegar, caperberries, parsley, cilantro, Brazil nuts and edible flowers. It's hardly an exhaustive list; part of the experience is exploring all the other superfoods at your disposal.
Perhaps, though, you can already envision how these may play out as menu additions. Some ideas:
- Most breakfasts contain a yogurt bowl with some combination of fruit, nuts and seeds, where a dollop of Brazil nuts or spirulina can be a $2 extra.
- At the smoothie bar, spirulina and marine collagen are already proven add-ons often priced at $3 or $4 more per scoop.
- Collagen, vegan or animal-derived, is now often sold as "bone broth soup," which can be great for winter menus.
- As practically the only two salty fruits, caperberries and olives make for a nice appetizer.
- With people looking for alcohol alternatives, turmeric has been a mainstay when sold as "golden milk" (nut milk, turmeric, cinnamon, ginger, black pepper and honey all boiled together).
- Likewise for dieters, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, honey and sparkling water combine well into a restorative tonic.
- For parsley, cilantro and edible flowers, these can all be sold as individual add-ons to a salad or main or combined as a fresh herbs and flowers addition.
From these ideas, you can see that nothing here is breaking the bank and nothing here is going to add seven figures to the bottom line either. Instead, it’s about testing the waters.
There is potential for future expansion of the healthy food options at your restaurant or as room service offerings. Hoteliers pondering these opportunities should ask themselves: How receptive will health-conscious diners be to other wellness products beyond food and beverage, such as spa, sleep programs or in-room fitness?
Let’s focus on the singular example of offering a handful of Brazil nuts as a $2.50 extra to the yogurt bowl (with the assumption that this is well-typeset in both the physical and digital menus so that it’s visible). Restaurant guest purchases of this add-on will be recorded within the point-of-sale system. From there, do a basic before-and-after comparison to determine whether the availability of Brazil nuts was purchased in a significant amount and also if this addition increased total sales of the yogurt bowl.
Connecting your point-of-sale system to guest profile data allows for even more end-to-end feedback and analysis. If you know an overnight hotel guest purchased the Brazil nuts addition, you could set up an automated workflow within your post-stay survey platform to specifically ask whether they would pay for other health-minded products during their trip, as well as what their preferred products would be.
In this sense, the minutia can inform a greater whole. The two of us are very bullish on wellness for hotels, but this takes on numerous different forms depending on the brand. To discover what’s best for your organization, you have to test and you have to measure, and the additional of a few biohacking foods can help you do just that.
Larry and Adam Mogelonsky are partners at Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting practice.
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