Almost two years ago a minor food media scandal erupted when a website called Snackpicks.com, owned by Kellogg’s, published a pair of recipes purportedly written by Grant Achatz. If “Chef Grant Achatz’s Ham and Curry Toppers” and “Chef Grant Actatz’ [sic] Sweet Potato Toppers”—snacks built on Keebler crackers—seemed beneath the talents of the creator of Black Truffle Explosion and Pheasant, Shallot, Cider, Burning Oak Leaves, matters were made even more ignoble when the site misspelled the chef’s name. At first Alinea‘s Nick Kokonas denied the recipes came from his partner, but he and Achatz later recalled that back in 2006—just one year after Alinea opened—the chef did in fact have a relationship with the snack maker.
Many Chicago chefs continue to dip their spoons into Big Food’s kettle, participating in recipe development, brainstorming sessions, focus groups, and product evaluations for giant companies such as Kraft, Nestlé, United Airlines, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and KFC, or trade groups like the National Pork Board or Dairy Management Inc. Tony Mantuano helped create dishes like steak tagliata for the Nutrisystem weight-loss plan. Ina Pinkney developed recipes and appeared in a commercial for Quaker Oats. Rick Bayless endorsed a chicken sandwich for Burger King on national television (and donated his $300,000 fee to charity).
Since 2010, Kahan has been a member of Lean Cuisine’s Culinary Roundtable, a group of six prominent chefs led by Nestlé’s director of culinary strategy and innovation, Lucien Vendôme. Vendôme, the former executive chef of Nestlé’s Stouffer’s Hotels, took the job in 1993 when the chain was sold off, and began a four-year educational program on the elements of cooking and taste at all levels of the corporate hierarchy. After that Nestlé began bringing in consulting restaurant chefs regularly. “If you have ten chefs and each one is making one lasagna and you tasted each one,” Vendôme says, “then you’re gonna start seeing some key drivers that make this lasagna excellent. Once you accumulate all this knowledge, then you go back and say, ‘Let’s take all the best stuff we saw from the chefs and let’s translate it into our factory.’ We started doing that little by little.”
This isn’t Kahan’s first or last experience with Big Food. He served for two years as a spokesman for the National Pork Board, and last year he and partner Donnie Madia participated in a two-day consulting session for McDonald’s (about which he’s bound to secrecy). Back in the early 90s, when Kahan was sous chef at Topolobampo, a group of Taco Bell executives approached Rick Bayless and asked if he’d do some consulting work for them. Bayless wasn’t interested, but Kahan was, and the boss agreed to let him represent his brand.
Bayless, who went on to work with Taco Bell four or five times and who’s also consulted for Nestlé, says you can rarely point to a chef’s direct influence on a particular product. “They would say, OK, make us ten dishes that have your flavors, but are all focused on whatever they had chosen that they wanted to explore. It’s not creating products with them. We don’t have any experience in creating products like that, but what we can offer them is an education in flavor, in ingredients sometimes, especially for some of the big corporations where a lot of the R&D people come from a food science background. Those people don’t really have a whole lot of experience with good food.”
She’s worked with chefs like Ina Pinkney, who’s probably done more corporate consulting—ideation, focus groups, recipe development—than any other Chicago chef. Pinkney’s not leery of talking about her experiences. Chicago’s “Breakfast Queen” figures that up until she closed her eponymous restaurant last New Year’s Eve, she worked for at least a dozen companies, including Healthy Choice, Cargill, Quaker Oats, Land O’Lakes, and Hillshire Farm. She says she’s made cereal shapes out of clay for Kellogg’s, called out KFC executives for serving grilled chicken containing rendered beef fat, and created a recipe for avocado hot cocoa for a Mexican grower’s association (see the recipe on the Bleader). The money’s “just gravy,” she says, but she figures she’s made anywhere from $12,000 to $20,000 a year.
