Behind the Scenes: Disney's Flavor Lab

[BradyBzLyn...Mo 2,023]

From Forbes - follow link at the end for photos

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Inside The Backstage Lab Where Disney Mixes Story And Tech Into Food

Seth Porges , CONTRIBUTOR
 
Sometime in the not-so-distant future, visitors to the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida will be able to eat a meal surrounded by the infinite darkness of outer space. Wrapping around the dining room will be enormous high-resolution screens that give the illusion of looking out onto a galaxy’s worth of stars and planets. And because guests will actually be safely earthbound in Epcot, the menu will surely include far more than freeze-dried astronaut food.

When Disney's space-themed restaurant was first announced at the company’s D23 Expo last year, fans got excited at the concept's visual immersion and attention to visual detail. The initial response was something akin to the announcement of a major new ride, rather than a restaurant.   

What few fans probably realize: This idea was birthed at a backstage lab of science, technology, and food that is uniquely designed to make such high-tech and immersive dining experiences possible.

Flavor Lab is a 7,500-square-foot complex tucked away in the backstage parts of Disney's Florida property, off limits to the countless tourists who will eat the dishes dreamed up within its walls. In this building, the company’s chefs and Imagineers have access to a one-stop workshop to build immersive dining experiences, create detailed mythologies that lend story to restaurant locations and menu items, try out new technologies, make sure ideas are practical on a Disney-size scale, and test everything down to the individual appetizer. The goal: Create restaurants where a meal is as much a part of a theme park vacation as a ride on the Haunted Mansion.

"If you visit, part of you would feel like you're on a studio lot, and part of you would feel like you're in this really cool, creative workspace," says Ed Wronski, director of culinary development for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.

The Flavor Lab complex, which opened in late 2015, is divided into three primary parts. The first is what Wronski calls a “cross-functional ideation space”, where a restaurant’s story is first conceived and fleshed out. Here, Disney’s chefs and Imagineers work together to create fantastical dining settings along the lines of the Epcot space restaurant (which has yet to receive an official name or opening date), and Be Our Guest: a popular Magic Kingdom restaurant that places guests inside a gigantic recreation of the castle from The Beauty and the Beast. (Since it opened in 2012, it has consistently been harder to get a table at Be Our Guest than to get a Fastpass on just about any ride at the park.)

The second part of Flavor Lab is a broadcast television-grade show kitchen called Eat. This is where presentations are held and educational videos are shot. This space is also equipped with advanced A/V equipment so chefs can collaborate with people in other locations. “If a chef here is working on a restaurant at Disneyland Paris, they can work real-time with the chef over there to develop the menu, versus a lot of flying back and forth and such,”  Wronski says. 

The third and final part of Flavor Lab is a “workhorse” back kitchen. In this space, massive amounts of equipment rests on casters, allowing employees to move appliances around and mix and match configurations. In effect, this allows the company to test-drive different restaurant and kitchen layouts, and see what works before building things out at an actual location. This is also where the chefs produce giant batches of food in order to ensure recipes can be done at a large enough scale to feed the masses of hungry park-goers. "We also have a space for coffee equipment, soda, and anything else that we want to plug and play to make sure that we flush out the equipment capabilities before we roll them out to the operations," Wronski says.

The impetus behind a facility such as Flavor Lab becomes obvious when you realize just how important dining has become to Disney visitors. Theme park food has come a long way from the days of cotton candy and funnel cake (though you can probably still find that at Disney if that's your thing). Epcot park is probably better known for its wide range of international cuisine than any individual ride, and guests often book prime slots at desirable restaurants months in advance, turning eating arrangements into a lynchpin for an entire itinerary (basically, which parks groups visit on which days). And when you consider that Disney has more than 500 food and beverage locations in its Florida resort alone (not to mention a host of other food and drink-serving parks, resorts, and cruise ships spread throughout the world), the creation of a centralized hub to try out new ideas and practice quality control begins to make a lot of sense.

So how does a new restaurant concept make it onto Disney property? According to Wronski, the process often begins with a story.

Sometimes, a restaurant’s story is inspired by its physical location. The upcoming Epcot space restaurant will sit next to the similarly themed Mission: Space ride, Be Our Guest sits smack in the middle of Fantasyland, and the Skipper Canteen restaurant (which opened in late 2015) feels like an extension of the nearby Jungle Cruise ride in the Magic Kingdom’s Adventureland area. Even restaurants that don’t have obvious mythologies still try to tell a story with their menus, and are often thematically rooted in their location. For example, the menu and decor of the recently revamped Flying Fish restaurant are both heavily rooted in its location on the seaside-inspired Boardwalk entertainment area outside Epcot

The next step is to come up with a “blue-sky menu” that fits into this story. According to Wronski, this step also informs operational decisions such as kitchen equipment and restaurant layout. After that, the chefs begin to hone in on individual menu items. “One dish might be refined seven, eight, ten times through that process before we are really content with it,” Wronski says. “What is good today could be better tomorrow, so we continually go back. It's usually anywhere from an eight-month process to sometimes up to two to three years that we're working on it.”

Of course, unlike rides that are composed of immovable concrete and steel, restaurant menus are constantly tweaked; allowing the company to play around with experimental ideas that may not be sure-fire hits.

“We always want to take a little bit of risk, maybe sometimes we've gone too far," Wronski says. "The best thing about food menus is you can always pull back or change menu items pretty quickly. There were some times that people said, 'That will never sell,' but then they become top-selling items in the end."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethporges/2018/01/26/inside-the-backstage-lab-where-disney-mixes-story-and-tech-into-food-restaurants/#687814d48637

[Travisma 1,317]

interesting.  But some of the meals I've had were either Food Lab rejects or the delivery trucks must've been waylaid and the food spoiled!

[BradyBzLyn...Mo 2,023]

Gotta say this would be a behind the scenes tour I wish they'd offer.