The World's 50 Best Restaurants Award 2013

list from San Pellegrino

The World's 50 Best Restaurants list has been announced, and the big news is of course that Noma's three year reign as the number one restaurant in the world has come to an end. That title now goes to El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain. Noma holds tight at second, while third goes to Massimo Bottura's Osteria Francescana.

World's 50 Best also announced they'll be doing Latin America's 50 Best Restaurants in September in Lima; more details on that can be found in a press release below.

1. El Celler de Can Roca, Girona, Catalonia, Spain 
2. Noma, Copenhagen 
3. Osteria Francescana, Modena, Italy 
4. Mugaritz, San Sebastián, Spain 
5. Eleven Madison Park, New York City 
6. D.O.M, Sao Paulo, Brazil 
7. Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, London 
8. Arzak, San Sebastián, Spain 
9. Steirereck Restaurant, Vienna, Austria 
10. Vendôme, Bergisch Gladbach, Germany

How to Do a Breakeven Analysis

Breakeven analysis helps determine when your business revenues equal your costs

By Daniel Richards

If you can accurately forecast your costs and sales, conducting a breakeven analysis is a matter of simple math. A company has broken even when its total sales or revenues equal its total expenses. At the breakeven point, no profit has been made, nor have any losses been incurred. This calculation is critical for any business owner, because the breakeven point is the lower limit of profit when determining margins.

There are several types of costs to consider when conducting a breakeven analysis, so here's a refresher on the most relevant.

• Fixed costs: These are costs that are the same regardless of how many items you sell. All start-up costs, such as rent, insurance and computers, are considered fixed costs since you have to make these outlays before you sell your first item.

• Variable costs: These are recurring costs that you absorb with each unit you sell. For example, if you were operating a greeting card store where you had to buy greeting cards from a stationary company for $1 each, then that dollar represents a variable cost. As your business and sales grow, you can begin appropriating labor and other items as variable costs if it makes sense for your industry.

Setting a Price

This is critical to your breakeven analysis; you can't calculate likely revenues if you don't know what the unit price will be. Unit price refers to the amount you plan to charge customers to buy a single unit of your product.

• Psychology of Pricing: Pricing can involve a complicated decision-making process on the part of the consumer, and there is plenty of research on the marketing and psychology of how consumers perceive price. Take the time to review articles on pricing strategy and the psychology of pricing before choosing how to price your product or service.

• Pricing Methods: There are several different schools of thought on how to treat price when conducting a breakeven analysis. It is a mix of quantitative and qualitative factors. If you've created a brand new, unique product, you should be able to charge a premium price, but if you're entering a competitive industry, you'll have to keep the price in line with the going rate or perhaps even offer a discount to get customers to switch to your company.

The World's 50 Best Restaurant Award 2011

quoted from William Reed Business Media Ltd

The much-anticipated S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants Awards 2011 was held on Monday 18th April at the historic Guildhall in the City of London, in the company of the world's finest chefs, international media and the world's most influential restaurateurs.

The S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants Awards and List is organised and compiled by Restaurant magazine, and sponsored by S.Pellegrino. The Awards are now in their tenth year.

Marketing Strategy

Approach and Concept

Marketing is far more than just selling, although higher sales are obviously the ultimate aim. Rather, marketing is a whole collection of activities including advertising, selling and sales promotion, marketing research, introduction of new products, pricing, packaging, distribution and after sales service.

Approaches to Marketing

One approach to marketing is to regard it as the process of finding customers for goods which the firm has already decided to supply. In this case there is much emphasis on face to face customer contact, price cutting, heavy advertising and sales promotions. It might be assumed that customers will always want to purchase well-constructed items that are made available to them at low cost: that all a firm needs to do is offer for sale high quality, sound value product with many attractive features, provide effective after-sales service, and then the goods will ‘sell themselves’.

The Marketing Concept

Alternatively, the firm might seek to evaluate market opportunities before production, assess potential demand for the good, determine the product characteristics desired by consumers, predict the prices consumers are willing to play, and then supply goods corresponding to the needs and wants of target markets more effectively than competitors, business adopting the latter approach are said to apply the marketing concept.

Adherence to the marketing concept means the firm conceives and develops product that satisfy consumer wants. Note however that:

• consumers demand can be and frequently is created and manipulated through advertising campaigns

• unquestioning adoption of the concept could lead to the productions of items that are highly attractive to consumers but which nevertheless are expensive to supply and thus generate negligible profit.

Practical application of the marketing concept implies the full integration of marketing with other business activities (design, production, costing, transport, and distribution, corporate strategy and planning) so that the marketing department assumes extraordinary importance within the firm. Numerous conflicts with other functions arise from situation.

The Marketing Mix

In 1965 Professor N. H. Borden coined the phrase ‘marketing mix’ to describe the combination of marketing element used in given set of circumstances. Appropriate mixes vary depending on the firm and industry, and over time. Professor E. J. McCarty subsequently summarized the

Human Resources Strategy

Human resources management concerns the human side of the management of enterprises and employees’ relations with their firms. Its purpose is to ensure that the employees of a company, i.e. its human resources, are used in such a way that the employer obtains the greatest possible benefit from their abilities and the employees obtain both material and psychological rewards from their work.

Human resources management has strategic dimensions and involves the total deployment of human resources within the firm. Thus, for example, human resources management will consider such matters as:

• the aggregate size of the organization’s labor force in the context of an overall corporate plane (how many divisions and subsidiaries the company is to have, design of the organization, etc.)

• how much to spend on training the workforce, given strategic decisions on target quality levels, product prices, volume of production, and so on

• the desirability of establishing relations with trade unions from the view-point of the effective management control of the entire organization

• the wider implications for employees of the management of change (not just the consequences of alterations in working practices).

The strategic approach to human resources management involves the integration of personnel and other human resources management considerations into the firm’s overall corporate planning and strategy formulation procedures. It is proactive, seeking constantly to discover

Financial Strategy

Effective strategies are crucial to the well-being of the firm, and need to address the following issues:

• How, where and when the business will obtain funds, plus (for public companies) the timing of share issues and the determination of share issue prices
• The best use of financial resources
• Gearing
• How to maximize the market valuation of the firm
• What to do with accumulated cash
• Long term financial planning for business expansion
• The capital structure of the business
• The extent to which internally generated profits are reinvested within the company
• Choice of financial criteria for selecting major capital investments.

Also companies operating in several countries need to formulate