What’s on my mind? Foam, birthdays and what happens when technology leads vs. enables

As I approach my 49th birthday later this month, I’m reminded of my 40th celebration. As many of my friends also turned 40 the same year, we decided his was a major birthday milestone and wanted to celebrate together in style. My friends flew over from the States, and I took the Eurostar to meet them in Paris. 

On the night of our combined celebration we dressed up and arrived at the famous chef Alain Passard’s Arpège restaurant. We were escorted down into what seemed to be a cave and the celebration began. An insane amount of courses with full wine pairings for each - we went all out! After about five of the dozen courses, I realised that I was not only eating flowers for most courses, but I was also eating foam. Ah! The famous foam, as depicted in the recent horror movie, The Menu. 

At that point in my life, I definitely would not have called myself a foodie, so the whole foam situation was new to me. Foam, is a gastro-technology, which can take on any taste, as I discovered that evening. We had bacon foam, pistachio foam, fish foam. You name the flavour and we probably had it in the form of foam.  By the last course, and after a few too many glasses of wine, we had lost the plot! The food WAS amazing, some of the best I’ve ever experienced, but bacon foam is a gastro-technology I can live without.

It was different. It was unique. It was definitely the chef showing off his gastro-tech skills. But was it necessary? Was it something the customer really wanted? Something the dish needed? No.

It made me think of those old Mastercard commercials. Train to Paris £200, hotel £150, new dress £80, Arpège dinner £500. 40th birthday celebration laughing with friends about foam - priceless!

This 40th birthday experience made me think, can technology go too far? Can the innovation create a capability that is unique but actually not required or even desired by its customers?

Our industry is facing a challenging time, forcing us to make choices on where and how we spend our capex. We need to be asking ourselves: Are we building the base requirements at the highest quality? Are they highly resilient, highly secure and highly consumption-based? Are we developing the features on top that are truly desired? Are we building where we should and using partners to expand our reach? Or are we developing foam that looks cool, but is not something our customers really want?

The world has evolved greatly and what’s required and what’s now possible is very different, so we always need to keep the customer’s needs at heart.

Will we develop the equivalent technology to the chef’s bacon foam? Maybe but only if our customers believe it’s important to their experience!