In this Weekly Wrap, we’re looking at how U.S. trade policy is affecting fruit and vegetable growers across the country, the surprising rate of restaurant car crashes, the good and the bad of customer reviews, and more.
Farms and the Federal Government
The Headline: “In Michigan’s cherry country, the federal safety net is fraying”
The Source: Reuters
What You Need to Know:
King Orchards’ harvest crew from Guatemala arrived in mid-July, short-handed and weeks late after delays in securing the H-2A seasonal farmworker visas they rely on each year. They paid more to ship fresh cherries by private carrier after a U.S. Postal Service reorganization left fresh fruit sitting a bit too long.
A U.S. Department of Agriculture grant request for funding a cold-storage unit remained in limbo, as Washington cut spending on farm programs and agricultural research. And Jack King, Juliette’s brother and the farm’s agronomist, kept searching for fertilizer cheap enough to haul and untouched by President Donald Trump’s trade wars.
“It all slows us down,” King McAvoy, the farm’s business manager, said during a brief pause in July’s harried harvest.
Farmers in the hills near Grand Traverse Bay, where the fruit of their labor has filled pies and fed generations, said they are caught in the crosshairs of Trump’s reshaping of government, with sharp cuts and increasing delays hitting the $227 million U.S. tart cherry industry hard.
From weather, plant disease and pest woes, USDA forecast Michigan will lose 41% of its tart cherry crop this year, compared to 2024. Northwest Michigan, where the King farm is located, faces the steepest drop – about 70%, according to the Cherry Industry Administrative Board.
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When they fired up the tree shaker – a grumbling relic older than some of the scientists – a rust-colored cloud of brown rot spores rose in the heat and settled on their sleeves. Tree by tree, they logged bruised fruit and powdery mold.
“This kind of research doesn’t have corporate backers,” Rothwell said. “It’s always been the government and the growers.”
This month, she’s submitting the last paperwork for a $100,000 USDA grant awarded under the Biden administration for a disease study – money that’s part of a federal review of climate-related research. She’s not sure if the money will come through. Colleagues at other land-grant schools haven’t been paid, she said.
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The labor squeeze stretches coast to coast. In Oregon, grower Ian Chandler watched half a million pounds of cherries rot on trees. He began harvesting with 47 workers on June 10. He needed 120. Fear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in California would spread north kept some people away, he said.
Our Take:
This piece really hits the three-valve heart of the issue.
Tariffs – They’re crushing the export market. Oversupply is driving prices on some products way down, while the cost and lead time of critical imports needed to keep farms running are climbing. That means it’s not just harder to sell what’s grown here, it’s also more expensive to buy what farmers need — from equipment to fertilizers to packaging materials.
ICE – Not much more to add here, we’ve talked about it before. With 73 percent of farm workers being immigrants, the math speaks for itself.
The Big Beautiful Bill – This hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention. Yes, commodity crops like corn and soy will be protected, but there’s a lot of produce grown in the U.S. that won’t be. Cuts to agricultural budgets, most importantly research budgets, have real lasting consequences.
Take citrus: Florida’s production is down 90 percent in the last 20 years, partially due to disease. Researchers are working on disease-resistant trees, but much of that research is federally funded. Pulling funding won’t exactly speed up finding solutions. And this story repeats itself across the board — mildew, blight, pests. These aren’t sexy headlines so they aren’t in the mainstream's consciousness, but they’re devastating for growers.
All of this compounds on top of tariffs raising input costs and an ICE-driven labor shortage, leaving an industry already under pressure with fewer tools to adapt.
So what does this mean for restaurants? Prices. Some items will go up as imports and production costs rise. Others — like West Coast cherries in this case — may actually fall because of oversupply. For restaurants that focus on seasonal produce, menu planning and ingredient selection will require a thoughtful approach.
In fact, we’re all going to have to be more thoughtful. Thoughtful with menus, with sourcing, and with pricing. Farming has always been a tough business, but the knock-on effects are about to land squarely on the plate.
Restaurant Car Crashes
The Headline: “Every day, a car slams into a restaurant somewhere. Operators need to take action”
The Source: Restaurant Business Online
What You Need to Know:
It seems like a freak accident. But, sadly, vehicle-into-building crashes happen all the time, by one estimate an average of about 100 times a day, somewhere around the country. And about 20% of the time, it’s a restaurant that gets hit, if only because there are just so many of them near streets and parking lots.
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The Storefront Safety Council, an organization that has tracked vehicle-to-building incidents for a decade, said almost 6,000 restaurants have been hit by cars, as of May this year.
Representing about 20% of such accidents overall, restaurants are the third most common type of business to be hit by a vehicle, after retail stores (23%) and other locations not specified (28%).
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There are a number of design steps restaurant operators should consider to reduce the risk of a car ending up in their restaurant dining room. But key among them is the installation of some kind of sturdy bollard or barriers that allow pedestrians but would stop a vehicle.
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The liability from such accidents can be huge, notes Reiter.
In 2023, 7-Eleven agreed to pay $91 million to a man who was crushed in front of one of the chain’s stores outside Chicago. (Convenience stores are another business often hit by cars.)
Our Take:
I’d be lying if I said an article about cars crashing into restaurants was on my bingo card this week. But it’s interesting, and as I think back, I’ve actually seen it happen twice. Once while running a bar in Los Angeles, and the other while dining in Chicago. Both times I thought, “That was a freak accident. What are the chances?”
Turns out, the chances were pretty high. “Car-proofing” a restaurant or bar was never something I considered, but after reading this, it makes total sense.
The takeaway is simple: it’s something operators need to think about. Not every space will require it — you really have to assess the parking setup and look for hazards — but the risk is real. It’s the world we live in now, and preparation matters.
Higher Prices, But Better Value
The Headline: “How The Melt turned a single customer review into its North Star”
The Source: Nation’s Restaurant News
What You Need to Know:
“I loved that it was founded on the premise of taking ordinary comfort food, like burgers, grilled cheese, and mac and cheese, and elevating it to something special — taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary,” he said during a recent interview.
This means not cutting corners on ingredients, for instance. To adhere to this principle, The Melt enhanced its menu shortly after Bower came on board. The concept tested “virtually hundreds of different cheese combos” for its signature grilled cheese and found that cheddar, Muenster, and Fontina was the right one. The sandwiches also had to have an “extraordinary amount” of cheese.
“We never wanted to have a customer say, ‘for a place called The Melt, you ought to have more cheese,’” Bower said.
The company went through this menu upgrade without thinking about how such a build would impact cost inputs. When the new menu — called the “I love it here” menu — was rolled out, it included not only cheesier sandwiches, but also bigger burgers, a new French fry recipe, and more. To support the changes, The Melt raised prices by 35% across the board.
“Today, we get more than 90% fewer price complaints than we did before,” Bower said. “People don’t mind paying for extraordinary. What they mind paying for is ordinary. People come to a restaurant because they want something better than they can make at home.”
About that “I love it here” menu: The Melt also differentiates itself from other sandwich concepts by leaning into a mission of inspiring guests to say that once they’ve tried it. During The Melt’s early days, one customer wrote a Yelp review that simply said, “I love it here,” and Bower has since made it the North Star for employee training.
Our Take:
Right now, consumers want value. And value comes in many different forms.
Value doesn’t always mean cheaper. It means what you’re getting has a strong value proposition. The phrase “awesome value for what you get” comes to mind. People will spend more if they feel like they’re getting both a better product and more of it.
This is proof that sometimes value can come with a price increase. But for the higher price to work, the quality needs to be higher too. It needs oomph, more weight behind it.
I also love the inspiration behind their employee training. It’s so simple: “I love it here.” They know exactly what they want. They’ve got a focus, and they tailor their training to achieve it. That’s something every operator should aspire to.
I’m not saying everyone’s goal should be the same, but there should be something that drives the purpose of everything you do. It’s a mission statement. The problem is, most places don’t have one — and many that do don’t actually follow it. Every operator needs to find that purpose. Without it, success becomes a whole lot more elusive.
Bad Review Blowback
The Headline: “Restaurants Are Calling Out Customers Who Leave Unfair Reviews”
The Source: Food & Wine
What You Need to Know:
Online reviews, especially negative ones, tend to be one-sided. But the tides are turning.
Lately, some restaurant owners have decided to fight back, like Dragon Lee in Warrensburg, New York, which made national news when it responded to a negative review in an all-caps telling the anonymous critic to never come back, making national news in the process. When I say fight back, all I mean is they simply want to share their side of the story. We all know every story has three sides: the truth, the lie, and somewhere in the middle. For decades, businesses and customers have relied on the platitude that “the customer is always right.” Never mind that the rest of that sentence is “in matters of taste,” because customers only choose to remember the first half.
Nowadays, it’s quite common for a restaurant to respond to a negative review with their opinion of what happened. The restaurant can let others know that if Roberta had bothered to ask if the sandwich was white meat or dark meat, maybe she would have liked the sandwich. The restaurant wants to make sure readers of the review know she was the problem, not them.
Some restaurants are even taking it a step further, confirming their story with time stamps and closed circuit television screenshots to prove the customer is embellishing their story for pity. If someone said it took 30 minutes to get their food, the restaurant can easily prove that it was only 17 minutes from the time the order was placed until it was set on the table. They literally have the receipts and are happy to correct the reviewer. Then, the restaurant might take a screen shot of the review and response and post it on their socials for likes, clicks and shares.
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My favorite review replies are the ones when restaurants are standing up for their staff. Too often, a customer is quick to name check a server for doing something they didn’t like, but let me remind you, most people who work in the service industry, restaurants or retail, do not want to see their name posted on a review, especially when it’s negative. The point can be made without naming names.
Our Take:
I remember getting a one-star review at my restaurant that was completely unhinged. The writer went off on a server — except the server they named didn’t even work there. Then they tore apart a couple of dishes, the lamb and the Caesar salad… which had never once been on our menu. So yeah, I’ve always had a particular distaste for Yelp and Google reviews. I’ve had friends who own steakhouses get one-star reviews for “being too meat heavy.” You can’t make this up. It’s ridiculous. Which is why I take one-star reviews with a big grain of salt.
That being said, responding — even with receipts — can be a very slippery slope. There are times when it’s necessary, but the first step is always to investigate. At our restaurant, managers filed nightly reports documenting service including sales, covers, weather, 86’s, issues, and unhappy guests. If an unhappy guest had a reservation, we’d also have the guest’s name and info. More than once, the note was basically: “They’re definitely going to write a bad review.”
From there we asked questions:
Did we go above and beyond to help this guest?
Was there anything we could have done better?
Was there a mistake on our end? If so, how did we rectify?
What was their demeanor coming in, and what was it leaving?
Some guests are destined to be unhappy, were these guests those types?
Those details gave us the tools to decide whether to thoughtfully respond, let it go, or in the cases of outright fabrication, dispute the review and try to have it removed. Personally, I’m not a fan of engaging with the overtly outrageous reviews — it’s bait, and most readers can spot the crazy. But I applaud operators who do choose to engage.
What I wish more guests understood is how much their reviews actually impact a business. I’m not sure of the exact algorithm, but I know ratings influence where a restaurant shows up in Google search results — and they definitely affect placement on reservation platforms. (In the unfortunate case of Yelp, you can always pay for placement.)