The Future of Food and Beverage Management Research

Abstract

This article offers an overview of the current state of food and beverage management research and some recommendations for the future development of the field. It begins from the premise that establishing such an overview requires an appreciation of the condition and consequences of hospitality research more generally for food and beverage research. A second premise is that understanding of food and beverage research is inseparable from comprehending the nature and role of food and beverage education more generally within the hospitality field. The central theme developed from this is that food and beverage management research is a Cinderella subject even within the hospitality field, where the latter has more generally largely failed to establish credibility within the academy. The irony of this situation lies in the fact that food and beverage management is one of the central subjects that potentially defines hospitality management. The near-utopian prescriptions for the future of food and beverage management research centre on building connections to other food-related research and hence to hospitality, eschewing much of what currently passes for hospitality management research in an effort to rebuild the subject field around the industry's core concerns.