CD-based reference aid for menu planning

Hogadata, a European company set up in 1987, has formed a UK subsidiary, Hogadata CCS.

Managing director of the new company is AnthonyNovissimo, former head of sales for the hotels sector at Siemens Nixdorf, for whom Hogadata did some development work from 1987 to 1990.

Its first product, to be launched in Britain next month, is Tragastro, a database of food expressions. Stored in seven languages on compact disk (CD), Tragastro runs on personal computers (PCs) using the Windows operating environment.

The product is being marketed to hotels, restaurants and conference centres, and also to colleges, who can use it as an academic reference source as well as for catering purposes.

Users can search the system for the dishes to make up a function menu, extract the data into a word processor and print out menus.

For international conferences, for example, the same menu could be presented in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch or Flemish, as well as being printed in English.

Menu planners can search the database for themes, such as dishes from a particular country.

Tragastro also includes preparation methods, formats of presentation and photographs.

Hogadata has already placed Tragastro with an American wholesaler, and is looking for UK distributors, which it plans to appoint by mid-April. The package costs £199 plus VAT, and Hogadata aims to sell 1,000 copies in the UK in the first year.

The company also has a hotel point-of-sale system, Hoga POS, which it says has already been installed in several hundred European sites; it will be launched in Britain in May.

And later in the summer the company will launch Hoga HOTEL, believed to be the first hotel property management system written to run in the operating environment, Windows NT.

Hogadata CCS sales manager Adrian Young expects to sell Hoga HOTEL in "shrink-wrapped", or ready-to-use form, through distributors, for use as a single-user system for very small hotels, although it will also run a 1,000-bedroom hotel and such installations will be carried out and supported by Hogadata.

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