Speed Winds: The Restaurants That Hire First Are Winning the Talent Race
An unfilled restaurant position impacts far more than recruiting. In a competitive labor market, restaurants that respond quickly to applicants can gain an edge in securing top hourly talent before it disappears. For years, restaurant hiring has been treated like a numbers game. Post a job, collect applications, review resumes, schedule interviews, and hope the best candidate is still available when you’re ready to make a decision. Today’s hiring market doesn’t work that way. One of the biggest competitive advantages in restaurant hiring isn’t offering the highest wage or the biggest signing bonus. Increasingly, it’s speed. Great candidates have options, and the restaurant that reaches them first often has the best opportunity to hire them. Great Candidates Don’t Stay on the Market. Hourly workers aren’t necessarily spending weeks evaluating opportunities. Many are applying to multiple restaurants at the same time, often directly from their phones and sometimes within minutes of each other. The first employer to acknowledge an application, answer questions, and invite a qualified candidate to an interview immediately stands out. By the time another restaurant reviews applications two or three days later, that same candidate may already have an interview scheduled or have accepted another position. Hiring delays don’t just cost time. They cost talent. Think about two restaurants hiring for the exact same position. The first reviews applications every few days. A manager manually contacts candidates, waits for responses, and goes back and forth trying to schedule interviews. The second responds almost immediately. The candidate gets their questions answered, selects an interview time, and could be sitting across from a manager the following day. Both restaurants might offer similar compensation, culture, and opportunities. The difference is that one created momentum while the candidate was still interested. That’s the advantage of speed…
Bold Game-Day Flavors Create Fall Menu Success
Without adding ingredient complexity. Football season is an opportunity on the restaurant calendar, but winning game-day menus do not require operators to load the pantry with new ingredients. My advice is to think like a quarterback: read what the defense is giving you, understand the tools already in your kitchen and call the play your team can execute. When the Ken’s Foods culinary team works with an operator, we begin by looking for gaps in the menu and studying the pantry. I want to know which dressings, barbecue sauces and pantry ingredients the kitchen stocks. From there, we can pair those items with products from Ken’s®, Sweet Baby Ray’s® and Kogi L.A. Street Sauces™ to create distinctive flavors without adding extra SKUs. Think of it as a mystery-basket exercise. A core sauce provides a consistent starting point, while ingredients on hand help make it your own. An operator serving a Latin-inspired menu might begin with Buffalo sauce, then add Valentina hot sauce, butter, cayenne or cumin. The result delivers the familiar Buffalo experience guests want, but with the restaurant’s own flavor signature. That balance between familiar and new is especially important during football season. Guests arrive expecting wings, loaded fries, nachos, burgers, handhelds and dips. Instead, use sauce to move them in a fresh direction through smoke, acidity, sweetness, heat and global flavor. Heat should build rather than overwhelm. Hot honey works because guests taste sweetness first, followed by a gradual kick. That progression can be created with spicy peach, sweet red chili or mango habanero. Smoke adds dimension alongside sweet heat. Imagine smoked pastrami topped with jalapeño-honey sauerkraut on a telera or bolillo-style roll. It is recognizable enough to feel comfortable but different enough to earn attention…
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Prepare Your Delivery Operations for Fall
Take another look at the delivery menu. Fall changes how people order delivery. Cooler weather keeps more customers indoors, football gives them another reason to order in, and school and extracurricular schedules shift when families sit down for dinner. Restaurants won’t know exactly how demand will change until the orders start coming in. But the weeks leading into fall are a good time to review summer performance and address any weak spots before ordering habits shift. Preparing for a new season doesn’t require overhauling your entire delivery operation. Start with the areas that have the biggest impact on profitability and the customer experience—from what customers see on your online menu to how easily they can place their next order. A restaurant’s dining room menu and delivery menu do not have to look identical. Some dishes travel better than others, while certain items may require packaging or preparation that makes them less practical for off-premise orders. Before fall, operators can review their recent orders to see which items customers frequently order for delivery and which ones rarely leave the kitchen. Sales volume only tells part of the story, so restaurants should also consider preparation time, packaging costs and how well each dish holds up between the kitchen and the customer’s table. Seasonal menu changes deserve the same consideration, because a fall special that works well in the dining room may need different packaging or preparation for delivery. Restaurants should test new items before adding them to the online menu so they know how the food will arrive after spending time in transit…
Why Dining Decisions Are Defaults
The Gap Between Aspiration and Habit. Dining decisions are primarily driven by frequency and habit rather than deliberate choice. Data shows the places people have shown what they aspire to eat, while their visits show how they actually eat. For example, sushi, Italian, and Mexican are gaining shares of saves, while coffee shops, bars, and bakeries dominate real-world visits. Coffee alone accounts for approximately a quarter of all visits, with more than half coming from repeat customers. “It’s all about frequency, ” Gomez-Hall noted. “A coffee shop can be an everyday habit, but a sushi bar is more likely a date night or birthday treat. Coffee is cheap, daily, and attached to routines that already exist (the commute, the work session, the walk), so it stacks visits no other category can touch.” At the halfway point, the shape of the data fits a value-conscious year. Fast food is a top-three category by visits, and nearly half of its volume is repeat customers. Sandwich shops and delis are both close to 50 percent. The high-loyalty end of the data is almost entirely cheap and fast, he added. “People are routinizing the cheap stuff and saving up the expensive stuff for occasions. The defaults are being set by price and proximity, not by ambition. Today, a saved list is more like what someone wants their eating life to look like, and the visits are what fits the week they actually have.” A number of trends have been revealed in the data including people becoming more adventurous about where they want to dine, how they view their daily coffee habit and, the return of bars for socializing…
Proposed Bill Would End Restaurant Purchases With Food Stamps
A new bill introduced to the House could eliminate the program entirely. While the current federal SNAP program is mostly confined to grocery store purchases, there is a voluntary provision that affects restaurants: the Restaurant Meals program. Currently, the program is available in only nine states and allows certain eligible individuals (including the elderly, disabled, and homeless) to use their SNAP EBT cards in select restaurants. While under current federal law, most SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) purchases must be made at grocery stores, there are some exceptions. Nine states (California, Illinois, Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia) participate in the Restaurant Meals Program to some degree, which allows eligible participants, including the elderly, disabled, and homeless, to purchase prepared meals at certain restaurants. However, H.R. 10268, recently introduced to the U. S. House of Representatives by Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas), and cosponsored by seven Republican Congresspeople, would eliminate the Restaurant Meals Program from SNAP by amending the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008. Why should foodservice care: Many popular quick-service chains participate in this program, including McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and Burger King. The program has also been expanding in recent years and could be active next in multiple states, including Colorado…
Food Delivery is Booming at the Movie Theater
Delivery sales are up nearly 50% at AMC Theatres this year. No trip to the movies is complete without popcorn. But more consumers are deciding to buy concessions without ever setting foot in the theater. AMC Theatres revealed this week that food delivery sales at its cinemas are up nearly 50% year over year and are now a multimillion-dollar business for the world’s largest theater chain. The 850-unit AMC offers most of its concessions, including popcorn, for delivery via third-party services DoorDash, Uber Eats, and, as of this week, Grubhub, in select locations. It has found surprising demand for movie snacks outside of the movie theater. “It’s hard to beat having it fresh at the theatre, but we also know people want to enjoy those same foods at home, whether it’s for a movie night in, a gathering, or simply because they’re craving it,” said Cassie Kennard, AMC’s manager of media relations, in an email. One of AMC’s best-selling delivery items is popcorn, and it has leaned into that demand with the AMC MegaBag, a giant sack of freshly made popcorn that is packaged for takeout and comes with a buttery topping on the side. But the theater chain has also been expanding its food and beverage options beyond the usual movie theater fare. In May, it added new items to its Feature Fare lineup of “elevated” snacks, including street corn poppers, popcorn chicken, dill pickle pretzel bites, and a hot honey sausage pizza…
Did You Know?
When one ingredient becomes an outbreak: Why food safety depends on layers. Food safety events often become visible to consumers only after illnesses are reported, recalls are issued, and public health agencies begin connecting the dots. But for those of us who work in food safety every day, these events are also a reminder of something more fundamental: prevention has to be built long before a product reaches the kitchen…
Employee Tip
Food Safety in Focus. September marks National Food Safety Education Month, bringing back-of-house (BOH) operational standards, technology, and food safety culture to the forefront. Thirty-four percent of operators ranked maintaining food safety and quality standards among their top three operational challenges across both FOH and BOH in the 2026 Restaurant Readiness Outlook, a survey of 400 QSR and fast-casual operators conducted by Censuswide, revealing insights into industry pain points…