Why Customer Counts are Down
And what you can do about it. Most operators blame inflation, or something else, on customer counts being down and surely inflation has had a bearing on the problem. Consumers are still frequenting restaurants, and their hard-earned dollars are going to restaurants that are fulfilling and surpassing their constantly changing needs. Operators must have consistent messages and be constantly communicating with their customers and potential customers. It is not about what operators think, but what they know. Knowledge is power, and it drives more customers in because good decisions are being made that can positively impact the consumer. Consumers and operator teams will react differently if there is greater transparency. Everyone knows that there is a difficult economy, staffing is not easy, and many obstacles exist, but that does not warrant lack of proper communication. It all starts with leadership creating the right culture. Operators must focus on learning from the customers, team members, strategic partners, and other operators. Those that are close-minded and think they have it all figured out will run into many walls that could easily be broken down. Tell a great story and continue to adjust the story, but make sure it is accurate. Marketing a fantasy will be short-lived. The customer is more discerning than ever before. They have a certain amount of money to spend and are looking for restaurants that can meet or exceed their expectations. It does not matter what the level of standard is for a particular restaurant as long as the consumer understands what it is they are paying for and that they are receiving their orders the same way each and every time. A standard, quick service burger and a high-end steak house Kobe burger are quite different and the expectations that go along with each are also different. The key item that both have in common is consistency. If the Kobe burger is great one of three times and the standard burger is consistent every time, the consumer will likely adjust their preference. In today’s marketplace, forgiveness when it comes to a disappointing restaurant experience is becoming nonexistent. Operators must do whatever it takes to be consistent and that may mean simplifying their menu and their overall operation.
Restaurants Ready for the Holiday Rush
With more consumers planning to dine out. Consumers are choosing restaurants this holiday season, according to a new National Restaurant Association survey showing two-thirds (63 percent) of adults plan to eat out during the next several weeks and half (48 percent) plan to order takeout or delivery. “Our research confirms that restaurants serve a practical need during the holiday season—giving guests the gift of time so they can enjoy the warmth of good company with family and friends,” said Michelle Korsmo, President & CEO of the National Restaurant Association. “The data also reveal that takeout and delivery remain critical components of the guest experience for every age group. From Gen-Z to Baby Boomers, restaurants have options to meet every need and taste preference, in this season and throughout the year.” This holiday season, consumers see value in letting restaurants help heighten their meals at home. Sixty-six percent of those choosing to order in from a restaurant will order the entire meal from a restaurant, while many are trusting restaurants with the main course (89 percent), sides (86 percent) or appetizers (74 percent) for their meal. Nearly 2 in 3 (63 percent) will purchase desserts from a restaurant. Given the emergence of TikTok-driven trends at restaurants in the National Restaurant Association’s 2024 What’s Hot Culinary Forecast, owners, operators, and chefs should look for social inspirations when putting together their holiday main courses this year. Chefs from across the U.S. found that consumers want to try new foods, but in a way that’s recognizable, comforting and communal – which lends itself well to the holiday season. For millennials planning to order out this holiday season, the majority (91 percent) said they were most likely to purchase the main course from a restaurant. Why and how consumers choose where to eat this season also differs by generation:
Bielat Santore & Company – Restaurant Industry Alert
MERCER COUNTY, SPORTS BAR/PUB FOR SALE
Photo used to depict “Sport Bar/Pub” only. Not actual representation.
Mercer County, N.J. combination Dive Bar/Sports Pub/Restaurant located on a busy County roadway. Free-standing building at a signalized corner on a half-acre lot with private parking for 40 cars. Serving up “killer pub grub” for almost 25 years. Cozy atmosphere accented by timeless pine wood paneling and rustic beams overhead. The dining room, with fireplace, is newly renovated with a 20 seat separate private room. 20 TVs, easily viewed from anywhere in the bar and dining areas. Family-owned and operated; owners have decided to retire. Detailed information available upon request. Financing available to qualified.
Contact Robert Gillis 732.673-3436 for additional information.
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The Power of a Standout Menu Item
If you don’t have a signature dish, you’re missing an opportunity. It’s important to find a way to stand out in the restaurant industry. One way to do that is to ensure you have one dish on your menu that is to die for. There is real power in having a standout menu item, especially when you’re competing with restaurants that serve the same kind of food as you. For example, I live in the northwest valley in metro Phoenix and within a 3-mile radius of my house there are no less than 10 pizza restaurants … 10! Do you know how many of them I visit? And full disclosure, pizza could be my all-time favorite food, and I’m going to search out pizza on a regular basis. My family and I visit two of the pizzerias in our neighborhood. One offers a Neapolitan wood-fired pizza and one offers the most authentic New-York-style pizza that I can find in my area. It’s not knock-your-socks-off good but it takes me back to my days of walking around in the Theater District in New York City and bar hopping from one little place to the next and then looking for a good slice of pizza. It really feeds those memories. When I was a chief operating officer for a 30-unit restaurant sports bar chain called Famous Sam’s here in Arizona, our pastrami and cheese sandwich was to die for. We offered all the favorite foods of a sports bar but knocked it out of the park with this sandwich. I have a good friend who has a Tex-Mex restaurant outside of Dallas. He trademarked the words “Margarita Capital of Texas.” This is because while his food is amazing, and I’ve been to his restaurant probably a dozen times, people are all about his margaritas. A signature dish doesn’t always have to be off your food menu. It can be a drink. You have to be known for something that makes you better than everybody else, something different, something that somebody has to have. You want people coming in on a routine basis for it.
Your 2024 Marketing Checklist
9 strategies to boost your brand in the new year. As the New Year approaches, it’s the ideal time to take stock of your business’s marketing strategies, and assess where opportunities lie. From ensuring you’re fully leveraging all digital channels, to exploring brand collaborations, and investing in visual assets, we outline 9 recommendations to help boost your brand’s visibility and appeal—ensuring you stand out in an increasingly competitive landscape. (i) Be A Guest in Your Own Brand. When you are immersed in your business every day, it’s easy to overlook small details that can greatly impact how your guests experience your brand. Step back and “discover” your brand from the perspective of a brand new guest. Take a fresh look at assets such as your website, social media profiles, menus, and newsletters. A key thing to note is whether your brand identity is uniform across all channels. This includes using the same logos, colors, tone, and messaging so that customers have a consistent experience whether they see an ad on Facebook, receive an email, or visit your restaurant. A unified and seamless experience for guests across the physical and digital worlds is essential. People interact with your brand at various touch points along the customer journey, and ensuring that each interaction—from discovery, to dining, and post-dining experience—tells a cohesive story, will serve to effectively engage your target audience, enhance brand recognition, and strengthen customer loyalty. (ii) Conduct A Website Check-Up. Your website is one of the most important marketing tools for your business. With so many options available to guests these days, any friction in navigating your site, finding the desired information, or getting a clear visual sense of what you offer, could be the difference between you securing or losing a booking. When assessing your current website, take a step back and think like a guest—what if I knew nothing about what you are offering? What information is most important? Does the imagery entice me to visit?
How One Multi-Million Fund is Revamping the Approach to Growth Capital
Emerging fund hopes to raise $100 million for next generation of social entertainment concepts. The Emerging Fund, a strategic firm looking to invest in the hottest emerging concepts and technology companies the food and beverage industry has to offer, prefers not to be compared to venture capital or private equity. CEO and founder Matthew Focht says the company isn’t looking for “50 bets to win two or three.” It’s also not gunning for majority stakes in its invested concepts. Yes, capital is a portion of the agreement, but that’s what it truly is—a portion. Focht has been around long enough to know there isn’t a money issue in the industry today. Good concepts and tech companies get funded. What they don’t always have is a credible growth partner who understands the importance of strategy and mentorship and ensures a sustainable future. “We see ourselves positioned to be better than anybody else,” Focht says. “And right now we’re obviously seeking to close out our fund and bring in some more strategic investors. So anybody that has affinity for the space, we’d love to talk to them.” The Emerging Fund launched in March and has since raised roughly $56 million. The goal is to reach $100 million, which Focht estimates will happen sometime during Q2 of next year. Thus far, the company’s investment portfolio includes social entertainment concepts like Puttshack, Flight Club, and F1 Arcade, and technology firms such as Overproof, a business intelligence agency in the adult beverage segment, and Tablz, a 3D table booking solution. The fund is years in the making. It gains strength from two verticals operated by Focht and his team—Buyer’s Edge Platform, a software platform assisting with supply chain logistics, and Emerging, a company well-versed in the real estate segment. Through these resources, the Emerging Fund is connected to a food and beverage network of more than 225,000 locations.
The Restaurant Trends That Defined 2023
These were the restaurant trends that shaped a year of eating out. This year we drank pickletinis and MSG martinis and dirty pasta water martinis and, for good measure, about three dozen espresso martinis. We ate dinner at 1 a.m. and stepped into restaurants that looked more like amusement parks than neighborhood pizza spots. It was a fun, wild, exciting year for restaurant culture, shaped as much by TikTok food influencers as restaurant critics. As the industry continues to bounce back from the pandemic, it feels for the first time like many restaurants have been able to get out from under the heavy weight of the past few years and have some fun—or at least try new things. Of course, it’s not all cheese pulls and Technicolor dining rooms: Soaring inflation means that restaurants are contending with even-thinner-than-usual margins, and ordering a salad can be like putting down first month’s rent. Plus, people are still arguing about when—and how much—to tip, and scoring a reservation at a buzzy restaurant can feel like a contact sport. From good to bad and all that’s in between, these were the most persistent restaurant trends of 2023. My favorite bit of restaurant decor is a lamp that sits at the entryway of the tropically inspired Lil’ Deb’s Oasis in Hudson, New York. Inside the glass column, two dancing jellyfish pulse and flash, filling the room—already a sensory overload of color and sound—with neon light. Though Lil’ Deb’s has been leaning into all-out maximalism since it opened in 2016, it’s now joined by a wave of over-the-top, wonderfully overwhelming restaurants. At Shuggie’s, the San Francisco restaurant dedicated to food waste prevention and natural wine, one room is entirely green and the other is painted an almost headache-inducing yellow. Even as I dug into an excellent pan pizza, my attention-deficit brain strained to focus. There was so much to absorb! I left the restaurant very full and feeling like I’d just spent the night at a rave.
A Federal Court Reinstates a Lawsuit
Alleging Sysco shorted restaurants on chicken deliveries. A lawsuit alleging Sysco repeatedly shortchanged several Florida restaurants on their chicken purchases has been reinstated by a federal appeals court, clearing the way for a possible class action. The suit alleges that cartons of chicken shipped by a Sysco facility to the restaurants contained less than the 40 pounds of poultry the establishments had ordered. Yet, the plaintiffs allege, they were charged for the full 40 pounds. The plaintiffs are A1A Burrito Works, A1A Burrito Works Taco Shop 2 and their parent company, Juniper Beach Enterprises. They have asked that the suit be certified as a class action, which would potentially open the complaint to other restaurant plaintiffs. The suit had been dismissed in March 2022 because a lower federal court ruled it did not have jurisdiction in the matter. The complaint, originally filed in a state court, alleged that the Sysco facility in Jacksonville, Fla., had violated state regulations governing labeled shipments. Sysco successfully moved that the lawsuit be moved to a federal court, which dismissed the matter because it pivoted on state regulations, over which it had no jurisdiction. The plaintiffs recently appealed that ruling, arguing that the shorted shipments were a straightforward violation of their distribution contract with Sysco. The U.S. Eleventh District Court of Appeals affirmed that it had no oversight of the state law originally invoked by the complainants, but decided that the lower court was wrong in not considering the breach of contract allegations.
Did You Know?
20 restaurants open for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day at the Jersey Shore. Tired of cooking a big holiday meal? Go ahead and make a reservation. Think of it as a gift you can give yourself. Fewer restaurants are open on Christmas with each passing year, but there are some — and there are plenty open on Christmas Eve. Here are 20 to visit — just be sure to call ahead as many require reservations.
Employee Tip
The golden age of restaurant worker wage growth is over. Restaurant workers’ wage growth has slipped considerably since the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, falling below even pre-pandemic rates. That’s per Square’s new third quarter restaurant industry report, and includes base wages, tips and overtime. Why it matters: It’s a sign that restaurants are no longer quite as desperate for workers as they were during the late pandemic era, when many struggled to replace employees who had left for other industries during the pandemic slowdown. It’s also a reflection of inflation’s impact on restaurants and consumers alike.
