Following in the footsteps of fast casuals branching out into the pizzeria territory, Subway plans to open Subway Pizza Express at University of Nebraska-Lincoln in early 2014. The concept focuses on customizable, made-to-order personal pizzas. Pricing will be similar to Subway’s, falling in the $4-6 range per pizza.
Pizzerias Look to Chipotle as Model
December 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment
With the onslaught of burger, Mexican and and sandwich retail enterprises, pizzerias are one sector that has yet to be amplified in the fast-casual market. That’s where Pizzeria Locale comes in. The Denver restaurant, that Chipotle helped finance, serves pizzas in the same fashion Chipotle serves burritos: made to-order quickly, individually tailored and with higher quality ingredients than its low-end competitors.
Fast casual restaurants like Chipotle and Panera Bread Co. are stealing market share from casual restaurants like Olive Garden where food takes longer to arrive, and fast food chains like McDonald’s where quality is not in the picture whatsoever.
Fine Dining Chefs Joining the Fast Casual Market
December 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Over the past decade, some of the most experienced chefs, who under typical circumstances would only work in fine dining establishments, have expanded their interests to the fast casual sector. Take Chef Bradford Kent, for example. The CIA grad opened Olio Pizzeria & Cafe in Los Angeles, a wood-fired pizza enterprise; however, the thought of serving high-quality pizza to the fortunate few who could afford it did not appeal to him. This triggered Kent to help launch Blaze Pizza, a fast-casual franchise that serves customizable pizzas in two minutes for less than $8. Blaze Pizza is an example of just one of several chef-driven fast-casual concepts to influence the restaurant industry.
Kent claims, “Every chef wants to make a difference and wants people to eat well. There’s nothing cooler for a chef than seeing tens of thousands of people eating their food and blogging about it. It’s way more exciting than making 30 plates per night. This is more important, and most chefs want to be a part of something like that.”
Darren Tristano of Technomic, the leading food-industry research and consulting firm, offers his theory behind the trend, “The reason chefs are going into fast casual is very simple. Opening full-service restaurants is too risky. Fast casual allows chefs the latitude to create better-quality food in an environment convenient to customers and less risky and costly than an upscale restaurant.”
As for franchising, “But while more chefs are making the leap into fast casual, only a few are dipping their toes into franchising. “I think the reason many of them don’t franchise is because they have the finances to grow their businesses independently,” according to Tristano. “They want to keep control over the quality and service. Those are very important to chefs.”
To learn more, visit the original Entrepreneur article.
FDA Plans to Ban Antibiotics in Food-Producing Livestock
December 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The FDA admitted that, “Because antimicrobial drug use in both humans and animals can contribute to the development of antimicrobial resistance, it is important to use these drugs only when medically necessary.” While this truism is not new to most people, it’s important that the FDA is now catching on and planning to take action, as they’ve been under pressure from consumer groups and members of Congress. Drug makers have 90 days to say whether they’ll comply, and then three years to do something.
Restaurants including McDonald’s have already begun transitioning away from antibiotic-treated meat— that is animals that were treated with antibiotics for growth purposes. Tyson Foods also launched a line of antibiotic-free fresh and frozen poultry products and supports “responsible use” of antibiotics by its purveyors.
Cover App: An Easy Payment Solution for Restaurant Meals
December 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The app Cover is revolutionizing the way customers pay for restaurant meals. “What Cover is focused on — removing payments from the table altogether — I really do think that is fundamentally transformational,” according to Denee Carrington, a mobile commerce senior analyst at Forrester Research. “The part of your dining experience that you want to care about or want to remember is not how you paid. The more that can disappear, the better.”
Paying for meals at restaurants can be vexing. The process of getting the server’s attention for the check, waiting for the check, figuring out the appropriate tip and splitting the bill in multiple ways depending on the party size, can be time-consuming and leaves room for errors. Cover allows diners to notify the server at the beginning of the meal that they’ll be paying with the app, and as soon as they’ve finished eating, they are free to leave. Cover handles the bill accordingly with a pre-determined tip percentage the app user has applied. The app also automatically splits the bill amongst all the diners.
Cover is mutually beneficial for restaurant owners; the fees are lower than those of credit cards. Cover also offers following-day deposits in contrast to three to five business days for the average credit card. Circumventing the check process entirely turns tables faster as well.
Several casual restaurants in New York are already using Cover, including Parm, Empellon Cocina and Charlie Bird, to name a few. You can view the full restaurant list here.
Caring for Customers in the Cold
December 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Popular restaurants that often have a loyal, albeit freezing, fan base waiting in line outside, are taking extra measures to ensure guest satisfaction. Dominique Ansel, Shake Shack, Tom’s Restaurant in Brooklyn, and the West Village outpost of Magnolia Bakery are a few retailers that give special treatment to guests waiting in the cold.
Mr. Ansel offers “Winter Pass” tickets, similar to a “Fast Pass” ticket at theme parks like Disney World, that grant customers who arrive from 7-8am the option to pick up a ticket, arrive two hours later, cut the line and receive their Cronut. It’s not uncommon for lines to wrap around the block as early as 5am at Dominique Ansel. As soon as staff arrives to open the trendy SoHo bakery, they begin passing out hot chocolate and madeleine samples to patient customers braving the cold. Mr. Ansel even considered installing heat lamps outside but later vetoed that idea for logistics reasons.
Shake Shack hands out hot chocolate to guests outside each time it snows, and heat lamps are situated in the vicinity of outdoor seating areas. Tom’s Restaurant offers a melange of samples including cookies, coffees, pieces of pancakes, waffles and French toast, which never fails to alleviate the vexation of queuing outside. Magnolia Bakery delivers samples year-round, including their famous banana pudding.
Retailers can take note of these examples of winter generosity. Sometimes all it takes is a few hot chocolate samples to prevent customers from second-guessing their decision to wait on line outside.
The $75 Umami Burger
December 6, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The “better burger” has made headlines as a fast casual burger trend in 2013. Umami’s $75 burger may have just introduced the “best burger” trend in the fast casual market. This carnivorous indulgence comes with dry-aged bryan flattery wagyu beef, vintage port reduction, freshly shaved white truffles and foie gras.
Business Meals: Are Fast Casuals in Jeopardy?
December 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment
As of October, both the frequency and the check average of business meals has increased. Casual and Fine Dining restaurants have become the targets of diners eating out for business-related meals, according to a survey by Consumer Edge Insight.
David Decker, president of Consumer Edge Insight remarked, “A higher-spending business meal customer is a very welcome development for the high-end but also the middle tier of the restaurant industry. For fine-dining restaurants, one of their core customer segments is starting to visit restaurants more often and is more likely to be trading up to fine-dining than a year ago. While this is a smaller customer segment for most casual-dining restaurants in terms of traffic, the higher average spending among this group makes them an important segment to understand and target as much as possible given your brand.”
So what does this mean for limited-service concepts?
Limited-service restaurants wanting to target business diners should seek ways to overcome obstacles to being perceived as less desireable for business-meal occasions. One idea is to promote catering.
Healthy Eating Habits: Messages in Receipts
November 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment
TaraPaige Group hopes you had a happy and healthy Thanksgiving! Now that it’s the day after, many of us still have food on our mind— specifically in the context of how to lose that post-Turkey bloat. Studies from Bloomberg show that healthful tips printed on fast-food receipts actually influence consumers’ decisions. In contrast, consumers have reacted indifferently to caloric content posted next to food items on fast-food menus. Consumers can also personalize the types of messages they receive on their receipts, similar to the customization offered on Netflix. This is in thanks to Nutricate receipts, a program in which the chain Burgerville already witnessed improvements in consumer choices.
Hale & Hearty: Celebrity Chef Soups
November 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Hale & Hearty will feature celebrity chef-created soups from mid-January until mid-March of 2014. Chefs Geoffrey Zakarian, Andrew Carmellini, John DeLucie and Marc Murphy have been confirmed for now. A portion of the proceeds from each soup sold will be donated to charity.
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