Fast-Casual Restaurants Lead Traffic Growth in 2013

February 6, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Nation’s Restaurant News reports that the fast-casual segment lead traffic growth for the fifth consecutive year. Market research firm, the NPD Group, discovered that total customer visits to fast-casual restaurants increased 8 percent in 2013 compared with flat traffic overall for all restaurant segments.

“Overall, restaurant customers are trading down, foregoing some of their visits to full-service places while increasing the number of visits made to fast-casual restaurants,” justified Bonnie Riggs, The NPD Group’s restaurant industry analyst. “Fast-casual concepts are capturing market traffic share by meeting consumers’ expectations, while midscale and casual-dining places continue to lose share.”

The check average for fast-casuals was $7.40 during the twelve months that ended last November. The quick-service segment’s average was at $5.30 and casual dining’s $13.66.

Filed Under: Global Market Buzz, Operations Tagged With: ,

Restaurant Visits with Deals & Discounts Increase Across the Board

December 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The NPD Group reports that restaurant visits at enterprises using a deal or discount increased across all segments during the first nine months of 2013. Non-deal customer traffic has been flat in 2013 after two years of positive growth. Discounted-price traffic in all sectors of the industry increased 4 percent, and deal-price 2 percent.

NPD restaurant analyst Bonnie Riggs offers insight as to why casual-dining chain traffic declined by 1 percent this year, “In my view, the industry tried to move away from heavy discounting last year but found it was just not feasible with consumers still closely watching their spending. It is deal-related traffic that is keeping the industry from registering traffic losses. Casual dining has really ramped up with its deals, but unfortunately it hasn’t stopped traffic declines, which may mean that its deal offers aren’t resonating with cost-conscious consumers.”

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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.

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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.

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