Food for Thought

Operators understand very acutely the effectiveness of price changes – after all, nothing else in the business can impact the bottom-line so directly. Despite this appreciation for the importance of pricing, the sophistication by which most companies manage prices is woefully inadequate. Industry pricing “leaders” comment on the problem frequently, revealing “we should remind our [...]

Jonathan, Josh, and Michelle from APT enjoyed attending this year’s RLC in Scottsdale. Political punditry aside, the burgeoning marketplace for daily deal sites and social media continued to be a hot topic – as the novelty of these coupon channels wears off, we are seeing operators move past simple redemption stats to understand what impact [...]

Location based marketing is “here.” From Chili’s to Target, leading restaurants and retailers are showing an enthusiasm for piloting offerings from a range of hot New York and Silicon Valley start-ups including Foursquare, Shopkick, and Gowalla. While each location-based service (LBS) is unique, they are all oriented around a central core principal: offers and coupons are [...]

This post is the third in a three part series on ideas that will shape restaurant performance in 2011. Part Three: Marketing

This post is the second in a three part series on ideas that will shape restaurant performance in 2011. Part three will follow next week. Part Two: Expansion, Investments & Operations

UPDATE: During their earnings call earlier this week, Starbucks announced that over 3 million payments were received via mobile phones. That makes Starbucks the largest mobile payments system in the world… Starbucks recent announcement of an iPhone app that can be used to pay at the register has received a lot of press this week. [...]

Happy New Year from all of us at APT’s Food for Thought. 2011 promises to be an eventful year in the restaurant space and we’ve heard a number of bets, top 10s, and guesses for what the year, and the strengthening economic recovery, will hold. We’ve synthesized these ideas into a special series, in three [...]

As we’ve discussed before, convenience stores have their sites trained on the lucrative quick service prepared foods market. Through a languishing economic recovery, consumers are looking for quick and convenient meal options at affordable prices without sacrificing quality. Many c-store operators believe prepared foods to be key to customer loyalty and higher profitability. For example, [...]

The restaurant business is full of concepts that have gone stale.  Mindful of their sizeable investment (a sunk cost!), many restaurants attempt to enhance or revive their tired platforms with mixed success.  Rarer, but more important and much riskier, is the “relevance reset” – something big, announced with great PR fanfare and paid media – [...]