Food for Thought

Amidst all the industry forecasts that change like weather forecasts, sometimes the restaurant industry talking heads really get it right.  They certainly did on Soul Daddy, the reality-TV launched concept that recently closed 2 of its 3 launch locations.  The knock pre-launch was that new restaurant operations are hard, and so launching 3 restaurants in [...]

This article in the New York Times, plus my interview in Fast Company, got me thinking again about Groupon economics.  To be clear, I’m talking here about the Daily Deal type offers, not more sophisticated customer-targeted, location-based, fill-up-empty-seats-right-now types of offers. Here’s the crux, a restaurateur describing a successful Groupon in which a consumer receives a [...]

Earlier this month, Church’s Chicken closed all of its Nashville locations for 18 hours for employees to attend “an intense customer service training boot camp”.  While extreme, the “close and train” theme had occurred before.  In 2008, Starbucks famously closed all 7,100 of its American stores for 3 hours to train staff.  According to a [...]

In Restaurant SmartBrief’s list of Top Ten articles of 2010, there is an interesting cautionary tale about Groupon.  Well worth reading.  Yet again, the curse of redemption without incrementality strikes.

McDonald’s is testing “Garden Fresh Wraps”, which appear to be the evolution of prior a new product concept they’ve been trying for awhile: a portable, chicken “non-sandwich”.  Of course, as with all QSR product tests, the big issue is incrementality.  Even if I sell a lot of the new product, did I sell less of something [...]

Several high profile social media campaigns have made the news in the restaurant world, including Applebee’s Veteran’s Day campaign, Chili’s FourSquare chips & salsa promo, and McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Chipotle on Facebook Deals. As these offers become more mainstream among major restaurant chains, the way restaurants invest in and measure social media will need to [...]

I live in an upper middle-class suburb of San Francisco, where 99% of the population speaks outstanding English.  This train station is on the BART line that commuters take from that suburb into San Francisco or Oakland.  My best guess is that thousands of people pass under this ad each weekday, and maybe a dozen or [...]

The most interesting part of this article, in Ad Age, is the comments section.  The ad world sure doesn’t like it when a company drops the agency and brings creative in-house! Chipotle’s position is interesting to us because it presents an ongoing challenge:  how do you keep the “green” message fresh, and how do you [...]

We’ve written before about the major 2010 wave of financial buyers (i.e., private equity) taking advantage of depressed prices for restaurant companies.  Could the strategic buyers (i.e., other restaurant companies) now be coming out of the woodwork? Of course, the major news on this front is the Claim Jumper situation, with Landry’s potentially stepping in [...]