Discounting is the penalty legacy chain restaurants pay when the brand becomes stale.

Legacy chain restaurant  have been unwittingly capitulating market share too convenience stores, drug stores and grocery stores Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh and prepared food for years.

Leading the way are convenience stores that studied consumer trends, focused on the consumer, entered the Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat grocerant niche with fresh and prepared quality food capturing additional market share. Currently the C-store sector has posted positive same store sales numbers longer than any other retail food sector.

The restaurant industry has become known as the home of copy-cat menu items and marketing. The restaurant industry is currently filled with unremarkable new food products.  Innovation is not the length of time it takes to copy a competitor’s product, pricing or marketing campaign.

If success leave clues Copy-Cat marketing is simply put unremarkable. Marketing Kid’s Eat Free has been around for years yet when sales are slow it’s at times much easier to take a step back than invest in research and move forward.

Restaurateurs must look outside the box. It might be time that they toured chain drug stores, dollar stores, grocery stores and C-stores for product, packaging and pricing ideations.  Brands are dynamic not static, doing what they did three, four or five years ago simply is not the solution. Deep discounting is the price chain restaurants pay for lack of innovative positioning of both food product and messaging. Foodservice Solutions® 5P’s of food marketing might be a place to start if moving forward with consumer is your goal.

www.FoodserviceSolutions.us Since 1991 retail food consultancy Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma, WA has been the global leader in the Grocerant nichevisit http://www.linkedin.com/in/grocerant, twitter.com/grocerant or Facebook Steven Johnson