IKEA Restaurants are the Foundation for Growth

The restaurants within IKEA stores have become destination dinning points that drive sales according to Foodservice Solutions® Grocerant Guru®. Recently IKEA announced that it was going to  remodeled restaurants as its food business continues to excel.

The remodeled restaurants will feature “three distinct areas: a family area, a coffee break section and an area for general seating”.  In the beginning the restaurants at Ikea  opened as a way to get customers to buy more tables, chairs, and lamps and as a way to give them a break from the large maze-like showrooms. 

Times have changes today, “the restaurants are a big reason, and sometimes the only reason, why customers drive to the mammoth blue and yellow stores. Sally Grant, food manager at Ikea in Sunrise, FL stated “The restaurants will feature a family zone, located near the condiments so parents don't have to wander too far from their little ones. It will include a counter with a bottle warmer and play stations.

Grant went on to say “There's also "fika": an area with couches for people to have a quick coffee break, and general seating, which includes a communal dining area with a series of tables lined next to each other.”

Ikea's stated goal is to “create spaces where shoppers can gravitate to, depending on who they are with and how much time they want to spend in the restaurant, Grant continued and if they like the décor, the sofa they are sitting on or the table where they set their coffee, customers can ask employees where in the store they can find it, she said”.

We are talking big numbers when it comes to foodservice sales at Ikea.   Ikea says its food division (restaurant and grocery sections) serves more than 600 million customers a year. Ikea's U.S. food sales went up 8 percent from Sept. 1, 2014, to Aug. 31, 2015, compared with the year before, Grant said. Store sales overall jumped 4.5 percent, she said.

The Wall Street Journal reported in October 2013 that Ikea’s food sales were $ 2 Billion a year.  Today IKEA reports that they sell more than 1 billion meatballs a year its signature item and part of the menu since 1985. Success does leave clues and at IKEA those clues can be found in Price, Value, Service. 

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