Success Clue Zukku Sushi When Life Throws you a Lemon Make Lemonade

Small business everyday face challenges. It’s how you face those challenges and move the goal post forward that matters. While not every day ends the way, you might have planned it. It is in the prepping, planning, and postulating your next steps, ideations, and future that you will find success according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.

So, let's take a look at what Zukku Sushi did when the Covid-19 outbreak began forcing restaurants to close their doors to guests, Zukku Sushi faced a unique dilemma: each of its three locations is housed inside a food hall.

Given they had the three location within food halls they were some of the first eateries to shut down, leaving Zukku’s flagship location in Tampa inaccessible, even to staff. So the restaurant’s leadership got creative in prepping, planning, and postulating what to do next.  

So, Ferdian Jap, a partner at Zukku, said he and his partners reached out to a friend in the business – a restaurant owner whose kitchen was underutilized due to the outbreak – and launched their own version of a ghost kitchen. Thanks to their online ordering platform powered by Paytronix, Jap and his partners have been able to keep operations running across all three locations.

 “We’ve used Open Dining for a while now,” he said, “so we have a good list of customers that we can market to using the email system. Even though we’re in a completely different location, our customers are still ordering from us and we’re reaching out to them to come support us.”

Now understand that in prepping, planning, and postulating years before Zukku collected the email addresses file of all previous online orders and a pop-up on its website to direct guests to the new location for takeout and delivery. Now Jap was able to leverage that self-generated data to help make lemonade out a virus of lemons.

However, Jap acknowledged that it has been an adjustment for the chefs to work in a new kitchen alongside the other restaurant’s employees, but the Paytronix Order & Delivery platform has made it easy for them to remove the items that can’t be made without their usual equipment. All business must make adjustments, evolve business models or risk losing everything according to Johnson.

So, when the Covid-19 outbreak began forcing restaurants to close their doors to guests, Zukku Sushi faced a unique dilemma: each of its three locations is housed inside a food hall. All of the prepping, planning, and postulating had proven valuable as “It was the fastest launch I’ve ever experienced,” Jap said.

You don’t have to be a big company, with a big budget. The Zukku team then used the 800 email addresses it had gathered at the restaurant’s grand opening, along with social media, to tell guests that online ordering was newly available. Incentives were also offered for placing an order online, such as a free item of the week.

As for the other businesses in the food halls, Jap joked that they were “jealous.” He has been connecting them with Paytronix to set up online menus of their own. Are you ready to make lemonade?

Looking for success clues of your own? Foodservice Solutions® specializes in outsourced food marketing and business development ideations. We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities, technology, or a new menu product segment.  Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma WA is the global leader in the Grocerant niche visit us on our social media sites by clicking one of the following links: Facebook,  LinkedIn, or Twitter