Fatburger Drives Brand Relevance with New Partnership

Success does leave clues and FAT Brands the owner of Fatburger and Hurricane Grill & Wings developed incremental success at Hurricane Grill & Wings leveraging a ‘virtual kitchen’ too extend the brands reach. With insights in-hand FAT Brands signed a partnership with Epic Kitchens for both Buffalo’s Express and Fatburger.

According to the last report Fatburgers, Buffalo’s Express and Hurricane Grill & Wings will be available for delivery only in Chicago.  However Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® believes this extended partnership with drive new brand electricity, customer relevance, mutual benefits for all brands and companies.  

When as regular readers of this blog know Fatburger began using its restaurants as virtual kitchens for serving a delivery-only menu for sister brand, Florida-based Hurricane Grill & Wings FAT Brands began to see just how the virtual kitchen strategy pay off during the coronavirus pandemic, FAT Brands is now expanding its virtual kitchen experiment through a partnership with Epic Kitchens in Chicago expanding all brands reach.

Here is how it will work; menus from FAT Brands concepts Fatburger, Buffalo’s Express and Hurricane Grill & Wings, will be prepared at a virtual kitchen facility operated by Epic Kitchens in Chicago. The deal allows FAT Brands to expand its branded concepts in new markets without opening a brick and mortar restaurant. 

At FAT Brands, Epic Kitchens is “acting like a franchisee, where they license and operate multiple brands out of a cloud kitchen facility. The food is prepared and delivered by the major third-party delivery players including Uber Eats, Postmates, DoorDash and Grubhub.”   

CEO Andy Wiederhorn stated “offering multiple off-premise channels is crucial during the coronavirus pandemic. Fatburger, one of the company’s best-known brands, has seen delivery and to-go grow from about 40% of sales to 62% during this crisis.” How are you driving new electricity into you brand and at what cost? Driving new electricity into a legacy brand with a partnership is a good move and will accelerate the marketing messaging for all companies involved according to Johnson.

Just how is your company positioning to grow your brand, the top, and bottom line?  Johnson stated “that in my minds-eye the new electricity must be very efficient for the supply chain and includes such things as fresh foods, online ordering, delivery, plant based foods,  sampling, toy’s, beer, developing brands,  grocerant positioning, fresh food messaging, autonomous delivery, cashier-less retail, plates, glasses, cash-less payments, digital hand-held marketing.

All food and beverage retailers to survive the next generation of retail must embrace the artificial intelligence revolution while simultaneously embracing fresh food and beverages that are portable, fresh, with differentiation that is familiar not different.  Does your retail path forward look more like yesterday than tomorrow? Why? This new partnership does all of that.

Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food marketing ideations look more like yesterday than tomorrow? Interested in learning how Foodservice Solutions® can edify your retail food brand while creating a platform for consumer convenient meal participation, differentiation and individualization?  Email us at: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us or visit us on our social media sites by clicking the following links: Facebook,  LinkedIn, or Twitter