Restaurants Battling Ambiance of My Office Chair, My Couch, My TV

When fast casual restaurants, quick service restaurants, and full service restaurants don’t provide fast service, distinctive differentiated fresh food, bundled Mix and Match meal components customer counts will decline.

The competitive fresh food landscape is evolving faster than legacy chain restaurants operators have been willing to accept.  With continue flat or down year over year customer counts the restaurant sector is feeling the undercurrents of consumer migration according to Foodservice Solutions® Grocerant Guru™ Steven Johnson. 

There is a “direct correlation between customer frequency of visits, speed of service, price and portability” according to Johnson each directly relating back to Foodservice Solutions® 5 P’s of Food Marketing.

Technomic reported new research that directly supports Foodservice Solutions® findings specifically: 

·         Sixty-four percent of consumers report visiting fast-food restaurants at least weekly, and 40 percent patronize fast casuals as often.

·         Patronage is significantly more frequent at fast-food than at fast-casual concepts; twice as many consumers visit fast-food (39 percent) as fast-casual (19 percent) restaurants more often than once a week.

·         Delivery occasions have increased slightly at LSRs. Further, more than a quarter expect fast-food (30 percent) and fast-casual (28 percent) delivery, while similar proportions say this service could encourage patronage.

Many legacy restaurants have discounted this global trend.  Legacy operators don’t’ understand the undercurrents of fresh prepared food customer’s migration and the scale of success it is finding.  Let’s take a quick look at what is happening. 

Elliot Fread, CEO of Long Island City-based Bimmy’s (a gourmet wholesale catering company) sales “11,000 sandwiches, salads, and other prepared meals to just 44 Walgreens (Duane Reade NYC).  That is 250 meal occasions a day per location that at one time went to restaurants or could be going to a restaurant today. How many meals to you sell a day? 

In the Philippines Chef Claude helped launch three packaged Filipino comfort dishes through the country’s 7-Eleven franchise “that aim to be healthier and better tasting than typical ready-to-eat meals.” That is immediately consumable fresh foods which id & Elevens focus. Emmanuel Lee Esguerra, marketing communications manager of Philippine Seven Corporation, stated: “Although Chef Creations is more expensive than our usual meals, it is market dictated.” He added that it took almost a year to finalize the three meals because Chef Claude wanted to guarantee tasty meals without compromising on ingredients. “Everything was made from scratch; no instant powder was used,”

7 Eleven is clearly focused on customer frequency of visits, speed of service, price and portability and seeking to garner additional restaurant customer migration with Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat Grocerant niche fresh prepared food. Is you company selling meals to the customer of yesterday or the customer of today?  Are your customer counts increasing?  By the way don’t forget Pinkies Liquor stores are selling fresh in store prepared Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat food.

Can outside eyes help your company? FoodservcieSolutions® excels with Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh food for QSR’s, Full Service restaurants, C-stores and Deli’s with a focused Build, Measure, Learn, and Repeat steps to success program? Visit: www.FoodserviceSolutions.us or Call: 253-759-7869 Success Does Leave Clues