Restaurants Need To Refresh and Refocus

Chain restaurant brand protectionism used to be the foundation on which regional, national, and global chains were built according to Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® Grocerant Guru®, Steven Johnson.

Doing the same thing, the same way in a world evolving faster and faster is not working for many chain restaurants since 2008 have been capitulating year over year customer counts to non-traditional channels of fresh food distribution according to Johnson. 

Industry icon Bonnie Riggs of the NPD group reported that “restaurant visits declined slightly in 2016, following a 1-percent yearly growth before”. Recently NPD reported that year over year same store customer traffic figures collected from some 22,000 restaurants showed a 3.6 percent decline in the first quarter of 2017, following a decline that began last year.”

So our grocerant guru® asks if it is the supply of restaurants exceed demands as there are now 29 restaurants for every grocery store in the US or do have many legacy chains help on to brand protectionism to long and simply gone ‘stale’ in the mind’s eye of the consumer?

We ask because many legacy branded chain restaurants have announced that they are reducing the number units they have.  Brands the ilk of Subway, “which has some 27,000 locations, closed hundreds of stores in 2016. McDonald's closed about 200 stores in two years, reporting 14,155 locations in 2016.”

One thing is clear consumers are not eating less.  Consumers are simply buying grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food somewhere else?  Why?  When the customer moves restaurants must move with them.  Our Grocerant Guru® stated “Consumers are dynamic not static brand protectionism is dead if your brand is not evolving your brand will be greatly diminished.”

Foodservice Solutions® specializes in outsourced business development. We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities or a new menu product segment and brand and menu integration strategy.  Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma WA is the global leader in the Grocerant niche visit Facebook.com/Steven Johnson, Linkedin.com/in/grocerant/ or twitter.com/grocerant