Many of the
retail food industry junior executives went to school 14 years ago and have
begun to make their mark on their particular niche. The rest of us member the ‘industry buzz’ of
the day it was a book by Thomas L. Friedman title: The World is Flat. In that book Friedman contended a company
must be built to change if it wants to last.
Regular
readers of this blog remind me of that more often than I want to say. I will say that many legacy chain restaurants
that did not evolve fast enough have simply been slowly fading away. Today food industry success is a four-step
process according to Foodservice Solutions®
Grocerant Guru® Steven Johnson. Those four steps are Build, Measure,
Learn, and Repeat always in an effort to drive relevance to today’s consumers.
Chain
Restaurant success is determined by consumer’s choice. The options
consumers have for dinner have evolved to such a point that going to a
restaurant for dinner is not the top choice for most consumers. Here is an
example how non-traditional fresh food retailers side-step old fashion
positioning for more customer focused, fresher, faster, food and beverage
relevance that is built to evolve.
Starbucks is very
close to 50 years old, bureaucratic, yet more innovative than most chain
restaurants. However, is that enough in
2019? Like any bureaucratic company
Starbucks has big plans for China. Today, China is the company’s second
largest, after the U.S., and its fastest growing. Starbucks added nearly 600
locations there in its most recent fiscal year. It is now China’s largest
coffee chain according to press reports.
Now getting back to
customer relevance. Today Starbucks’ dominance in China is under threat from a
company that didn’t exist just two years ago. That company is Luckin Coffee,
which was founded in 2017, already has more than 2,000 locations in China and
is quickly adding more. In fact, it announced that it plans to open
another 2,500 locations by the end of 2019.
Think about its Starbucks has been developing in China for 20 years and
has 3,600 locations there.
Reuters
reported that Luckin’s rapid growth has come at a cost. That cost, the company has been losing money to
spend on its growth. Luckin, is not a traditional startup and different from
Starbucks but wasn’t that what they said about Starbucks 50 years ago? Let me
ask is your brands business model built for yesterday, today or tomorrow?
For
international corporate presentations, educational forums, or keynotes contact:
Steven
Johnson Grocerant Guru at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice
Solutions. His extensive experience as a
multi-unit restaurant operator, consultant, brand / product positioning expert
and public speaking will leave success clues for all. For more information
visit www.GrocerantGuru.com , www.FoodserviceSolutions.us or call
1-253-759-7869
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