Yum Brands Elevate Educate Execute Success Clues

 

Success does leave clues and Yum Brands has picked up its share of them. In an ongoing effort to garner a broad market appeal created a new platform to recruit, elevate, educate, and execute on both long-term and short team goals and objectives according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.

The future looks bright as Yum Brands and the University of Louisville announced the creation of a business education program on franchising and targeted at women and people of color. The Yum Center for Global Franchise Excellence will focus on recruiting and educating underrepresented people of color and women on the possibilities franchising holds as a “pathway to entrepreneurship.” The effort is targeted at both new and existing franchisees.

So, the center is part of the Louisville, Ky.-based Yum’s “Unlocking Opportunity Initiative” in which it committed $100 million over five years to promote equity and inclusion for employees, frontline restaurant teams and communities around the world.

University of Louisville President Neeli Bendapudi, stated, “We believe that combining the resources and expertise of the University of Louisville with Yum Brands will create an unrivaled resource for world-class training in franchising that will help people everywhere, particularly underrepresented people of color and women, succeed in franchise ownership and management”.

Regular readers of this blog know that, Yum Brands operates KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and Habit Burger. The vast majority of the chains' 50,000 global restaurants are owned by franchisees. Thus this center builds on the university’s existing franchising education tracks within the College of Business, which include a graduate program and an executive-level franchise management certificate. This will create new electricity for both the University and Yum Brands according to Johnson.

So, the center added an undergraduate franchising track within the bachelor of Business Administration program in the spring semester this year. Franchising industry experts at the university, with experts from Yum Brands, will lead the curriculum development.

Focused on improving equity, the center will recruit diverse students to its programs, research the reasons for lower ownership among women and people of color and create podcasts and a journal to share franchise education and news with owners and managers.

Once again regular readers of this blog know that franchising is strong in the U.S. The International Franchise Association projects the industry will have more than 780,000 total outlets and employ 8.2 million people in the U.S. alone by the end of this year. But women and people of color have historically been underrepresented as franchise owners.

“Franchising is one of the best paths to entrepreneurship, creating an opportunity to build generational wealth,” Kathleen Gosser, executive in residence at the University of Louisville College of Business, said in a statement. “Our goal is to uncover and reduce barriers to franchise ownership, starting with education.”

According to Johnson, “Brand relevance is in part driven with innovation in new menu related products in combination with new avenues of distribution all of which are the platform for the new electricity.”

Johnson stated “that in my minds-eye the new electricity must be very efficient for the supply and includes such things as fresh foods, music, developing brands, unique urban hemp clothing, grocerant positioning, fresh food messaging, autonomous delivery, cashier-less retail, plates, glasses, cash-less payments, digital hand-held marketing.

All retailers to survive the next generation of retail must embrace the artificial intelligence revolution while simultaneously embracing fresh food that is portable, fresh, with differentiation that is familiar not different.  How is your brand building new electricity?

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 us on our social media sites by clicking one of the following links: Facebook,  LinkedIn, or Twitter