There
is no let up in our love for fresh food fast.
The simple fact is Americans love fast food restaurants more today than
ever before and there is no sign that is going to change for some time to come.
That according to Steven Johnson Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.
Consumer
have become a custom mix and match meal component bunding which includes
bunding meals and meal components form multiple branded fast-food outlets to
make the perfect family meal. Consumers
are dynamic not static. to Here are some
2023 numbers to highlight just how dynamic the food-fast sector has become:
1. Recent Grocerant ScoreCards found 82.3% of consumers
don’t know what’s for dinner at Noon, and 61.8 %don’t know what’ s for dinner at 4PM.
2. Roughly 63.7% of consumers purchase prepared food items from a
retail location at least three times a month.
3.
79.6% all dinners have at least 1
grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat meal component and 66.6% have two
meal components per day.
4. When asked if
they wanted to cook dinner from scratch or assemble dinner from fresh meal
components 91.3 % of Gen Z chose assemble from Fresh Prepared Meal Components
and Millennials 83.4% chose meal components.
5. Seventy-three percent of retail prepared food purchases are taken
to go
6. 88.2 % of consumers prefer hand held food over sit down meals with
a knife and fork
Understanding
the data that comes straight from the restaurants themselves is important to
understanding just how consumers are helping drive change within the fast-food
sector. Delaget, the company founded by
Jason Tobar, serves as a single dashboard that collects and presents data from
the many systems used to operate restaurants, aggregates data from
multiple locations, and puts the data into context to help leadership make
better business decisions.
Delaget
creates a QSR Operational Index that identifies the biggest trends — and the
insights from the 2022 edition are striking. Let’s take a look at what their
team discovered.
Important
numbers and why they matter to QSR
There’s
lots of great data that can give us insights about what’s happening in the
world of QSR, but there are three areas where I think the data points the way
to the future for restauranteurs: In the rise of the delivery channel, employee
turnover, and loss prevention.
·
Big numbers for delivery: 1,343% growth (and rising) and 63% larger
checks
The most significant trend is the continued growth and resilience of the
third-party delivery channel for QSR — the DoorDashes and UberEats of the
world. The delivery channel grew 1,343% from 2019 to 2022 — no surprise there
given the boost seen in the pandemic years, but we now know it is continuing to
grow. With a full year of data in which there were few widespread restrictions,
we saw delivery grow by about 9.4% from 2021 to 2022 (from 9.5% to 10.39%).
Delivery
is good for business, too. Checks for delivery orders were 63% larger than for
drive-thru in 2022, likely thanks to upselling and mark-ups. But delivery
brings its share of challenges too – higher rates of order cancellations and
loss of customer experience control on the part of restaurants, which creates
new areas where QSRs need to adapt.
•
Big numbers for labor: 283% turnover for smaller stores vs. 82% for larger
stores
We’ve been inundated with stories about the tight labor market, rising wages and
shocking turnover, but when you dig deeper into the data, it’s not quite that
simple. There’s a big gap between what’s happening at stores with large numbers
of employees and small numbers of employees. The top 10% in terms of headcount
have a turnover rate of 82%, while the bottom ten percent have a rate almost
3.5 times higher.
What’s
happening here? I think it comes down to culture and the advantages larger
stores enjoy in terms of building it. The largest stores are successful in
recruiting and retaining good employees not because of wages — which are
transparent and fairly consistent within geographic areas — but because they
have invested in culture-building, things like employee appreciation and
recognition, and features employees value such as earned wage access that lets
them get their pay faster.
•
Big numbers for loss: 16% increase in refunded transactions in 2022
Loss at QSRs can come in many forms, including internal theft (a major problem
in the industry) and refunded transactions (which our data shows rose by 16% in
2022 over 2021.) The numbers are entwined but not completely locked —
cancelling and refunding transactions is a way some thieves cover their tracks,
but it is also tied to the rise of the delivery channel, where orders are more
often changed, rejected or cancelled at the last moment, with restaurants often
eating the losses.
Digging
deeper, we again see refunds, cancellations and losses unevenly distributed,
with the bottom 10% of QSRs accounting for the lion’s share. Again, I think
this can be a sign of culture issues — satisfied employees are less likely to
steal from their employers — and also an investment in loss prevention tools by
larger, more successful QSRs.
Looking
to the future
What
matters to owners and QRS brands is how they can use this data to improve their
bottom line. I predict that we will see significant investment and innovation
in certain areas because of the trends outlined here:
·
New restaurant concepts tailored to delivery: Think small-footprint
stores with dedicated lanes for delivery drivers, ghost kitchens producing food
(perhaps for multiple brands) from one location exclusively for delivery, and
other new ideas.
·
Continued investment in culture and retention: Expect more programs
and benefits that focus on making QSRs a fun place to work and that reward
longevity, rather than sign-on bonuses. Look for brands to invest in their
image publicly not just to attract customers, but workers.
·
A focus on mitigating loss: New technologies will help mine data for suspicious
activity and tie that activity to specific losses. Additionally, improving
relationships with delivery companies and treating drivers like customers –
including walking them through orders – can reduce unhappy delivery customers.
These
are only some of the big trends and themes that have me excited as we look to
the future. With better insights and measurement, the technology-driven QSR
space is ripe for reinvention!
Consumers are dynamic not static your brand must be as
dynamic as consumers.
Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food
marketing ideas look more like yesterday than tomorrow? Interested in learning
how our Grocerant Guru® 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 one of the following links: Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter
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