Pizza Hut, Papa John’s, Domino’s Are Being Targeted by Restaurants

Did you ever get a pizza made in two minutes from Pizza Hut, Papa John’s or Domino’s? With Pizza consumption continuing to grow it is no wonder the restaurant sector is looking for ways to sell pizza faster and cheaper than legacy pizza operators.

QSR Restaurants selling pizza was a big idea back in the early 1990’s.  Even McDonalds rolled out pizza.  I was working on a pizza project for the US Navy at the time and was able to sample McDonalds pizza.  It was good, priced right yet even McDonalds over looked that fact that the pizza box would not fit through the drive through window.  Replacing the Window simply cost to much which l believe was the main cause for the failed pizza test. Had that test worked the Pizza industry and indeed McDonalds would look different today.

The consumer like pizza more today than back then the NPD Group reports that “75% of consumer have consumed pizza at least once in a two-week period, up from 66% in 2003.”  Technology has evolved and today many restaurants can find a pizza oven that can cook a pizza in 2 Minutes.  The pizza can be customized, cooked and served in a restaurant setting in less than 5 minutes.

Rick Wetzel, co-owner of Blaze Fast-Fire'd Pizza, a chain based in Pasadena, Calif. Had built a fast growing company within the Fast Pizza Sector.  Restaurants and local Pizzeria’s are taking notice and want in on the Fast Pizza Sales Growth.

Chipotle, Founder and CEO Steve Ells is looking at pizza, Jack in the Box has looked at Pizza and we know McDonalds has done and can do Pizza.  Will 2014 be the year that Pizza becomes the new Burger?

Foodservice Solutions® specializes the Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat Fresh Prepared Food niche aka the Grocerant niche.  www.FoodserviceSolutions.us  We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities or a brand leveraging integration strategy.  

General Mills Innovation Leader Focusing Direct To Consumer

Success does leave clues and retail food manufacture General Mills is an industry icon not because they have been around so long.  General Mills is an icon because they focus on the consumer, innovation, technology and edifying the “brand” with consumer relevance.  That focus on the dynamic not static consumer with relevant innovation has been the foundation for ongoing success at General Mills.

Foodservice Solutions® Grocerant Guru like General Mills Marketing staff believes that “the Consumer is Dynamic not Static” It was not long after testing direct to consumer frozen food delivery via Betty Crocker Meals that General Mills qualified enough consumer demand and attributes to extend direct to consumer food sales trials.

While most consumers head to the grocery store to stock up on snacks; General Mills is now going beyond frozen meals and experimenting with a subscription service that ships snacks boxes directly to consumers.

This new subscription service is called “Nibblr”.  The Nibblr subscription, “mails subscribers a regular snack shipment that cost about $6 each time. Snackers then rate what they tasted and future shipments are based off customer tastes. Yes, if this idea sound familiar think Netflix or Pandora and consumers are not adverse to signing up for food service either.

“Nibble” is contemporized consumer relevant innovation from this multi-national food retailer.  The “Nibblr snacks aren't General Mills-labeled and are mostly fruits, nuts and trail mixes. ..General Mills launched Nibblr through a business development unit the Golden Valley-based company calls 301 Inc. That unit, started last year, was envisioned by General Mills as a way to partner with emerging companies to develop food products. Nibblr has an immediate and established competitor in Graze.com, a U.K.-based company owned by Carlyle Group L.P.”

Will it work? The competitor “Graze told Bloomberg two weeks ago that it launched U.S. operations earlier this year and already has 55,000 customers and is adding 1,000 customers a day. It will begin a major marketing push in January.”

Success does leave clues new non-traditional points of food distribution are finding success daily.  Companies the ilk of General Mills find success operating at the “Innovation Intersection”.  That intersection is filled with a cross section of industry leaders, inventors, academics, entrepreneurs, customers and suppliers.  www.FoodserviceSolutions.us is at that same intersection are you? 

Food Industry Disruption Continues as Relay Foods Finds Success.

When retailers simply copy what the other guy does there is never any lasting excitement encompassing the brand or its products. Founded in 2007 and served its first customer in 2009 Relay Foods continues to grow and now is operating in Virginia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia markets.

With a focus on locally grown and better for you food delivered; Relay Foods focus is fresh, organic locally grown foods for urban markets. In an interview with The Hartman Group Relay Founder and COO detailed Relay’s point of differentiation in the food deliver marketplace this way when asked “How would you compare Relay to Peapod or FreshDirect?”

Peapod is selling mass-market CPG brands as a luxury service due to their home delivery fees and the economics of home delivery. It’s a different value proposition. They are competing on price and selling the same things you can get at any grocery store.

One of the inhibitors of growth for Peapod, at least in my view, is that home grocery delivery is a luxury service. They're asking people to pay a $10 delivery fee on top of the grocery order to deliver to a customer’s home. Yet Peapod is trying to position itself as the market leader in price, so the two facts presented together—luxury service and price focus—don’t work.

Relay is a brand that is improving people's lives by making their lives simpler, better, healthier and happier. We are not about selling CPG items and moving them as quickly and cheaply as possible. We are about making people's lives better. Our success is attributed to our customers, not to the brands we carry on our virtual shelves.

FreshDirect is a company we admire, and they are perfectly positioned to meet New York City’s online grocery demand. Their current business model won’t work as well in suburban cities such as Atlanta, Dallas and Los Angeles. But they may still figure it out—they are a young company, after all.” You can find the full interview by The Hartman Group at: http://www.hartman-group.com/hartbeat/relay-foods-interview-growth-of-online-local-grocery

How close are you to your customers? Do you have defined differentiation in the ready-2-eat and heat-N-eat fresh food space? Non-traditional food retailers are simultaneously assisting your customers in consumer relevant ways are you?  Copy-cat menu and positioning will not prevail long term.  Need help?

Interested in learning how the 5P’s of Food Marketing can edify your retail food brand while creating a platform for consumer convenient meal participation, differentiation and individualization  Visit www.FoodserviceSolutions.us or  Facebook.com/Steven Johnson, Linkedin.com/in/grocerant or twitter.com/grocerant

Fresh Food Amazon is Bold, Brave, Branded.

Seattle-Tacoma, Washington has a legacy of food industry innovation, leadership and success.  There are no signs that food innovative leadership will diminish any time soon. With industry leading independent restaurants the ilk of Canlis, Palace Kitchen, El Gaucho, Wild Ginger, Dahlia Lounge anyone can tell Seattle loves restaurants, fresh food and legendary quality service.

From one of the first multi-national syndicated TV cooking shows, "The Galloping Gourmet" which featured charismatic and continued Washington State resident Graham Kerr focusing on rich and decadent recipes began 1969.

Then came Jeff Smith was the author of a dozen best-selling cookbooks and the host of The Frugal Gourmet, a popular American cooking show which began in Tacoma, Washington around 1973 and aired on PBS from 1983 to 1997 (as produced by member station WTTW Chicago), and numbered 261

episodes.

We have to mention Starbucks the worlds leading chain of coffee outlets and global food merchant that continues to break the retail food distribution mold continues expanding at break neck speed.

Then there is Seattle native Nathan Myhrvold with the most important cookbook of the first decade of the 21^st century according to Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in 2010. The cookbook Modernist Cuisine: The art and science of Cooking by Mayhrvold, Young, and Bilet consist of 6 volumes is 2,438 pages long and weighs in at 52 pounds. It cost more than 1,000,000 dollars to produce the first 6,000 copies that rapidly sold out.  Myhrvold’s The Cooking Lab order a second hard back printing of 25,000 copies and toady it is being sold both in hardback and paperback around the world.

Entering the food space is most disruptive book retailer the world has ever known, Amazon.com.  When Amazon started a new fresh food retail group called Amazon Fresh we here at Foodservice Solutions® predicted that Amazon may have found its solution to “the last mile” in delivery with Amazon Fresh.  We also properly predicted that they would enter the fresh prepared food delivery business as well.  Ah the grocerant niche filled with ready-2-eat and heat-N-eat food finally has a global retailer aimed at garnering market share from sleepy legacy food retailers specifically chain grocery stores and chain restaurants.

Book readers, book stores and investors dismissed the force that Amazon.com became early on as non-disruptive and not consumer friendly.  Well we all know how that ended up.  Amazon is now successfully selling groceries and delivering fresh food in Great Britain, Germany and parts of the United States.

Now comes Amazon’s “Seattle Spotlight” a delivery program that is leveraging the Amazon Fresh systems that delivers a gallon of milk, 6 apples, tomato’s hamburger and paper towels all within just a few hours’ notice, is now offering access to restaurant meals and ingredients.  Rebekah Denn reported that Amazon via “Seattle Spotlight” “in some cases, an interesting blend of takeout and home cooking, ranging from opening a ready-to-heat container of Pike Place Chowder to grilling your own Skillet burger patty and frying your own fries.”

Restaurants contract with Amazon to sell, cook and delivery preapproved menu items. That my friends is disruptive. Denn went on to explain in detail how it works and she was impressed that Amazon “with the selection, but not too surprised by it once I heard that Jonathan Hunt, formerly of Boom Noodle and Lowell-Hunt Catering, is the chef in charge of the Seattle-only program”…. 

How do restaurants figure out how to deconstruct their dishes for a home cook to prepare, or to package them for delivery so they're still good to eat? In La Spiga's case, I've found it fairly idiot-proof to grill my prosciutto piadina (part of an $11.95 box lunch) at home to melt the cheese. The Samurai Noodle ramen has also come with straightforward directions, taking a few minutes to boil the noodles, warm the broth and pork, and add the pre-sliced toppings.

"We thought it was a neat way to offer better service without... the extra expense of opening a restaurant," said La Spiga co-owner Sabrina Tinsley.

Working with Hunt, "we selected items we thought would travel well. We did a series of experiments, obviously, to make sure they would get there the same way," she said. Soup, for instance, "was a bit of a challenge" on a jostling ride. Baked pastas held up better than boiled noodles.

I asked how the salad, one of my old La Spiga favorites, arrived so crisp and fresh despite what I assumed was a day's delay. "I try to have my staff be really careful about the way they cut it. If you're just slamming the knife down on it it's going to bruise it and brown and deterioriate faster," Tinsley said. “

Rick Batye, vice president of AmazonFresh was asked how the company figures out which foods to offer, and how hard it is to make their dishes ready-to-eat or workable at home by Denn and he replied via Email.

He said that “the company gravitates "towards iconic well-known brands that are associated with quality and are unique in their offering," as well as being innovative and creative. Hunt worked with Samurai Noodle, for instance, to make their meals "the same experience" as you'd get at the restaurant, providing all the components and making it easy to prepare….

How do they decide who's in the mix? First, Batye said, they brought in merchants and products that customers had specifically requested. Amazon approached Pasta and Co., for instance, "after a customer of ours raved about their oven-roasted chicken." Pike Place Fish Market is so well-known that it made sense to ask the owners to be part of the program. "Right now we think more merchants are better for our customers and there's no need for us to limit the number of merchants or their products; each brings their own style and flair…

Here is Batye explaining how the logistics work? "We pick up orders from each of our merchants once or twice a day and merge them with each customer's regular grocery or general merchandise orders. The products they sell on AmazonFresh are the same that they sell in their store or restaurant, so they are ready to go or easy to prepare as the orders come in."

This program is clearly in the early stage of testing for Amazon.  With a track record of success and a goal to find the “last mile solution” Amazon is clearly on the right track.  Consumers are dynamic not static food retailers must look outside the box for success, growth and long-term profits. Seattle and the Northwest have a long history of innovation and cultivation of food trends.  Is your company focusing on developing success within the booming grocerant niche?  Ready-2-eat and heat-N-eat fresh food sales are booming.

www.FoodserviceSolutions.us  specializes in outsourced business development. We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities or a brand leveraging integration strategy.  

Cooking from Scratch Forgetaboutit.

Are you wondering What’s for dinner?  If your cooking for an at home family meal for two, three, or four, family members, chances are very good your buying several Ready-2-Eat or Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared meal components. The New Normal in home cooking is  Meal Assembly   Grocery stores, convenience stores and restaurants are all bundling fresh prepared meal components for the home cook.  The home cook is responding buying individualized components.

Foodservice branded and private label food manufactures are all vying for your attention. Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat foods from Swiss steak, Meatloaf, Baked Salmon, Rotisserie Chicken, Pizza and Lasagna fresh prepared, portioned and portable in portions for 1,2, or 5 are all available at most foodservice retail location.

 

Newbee’s this is the exciting  opportunity for new start-up’s and regional manufactures to produce sustainable business built on local, fresh and unique flavor profiles.  Legacy national brand manufactures are experiencing an increase in repositioning, consolidation and acquisition activities.  Regional start-ups are thriving supplying local restaurants, C-stores and grocery store delis.

Consumer are responding buying meal components in new food channels, experiencing new flavor profiles all the while individualizing the family meal.  The foodservice industry is evolving with the consumer.  Those companies looking for opportunity for growth times have never been better. The consumer is dynamic not static are you keeping pace?

www.FoodserviceSolutions.us  specializes in outsourced business development. We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities or a brand leveraging 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

Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner Fresh Food Drives Pueblo Grocery Stores Success

Pueblo’s grocerant prepared food is perfectly positioned. Clean well stocked stores that are beaming with patrons always are solid platforms for success.  Pueblo is no exception. If your eyes on the grocerant prepared food niche, Pueblo is one company that should be on your must visit list.

Professionally presented with clean, restaurant quality food presentation skill set, Pueblo clearly understands the positive halo affect a solid grocerant prepared ready-to-eat and ready-to-heat food program can have on the entire brand.

Time starved with diverse appetites after years of exposure to multi-cultural flavors profiles today’s consumer want prepared meal components that can be individualized not just family sized.  Pueblo’s prepared food program does just that.  With detailed attention to service, cleanliness and food quality its clear Pueblo is focused on growing this booming niche within foodservice retail.

Visit www.FoodserviceSolutions.us 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. Facebook.com/Steven Johnson, Linkedin.com/in/grocerant or twitter.com/grocerant

Do you know where Darden is Headed?

Recycling executives from brand to brand and without a change in strategy may not be the success solution Darden needs in 2014. What was once a successful strategy during the 1980’s, and 1990’s recycling executive simply does not work in 2014 in most cases. Look around you noticed that Kodak is nearly out of business. Growing up in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, every family had a Kodak Camera and I still have one of mine. Those yellow boxes were everywhere and getting your very own Kodachrome camera was seemingly a rite of passage, heck, Paul Simon even wrote a song about it.

As digital cameras gained popularity, Kodak stuck to what they believed. They sneered at digital’s quality, righteous in their knowledge that Americans would NEVER give up shiny pictures for their photo albums.

Today, cell phone cameras take most of the pictures and they are rarely printed. Kodak will shut the doors, correct in their assertion that professionally developed pictures look better than low-resolution versions uploaded to Facebook.

Being dead and correct is not a great strategy.  Today chain restaurants are either growing or dying much the same as Kodak. Simply look at restaurants that filed bankruptcy of late: Claim Jumper, Mr. Pita, Friendly’s, Chevys, Sbarro, Perkins.  They are not all dead but they have been far from right.

These are statements frequently heard from legacy restaurant operators. Like Kodak, crystal clear that what has always worked will continue to work.

• Our executives have 30 years of experience and know how to run the business.
• We never use coupons, nor do we deliver.
• We don’t allow our brand to wander, we protect our brand.
• We don’t use online ordering, I-pad ordering or voice screen ordering.
• We don’t advertise on Google, Twitter or Facebook.
• We don’t open for breakfast.
• We like the umbrella approach each store different personality but under one umbrella.
• Video menus and video signage is visceral gimmickry.
• We don’t measure ingredients, we create daily specials and simply show employees how to make it
• We can’t raise our menu prices.

How did a dominant brand and sector leader like Kodak, in a rock-solid consumer staple lose everything? Simple, they determined the market, the direction of that market and took the steps to conquer it.  If that sounds like your restaurant, retail food sector or niche leader, you better keep reading.

There is little about today’s market, the consumer or food marketing / promotions that was predictable 3 years ago. In the next three years the rate of change will continue to increase. So let’s look at the above list:

Reliability and a comfortable working relationship is correctly a key to success.  However, if you find your team is blaming the economy, minimum wages increases, cost of health care and rising food cost for disappointing results. Do not forget that many restaurants companies are growing both the top and bottom line, number of units and garnering market share.  It might be time for Outside Eyes. 

We always/never use coupons – coupons and promotions are very complicated today. Add the online aggregators the ilk of Livingsocial and Groupon and how can you know what works. Here is the point, what you measure you manage. All advertising must have a objective that is clear and measurable to insure a proper marketing ROI.

We don’t deliver – face it, convenience is a driving reason why foodservice is popular. If you do not want to deliver, consider outsourcing.  Delivery is not about you. That’s right it is about the consumer.

We protect the value of our brand and its integrity for the consumer, our shareholders and stakeholders.  We know the consumer is dynamic not static, but our customer’s comeback because we have a brand promise and they trust in us to keep that promise. Sounds a lot like Kodak, don’t you think?

We don’t use online ordering our food does not “carry” well.  Think about this if you don’t have a way to connect your menu to computers and mobile devices, your competition will woo your customers. Consumers are time starved, and hooked on technology, make it easy.

Google or Facebook – as above, set up a Facebook page, it costs nothing. Have someone help if you need it and then monitor your page 5 minutes a day.  Don’t think about it get started today.

We don’t open for breakfast – you pay rent 24/7, find ways to increase the utilization of your “factory”. Considering catering or school lunch program, contract out your kitchen.  Don’t become the next Kodak of chain restaurants.

Different store brands / personalities under one large corporation and all expected to operate utilizing a uniform set of metrics.  Worked well in the 70’s, 80’s but you have the answer.  Let me know just how well that works out.

Visceral gimmickry does not replace high quality food and great service ever.  Who defines quality service? You via your brand promise or the consumer?

We don’t measure ingredients; my employees know how much to use – why have menu prices, let customer pay whatever they want. If you don’t care what your product costs, you CAN’T make money.
We can’t raise our menu prices – tell that to the gas station owner on the corner, or the farmer growing your food. Costs are up, you must raise your menu prices or you will not exist.

Kodak management, smart and hard working as they were, did not see the world changing, fortunately you do. Realize that change is good and necessary. Act now to challenge your assumption, create new revenue streams and increase profits.  Success does leave clues, Disney movies leave you with a smile, being dead and correct is not a great strategy.

Foodservice Solutions® specializes the Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat Fresh Prepared Food niche aka the Grocerant niche.  www.FoodserviceSolutions.us  We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities or a brand leveraging integration strategy.