marketing Archives - HotOperator

6 Restaurant Trends and What They Mean (number 4 is essential)

Mark Laux — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 16:47:18 +0000

6 Restaurant Trends and What They Mean
(number 4 is essential)

According to The National Restaurant Association, the foodservice industry is on target to reach $1 Trillion dollars in sales this year. And when asked what stands out in the industry, here’s what they had to say (and what HotOperator recommends for taking advantage of those trends).

But before we get to that. Keep in mind, a strong message became clear: People want human contact when dinning out. You know, people helping people. So, take note before you try to tighten staff with computers.

The Key findings:

1. Sales are up: The foodservice industry is forecast to reach $1 trillion in sales in 2024.

Is this sales in more people going out to eat? Nope. It’s mostly higher prices. To offset this, make sure you are mental anchoring your restaurant menu. Have comparative prices that show the guest just how little they are spending.

2. Restaurants are hiring: The industry workforce is projected to grow by 200,000 jobs, for total industry employment of 15.7M by the end of 2024. 45% of operators need more employees to meet customer demand.

Which is great. But it also offers another problem. Many operators are struggling to find workers (and keep them). A strong brand marketing campaign will help your restaurant stay top-of-mind. And that makes your restaurant more attractive to employees along with consumers.

3. Competition is strong: In 2024, 45% of operators expect competition to be more intense than last year.

This is difficult for most independent operators. Chain restaurants are taking a larger and larger portion of the market. To combat this, independent operators will need to use guerrilla marketing programs to stay in front of chains moving into their market. Try things like local bonuses. Special menu items that only local guests know about. And treat guests like royalty.

4. Costs are up: 98% of operators say higher labor costs are an issue for their restaurant. 97% cite higher food costs. 38% say their restaurants were not profitable last year.

This points to a lack of marketing which puts stress on any restaurant. Simply put, a weak brand will not push their value up in the eyes of local guests. Our recommendation? Do a brand analysis along with a menu matrix to find out what your guests really think of your business. Every day you have a focus group going on in your restaurant. People are voting for your business with their pocket books and their feet. They are telling you if they like your business, and they are telling you what they like most about dinning with you (and what they don’t like)

But don’t do this on your own. You need an objective view. You need an expert to look at your business and offer advice. It might be painful, but it is necessary.

5. Consumers are value conscious: Nearly half of consumers are taking a wait-and-see stance when it comes to spending. Operators who offer a solid value proposition for dining out can nudge customers out of their holding pattern.

This is not a deep thinking thing to say. That’s because consumers are always value conscious. Where most people make a mistake is thinking that value conscious is all about price. But it’s not just about price. It’s about price and function together. A product can have a higher price only if you offer reasons that will support that higher price. Most operators get this wrong in their business and never think to support each item with the proper description and highlight.

6. Consumers love restaurants: 9 in 10 adults say they enjoy going to restaurants. Restaurants allow them to enjoy a favorite meal that has flavor and taste sensations they can’t easily replicate at home.

So it’s not all bad news. Of course people want to eat out. It’s fun. In fact, it’s a mini vacation. So, you need to nurture those feelings with your guests. That means you have to train your staff on how to work with guests so they make better choices when they order from you. And how to get your servers to leave their own struggles at the door when they come to work.

If you’re looking for help to build a better brand in your restaurant, give Mark a call. He’s an expert in restaurant branding, menu development, social media and content development. He’s been doing this stuff for nearly 4 decades, and has worked with more than 200 restaurants across the country. This gives him a unique ability to learn from other independent operators what’s working and what isn’t.

Hey, the first 15 minutes are free. To take advantage, call 800-316-3198 and leave a message. Mark will get back to you.

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Does Your Restaurant Menu Represent Your Food?

Mark Laux — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 19:53:50 +0000

Does Your Restaurant Menu Represent Your Food?

An ugly menu made by a restaurant operator.

I was out with friends for dinner the other night at a fairly upscale restaurant and was offered a really terrible menu. My friends all know that I have spent the last 30 years working with restaurant operators all over the world building great menus, so they all cringed a little when they got the menu. They asked me what I thought, and at that moment I was thinking: Does your restaurant menu represent your food? And then I said it out loud: “I was just thinking ‘does your menu represent your food?”

How can I put this in a way that you will understand how important this is and not get offended. When your menu is an ugly piece of garbage, it impacts your guest’s food experience. In this case, I ordered the ‘crunch chicken salad’, and found the chicken to be over cooked, and the salad dressing overly sweet. Would I have noticed that if I were not already turned off by the menu? Probably not. I can honestly say that if the menu were on a nice, waterproof sheet with an elegant design, I may have overlooked those slight imperfections. I probably would have thought that the menu does represent the brand, and that the salad was above average in quality.

Why chefs should stick to cooking.

What’s with all the dots? Makes the menu about price rather than quality.

When I go to a restaurant, I don’t expect to cook. I am going out to get something that is beyond my own capabilities. I’m looking for an experience. And your menu is a part of that experience. In fact, the entire experience comes together to form a brand in my mind. A special happy moment that is of a higher level. The food, companionship, service, food and atmosphere all come together to form a time that will be remembered. And the menu is a huge part of that experience.

When chefs cook and plate their food, they are looking for something special. The plate needs to go out just right and be consistent each time. Beyond that, the guest needs to be excited and satisfied with the entire experience from the moment they are greeted at the door to the time they first see the menu, to the time the food is delivered. If any one of those moments is a misstep, there is a hole in the brand that the guest will fill with criticism. Some of that criticism can emerge as a negative review. And here’s the thing, “positive reviews can encourage an influx of business, while negative ones can significantly impact a restaurant’s reputation and revenue. One research study found that a single negative review can drive away 22% of customers, while three can push the number to 59%.” This is more true of independent restaurant operators because they don’t have a high level of trust and notoriety. They simply are unknown, and people do not like to risk their dinner.

Your Menu is a Tool

HotOperator Design-Engineered

Okay, back to the menu. Take a good look at it and think to yourself: “Does your restaurant menu represent your food?” Thinking further, will this menu make my guests think more highly of my food? If there is any doubt at all, get it serviced. And don’t do what you’ve always done hoping for a different result.

When you think of your menu as a tool for your ‘salespeople’ to use to sell food, you’ll see your menu as a brochure that represents your brand. You’ll more fully understand that your guests will have a much better idea and experience with your food when your menu is design-engineered properly.

The Higher The Menu, The Lower The Quality of the Menu?

It’s funny, some of the most horrible menus are from so-called high end restaurants. Almost all of them are a complete disaster. Flimsy slips of paper that come off of a copy machine and flopped on the table without any explanation or introduction.

A Restaurant Menu You Can Print

This is like your guests start making Béarnaise sauce over filet mignon on their own? It’s a difficult dish, but it doesn’t look that hard when you see it on a plate. How hard can it be, right? It’s just a tarragon-flavored French sauce made from clarified butter, vinegar, shallots, egg yolks and herbs. Simple enough. You can see where this is going. It’s about knowing what you’re good at and leaving the really tough stuff to professionals. You know, like your menu.

Simple Elegance in a Menu is like Béarnaise in a kitchen

Looks easy when it’s done properly. But it’s a bitch to get right when you’re working on it. Staring at the ingredients and getting everything together just right so it doesn’t scramble and make you start over is much more difficult in the process than it is to plate it up. A great menu is similar. Take a blank piece of paper and make something that’s upscale, beautiful and will make your guests think more highly of your food.

As an industry, we can do much, much better.

Google Design you can print on your own

Get the right agent to help you. Someone with an experienced staff with menu design and engineering skills. Then, listen to them. It’s easy to think: “But I can save money doing it all myself. Plus, I change my menu nearly every week, sometimes multiple times in a week.” But a great design firm can set the menu up so you can still have a beautiful menu, and change it every week. Hell, every day, if you want to.

Here’s my advice, and I hope you will take this advice: get a professional to work on your menu. Someone with skills and experience. A real high level ‘chef’ in design and writing.

Once Completed, Your Restaurant Menu Will Represent Your Food and Lift your brand.

To get a free consultation, call (920) 420-2076, or click the link!

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Foodservice Brand Marketing

Mark Laux — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 17:01:03 +0000

Foodservice Brand Marketing from Farm to Table

When you think about Foodservice Brand Marketing, you may not think it’s terribly important from the outset. Especially when you consider all the restaurant operators trying to keep your foodservice brand marketing away from their customers.We have worked in the foodservice industry for more than three decades. We can tell you that foodservice brand marketing is essential to having long term success in the foodservice business.

If you were going to design the perfect way to sell food away from home, you would not come up with this process. It’s too complicated, for one thing. And for another there are too many hands out waiting to skim a little something off the top of your profits. From the farm to the table and into consumers mouths, there are dozens of people who all have to get paid. Over the years, we have helped a lot of foodservice companies make a lot of money in this very imperfect system.

How Foodservice Marketing is Different

Unlike a consumer brand, foodservice brand marketing needs to reach consumers indirectly. It also needs to mean something to every point along the way. If you are a private label company, your brand is being sold through a distributor, retailer or chain restaurant. And while your actual name may never come up along the way, you are still responsible for the foodservice brand marketing needed to get the product to sell.

Sadly, most private label companies are not at all good at foodservice brand marketing. Worse yet, neither are foodservice distributors or retailers. And restaurant chains are not at all interested in most of the details in their foodservice brand marketing. Instead, they are more interested in their own sales. As an example Jimmy John’s is not a famous sandwich shop because of the BBQ chips they sell. They are more interested in the sandwich, the delivery, the cute slogans and making you ask for paper napkins.

Let’s Walk through the Foodservice System

Brand Manufacturing.

My company has represented a large number of brands in foodservice. With each one we have always promoted selling based on the foodservice brand promise: you know our products will always be of the finest quality. Products are always consistent and they can be trusted. Plus, your customers are worth the few pennies extra you have to pay for that consistency. Brand reputations matter, even in foodservice brand marketing. It is that simple.

We also recommend building an offering and a sales position that will attract restaurant operators and keep them asking for the brand by name. This can be done with promotions, Foodservice Rewards®, exclusivity, guerilla marketing at the street level and better sales teams. But never, under any circumstances abandon your brand.

It is also essential at this level to have a great relationship with the end user. This is difficult for most food manufacturing companies because foodservice distributors hord this information. They keep it under lock and key with anyone who sees their customer list sworn to secrecy. This is why we recommend offering Foodservice Rewards. This is a program that offers you access to restaurant operators. Further, it gives you the chance to market directly to them and bypass the distributor.

Private Label Manufacturing.

When we work with private label companies, the first thing we try to impress on them is they are not ‘label’ companies. Instead, they are private foodservice brand manufacturers. As a point of difference, this means to the industry that you are going to take responsibility for developing the brand. It also means maintaining a level of trust equal to or better than any other foodservice brand marketing.

Rather than making your retail brand fit into foodservice, you are making a foodservice brand specifically for that industry. It is a foodservice brand marketing promise that you will create and nurture the brand. You are now the foodservice brand marketer. From the manufacturer through the distributor, the restaurant operator and all the way to the consumer.

Pitching a new product requires a foodservice brand marketing plan, neatly laid out with potential graphics and a sales approach. Keep in mind, distributors are not great at selling new items. In fact, they are not good at selling anything. They generally take orders and have great relationships with their customers. This is because distributor sales representatives are very cautious about offering anything to their best customers that might upset them. They would prefer to be asked for something by a restaurant operator and then be a hero and get it for them. So your foodservice brand marketing has got to be set up correctly. To do this, you must pull through the system. Foodservice brand marketing that is developed correctly will appeal to restaurant operators who will see its value immediately and ask for it.

Foodservice Distributors.

We have worked with hundreds of foodservice distributors over the years and have never seen anything that could be called foodservice brand marketing. They private label, and then swap out branded products. They generally do not put energy behind foodservice brand marketing. There are a lot of theories as to why this is. In my experience, they simply do not spend the time or money on developing foodservice brand marketing. Their perception is foodservice brand marketing will never see the light of day.

This is and always has been a mistake on their part. Of course, swapping out brands for private label products helps them secure the customer in the short term. But after doing countless research studies on foodservice brand marketing and the impact of product fluctuations on the restaurant industry, I know first hand how dangerous this is. Especially to independent restaurant operators. Consumers do not want a restaurant product to change. In every focus group we have ever conducted, consumers will say they would prefer to pay a higher price for a product than to have it be different to save money. Consumers are very sensitive to product changes.

Consumers do not want a restaurant product to change.

We have developed foodservice brand marketing programs for a number of foodservice distributors over the years. In most situations they have fumbled the product at the goal line. Even when we start correctly and build a nice brand position. When the foodservice marketing brand depends on foodservice distributors they seldom get behind the product. Or worse yet have a foodservice distributor sales director or vice president decide they know better and only offer the product to a select few customers. That or customers they think they need some leverage with because they might lose the business all together.

Good foodservice brand marketing needs to work through the foodservice distributor, but not depend on them. It’s best to do as much as you can to leverage the distributor sales representative. If you can make the case with the restaurant operator, the restaurant will order the product and resist the distributor swap.

A Word About Brokers.

After working with foodservice brokers over the years, they can be a real benefit if. But only if you are one of their top three or four clients. In other words, if you pay them a lot of money, you get a lot of service. If not, you simply don’t get a lot of attention. If you are a small client in a foodservice brokerage, the best you can hope for is one account executive part time making calls on your behalf.

When I was working with Anchor Food Products before they sold to McCain, we would often put a lot of pressure on our brokers to ‘drag a bag’ with our products. Most often this was at the expense of smaller clients within the brokerage. In some instances, if our products were aligned with the same broker that had Tyson foods as an example, we might even move our brands to another broker to get more attention.

If you decide to use brokers, pay close attention to their client lineup. Do your best to be as high at the top of their list as you can. And be prepared to spend a lot of time in each market training them to be able to sell your foodservice brand marketing. This part is essential. Your message needs to go through the broker to the restaurant operator correctly. Otherwise the restaurant operator may not understand the value of your foodservice brand marketing.

Independent Restaurants.

Most of the profits from the food industry come from independent restaurant operators. This is because they simply do not have the buying power to demand a lower price. While independent restaurant operators should be worshiped for their contribution to the business, they are not. Distributors will swap out products causing mission drift. And they get advice from multiple, often conflicting sources. This causes confusion for the restaurant operator.

From the food manufacturer standpoint, this can be a very lucrative source of business. But it is very difficult to get to. Most restaurant operators do not make decisions quickly. They are pulled in a number of directions and have very little understanding of foodservice brand marketing. We have given presentations at the National Restaurant Show, the Western Restaurant Show, countless distributor food shows as well as working with literally thousands of restaurant operators over the years. And when we start to talk about foodservice brand marketing, we lose their interest. Even though their brand is the most important part of their business.

On the upside, well run independent restaurant operators have a very thorough understanding of their guests. They fuss over them, talk to them and know what they like and don’t like. Your foodservice marketing brand and program needs to offer support in the form of products that will make them money. Offer consistency they can depend on. And provide marketing materials that will put butts in seats. Successful foodservice brand marketing is about thinking your offering through the restaurant to the consumer and getting the consumer to buy something over and over again.

Chain Restaurants.

Your foodservice brand marketing will need to be adjusted to partner with the restaurant you want to work with. It is important to offer something for the chain restaurant that they can present as their own. Exclusivity is king. Most chain restaurants will want to be able to say they are the only restaurant operator who has a particular item.

To be successful, you will need to either invent or reinvent a category for the restaurant customer. Restaurant chains are typically the most sophisticated foodservice brand marketers of the foodservice industry. So your approach will need to be well researched, perfectly positioned and profitable for them. Further, make sure you do not offer something that will pull sales from an item they are proud of or that is already branded.

That happened once with a client we were representing. Wells’ Dairy Blue Bunny had developed a fried ice cream product for Outback Steakhouse. The dessert would ‘blossom’ into petals when it was plated. It was a very cool product and well designed. However, Outback was not impressed because they were sure the dessert would pull attraction from their bloomin onion. Needless to say, we were sent packing and didn’t get a sale.

Foodservice Brand Marketing. Thanks for taking this tour through foodservice brand marketing with us. If you are looking for help growing your foodservice brand marketing at any point in the process, contact us here.

M+K Laux dba HotOperator is a farm to table marketing consulting firm. Mark and Kelly are a marketing team and managing partners of HotOperator. They have been working in the food business since 1989. Either can be contacted through the HotOperator website, or by calling 800-316-3198. or contact Laux here.

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What A Restaurant Menu Matrix Review Can Do For Your Business

Mark Laux — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 17:59:00 +0000

What A Restaurant Menu Matrix Review Can Do For Your Business

I’ll be the first to admit, a restaurant menu matrix isn’t for every restaurant. Well, it is, but not every restaurant operator understands the value of going through the process. But I’d like to help you understand a little more about what a restaurant menu matrix review can do for your business. And I’d like to offer you the opportunity to see what a restaurant menu matrix review can do for your business for FREE.

The menu matrix review process is time consuming. That’s why I can’t offer everyone free access to that opportunity. Time being the one thing we cannot make more of in life. But I can offer a couple of lucky restaurant operators the opportunity to go through the experience with an actual menu expert. And going the process can really be eye opening for your restaurant business.

When Was The Last Time You Got A Raise?

Every restaurant HotOperator has worked with over the years have made more money for their business. We have a great reputation of helping restaurant operators understand consumer behavior in their businesses. So if you’ve ever wondered what a menu matrix review can do for you business, the first benefit is more cash to the bank. This is because our menu matrix review process will help you focus your restaurant business on the items that make you a higher return on investment.

On average, we help restaurant operators find between 5 and 12% in income. That means for a $1M restaurant business, our process will uncover between $50,000.00 and $120,000.00 in added income.

Do You Understand The Power Of Your Brand?

Most restaurant operators have no idea what a brand even is or how it works. A restaurant brand is the essence of the restaurant. It’s the whole picture of the experience of visiting your business. It’s the story about why people come to and how they feel about your restaurant. Understanding what a menu matrix review can do for your business is about uncovering the brand. It’s also bringing your brand mission and vision into alignment. A menu matrix will also uncover your tagline and unique selling proposition. The long-term effect is that the business will be worth more money. This is because a brand will extend the value of the restaurant business beyond its monetary income.

The Answer To Restaurant Business Growth Is In The Stars, Puzzles, Workhorses And Dogs

There is a focus group taking place in your restaurant every day you are open. Consumers are voting on your restaurant with their wallets and their feet. They are deciding if they will visit you, and when they do, they are deciding what they will have to eat. When a HotOperator menu expert goes through a menu matrix review with you, they can help you understand what your guests are thinking about, what they love most about you, where you need to improve and what your customers are likely to do in the future. What you get back from the process is a better understanding of the potential for your restaurant business.

When we go through a restaurant menu matrix with a restaurant operator for the first time, it’s a game-changing experience. Suddenly they understand where their money is coming from. They understand which items are underperforming, and which items can be added and taken off the menu with confidence.

Find Out What A Restaurant Menu Matrix Review Can Do For Your Business, For FREE

HotOperator is offering a select few restaurant operators the opportunity to find out first-hand what a restaurant menu matrix review can do for their business. To see if you qualify, reach out to HotOperator and set up an initial 15 minute phone interview. After answering a few simple questions, we will explain how the process works and if it’s right for your business.

Don’t Wait To Find Out What A Restaurant Menu Matrix Review Can Do For Your Business

This is a limited time offer. If you don’t act now, the opportunity will be gone. And you will miss out on knowing what a restaurant menu matrix review can do for your business.

Mark and Kelly are a design-engineer team and managing partners of HotOperator. They have been working in the restaurant business since 1989. Either can be contacted through the HotOperator website, or by calling 800-316-3198.

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