High food costs continue to impact restaurant operators’ bottom lines. Even though overall inflation has been easing and foods purchased in grocery stores have been costing less than those offered at restaurants, restaurant costs (and many operator expenses) remain high. As a result, consumers may be giving menu prices some extra scrutiny right now — or skipping restaurant meals altogether. In fact, a recent report from AlixPartners found that instead of trading down on restaurant food, consumers have been cutting it out in an effort to protect their budgets. So it’s important to ensure you’re reaping the most benefit from the items you offer. There are a number of actions you can take. You may already be reducing portions and shrinking your overall menu size, and while this is helpful for waste reduction and cost savings, it also leaves room for guests to add to their dish. Play on their desire for customization by offering a selection of ingredient add-ons and side dishes that guests can add to their meal that incrementally increase the price of a dish without giving people sticker shock. Make the most of the sales you get by engineering your menu so its layout naturally leads the guest’s eye to items that generate the most profit for you (and cost your menu so you are well aware of what those menu items are). Finally, lean on other streams of income. Retail items and licensing opportunities may help you generate sales in the background and allow you to smooth out dips in your sales of menu items. Battling rising costs has been a challenge for restaurant operators across categories this year. According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2023 State of the Restaurant Industry report, operators have tried everything from adjusting operating hours and staffing levels to increasing menu prices and swapping out menu items altogether to manage these increases. One additional area of your operation where expenses are lurking is in energy and there are a number of steps you may be able to take to manage costs here in ways that guests don’t even see. While some (though not all) require a significant up-front investment, longer-term savings should outweigh these costs. For example, there are opportunities to cut costs by swapping in energy-efficient ovens, dishwashers, refrigerators and other equipment that can significantly reduce your energy costs over time. On a smaller scale, turn off equipment like ovens and lighting when not in use, or use timers and sensors to power down these items when they aren’t needed. Maintain your equipment regularly to make sure it’s operating efficiently — cleaning air filters and replacing worn-out parts can prolong the life of your equipment and ensure you’re reaping the most savings from it. Use a programmable thermostat to set controls for different times of day or areas of your operation. Also rethink light — make use of natural light where possible and use LED lighting elsewhere. It’s another energy saver and lasts longer than alternatives. Finally, consider low-flow faucets and toilets to cut water bills. No doubt, restaurants are feeling squeezed with the ongoing pressures of inflation, a tight labor market and even rising transaction fees from credit card companies – and the costs are too high for operators to absorb. As a result, many restaurants are finding creative ways to pass their extra expenses on to consumers. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, fees with such names as “fuel surcharge,” “noncash adjustment” and “kitchen appreciation” have been appearing regularly on restaurant checks in recent weeks. How – and when – you present such costs can have a significant impact on your guests’ response to them. For instance, presenting a surprise list of incidental costs tacked onto a bill can make a guest feel nickel-and-dimed – or worse, that you’re not being honest with them. It’s better to present any added charges under a single umbrella and make guests aware of them at the outset – verbally from the server, in a note on the menu, or both. In a report from Inc., Zachary Weiner, CEO and founder of Finance Hire, an outsourced financial controller for small businesses, said that even though people are well aware of inflation, being transparent about any extra fees and where they are coming from can go a long way in helping guests understand why they are needed. Ghost kitchens: Do the numbers work for you? Ghost kitchens are continuing their climb: By 2030, they are predicted to hold a 50 percent share of the drive-thru and takeaway foodservice markets, respectively, according to Statista. As restaurant operators think about the best ways to serve existing customers and tap into new markets, ghost kitchens could be an important part of a business strategy. Perhaps you had to close a brick-and-mortar location before or during the pandemic – or you want to enter a new market that sounds like a good match for your brand. You could open a small brick-and-mortar location in a high-traffic area to collect information. But you may be able to gain the same – or better – insights with a ghost kitchen operating with a much smaller real estate footprint in a less-expensive area. Ghost kitchens’ ability to help brands test market viability in a low-risk way is exactly why brands like Famous Dave’s consider them to be important to their business model. As Al Hank, COO of Famous Dave’s parent company BBQ Holdings Inc., said in an interview with 1851 Franchise: “That is typically a multi-million-dollar test, and you never know what the outcome is going to be, but ghost kitchens allow you to do it in a much more cost-effective manner.” So exactly how cost-effective might a ghost kitchen be for you? Dan Fleischmann of the restaurant equity investor Kitchen Fund developed a ghost kitchen calculator, available at Restaurant Dive, to help concepts get an initial sense of whether a ghost-kitchen concept might make financial sense. You plug in some key data about the business, cost structure and volume assumptions, then the calculator projects the resulting profit or loss, as well as the return on invested capital. Even in the best of times, restaurant margins are thin. Challenges related to the pandemic, labor, food prices and the supply chain only place additional strain on them. But the good news is that there are a number of steps operators can take to cut costs without taking anything away from the guest experience. First, ease supply chain-strains by ensuring your inventory goes as far as possible. Encourage precise ingredient measurement across your menu – Modern Restaurant Management advises operators to measure ingredients in grams vs. ounces for a more precise result. Take stock of your energy use and find ways to use it more efficiently – by turning equipment on only at the time it is needed, using energy-efficient lighting, and adopting technology to monitor your appliances so you can be alerted and act quickly if something isn’t working as it should. Be just as mindful of food waste. To avoid having usable food scraps tossed out, Restaurantowner.com suggests eliminating trash cans in the kitchen and giving each kitchen employee a clear box with their name on it where they can place food scraps so managers can minimize food waste being generated from the kitchen. Where possible, consolidate purchases with a single supplier to gain leverage in purchasing agreements. Finally, make the most of the staff you have by scheduling people in accordance with your anticipated sales and traffic each week – your schedule should not be on autopilot Restaurant sales are up 8 percent over where they were in June 2019, according to NPD Group’s David Portalatin. While that’s positive news for sure, business conditions are far different from what they were in 2019. People are preparing more meals or meal segments at home than they did back in 2019, whether from scratch or from meal kits. The business-lunch and happy-hour set is now spending more days working (and eating) from home, and the delta variant of the coronavirus is causing anxiety about eating out where it didn’t exist before. That may mean that your once-busy urban location isn’t getting as much traffic and that your suburban location is seeing more delivery and carry-out business. It’s more important than ever to know your guests’ habits – where they are eating, when they are most apt to order a restaurant meal, and what promotions would tempt them to buy a meal or drink from you instead of staying home. Treat each transaction as an opportunity to gather helpful data that you can use to plan your next menu item or promotion – or even your next investment in technology or real estate. At every order, are you gathering information on what items are selling the best and what channels those orders are coming from? Are you incentivizing guests to join your loyalty program and analyzing their orders so you know which promotions are most likely to inspire them to return? Your systems for automatically gathering, understanding and acting upon consumer data are what will help you flex with the fluctuations of the current environment – and better weather whatever challenges might arise down the line. In the past year in particular, it has often seemed like restaurant operators have been asked to accomplish the impossible: Simplify the ingredients you use but accommodate everyone from carnivores to vegans to customers with allergies. Increase wages for employees but avoid noticeable pricing spikes on your menu. Make your menu feel special and unique, but it should not be complex or time-consuming to prepare. The list goes on and on. And as consumers venture back into restaurant dining rooms and order delivery in the months ahead, expectations will continue to climb. It’s a good time for you to take a look at your business and decide what you value – and just as important, what you don’t care about as much – so you can do your best with the people and resources you have and then filter out the noise. What are your core values? What impression do you want your customers to have of your business? In which aspects of your business are you not willing to compromise or accept a substitute? Assess each area of your business and identify things that are out of your control and can’t be negotiated – like managing food safety requirements and government-imposed business restrictions. Where you do have some control, where are your biggest pain points? Where are things going especially well – and how can you apply those positives to other areas of your business?
The pandemic has forced even well-established restaurant operators across the industry to think and act like scrappy, new entrepreneurs: flexing to new challenges, doing as much as possible with few resources, keeping overhead low, being willing to reinvent when the circumstances call for it, and even flexing work around other commitments at home. As a result, we’ve seen a rise in ghost kitchens, as well as more home-grown, chef-driven meal-delivery concepts springing up on Instagram. Much like how many employees who have spent the past year telecommuting from home are now resistant to working from an office building full-time, the restaurant industry may emerge differently from the pandemic too. Dining rooms may take time to fill and it may be even more difficult to keep people on staff than it was before. Can you find ways to take the best lessons learned in the past year and apply them in the new environment? At your foundation, minimize the resources you need, including ingredients, real estate and staff. Harness technology to monitor waste in areas as diverse as your inventory, ordering, energy use and labor. Take another look at your pre-pandemic service model and assess whether that is realistic now. Embrace multiple revenue streams and look for new ones that could help you adapt more easily to challenges going forward. Finally, think about how you can continue to act at a grassroots level to keep customers engaged with your menu and brand – from creating rotating dinner subscriptions that you promote on social media to offering meal bundles for delivery to different neighborhoods.
To be sure, the vast majority of restaurant operators wouldn’t want to relive the challenges of the pandemic. But it hasn’t been all bad: The past year has also stripped away the clutter and forced operators to focus on making the kinds of improvements and adaptations that kept business running. As times improve, those changes should become permanent – while other possibilities should be considered with a more wary eye. Here are five key pandemic-era changes to embed in your operation (if they aren’t already permanent): Be transparent with your guests – about the origins of the food you serve and how you protect consumer safety – and make those elements central to your brand. Keep your menu simple to enable you to more flexibly manage your inventory and waste. Harness data to help you stay current about customer preferences, supply-chain challenges and areas of your business that are generating excess costs. Find ways to offer a personal touch while allowing guests to minimize physical contact with surfaces and other people – whether they are using your restroom or paying for their order. Finally, embrace structures that will allow you to be more nimble in the future. That could mean having a real estate footprint that can easily adapt to different service models, or adopting technology that allows you to more easily scale up and scale down your staffing based on changes in the weather.
At the time of this writing, the National Restaurant Association had just announced that more than 110,000 restaurants around the country – representing one in six dining establishments – had closed either long term or permanently due to the pandemic. If you’re reading this, your business has likely already developed strong survival strategies, but the winter months are likely to test them yet again as the country manages winter illness spikes and more potential lockdowns. Is your restaurant as ready as it can be? In a recent Restaurant Dive article, several attorneys from the global law firm Goodwin’s financial restructuring group offered guidance to help restaurants weather the challenges of the next few months. Specifically, they said restaurants have two critical capabilities now: their ability to identify and implement practices to enhance revenue and reduce expenses, as well as their ability to connect with stakeholders and create a mutually agreed-upon restructuring plan that maximizes the value of the business and develops a business model that is sustainable in the current environment. As part of this, restaurant operators will need to conduct a thorough analysis of their operations, including calculating all assets and liabilities, and consider potential opportunities for getting concessions from landlords and suppliers, as well as securing external sources of funding. While there are sure to be more restaurant closures ahead before this crisis is over, there will also be opportunities available. Savvy businesses that have a precise understanding of their operation, as well as contingency plans in place to provide help in various scenarios, will be in the best position to seize those opportunities.
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