​CEOs don’t want to scroll through endless kitchen data reports — they want a succinct assessment of how foodservice performance impacts the business’s bottom line and future prospects. This year, the National Restaurant Association forecasts $1.55 trillion in total foodservice sales, with modest inflation-adjusted growth of around 1.3 percent over last year. Balancing inflation with consumer value will continue to be important for operators. Those who can see their kitchen from a CEO’s perspective can strengthen their support from the executive suite at a time when it’s especially needed.
It’s a good time to fine-tune kitchen metrics in several areas. First, translate kitchen metrics into business-relevant margin language. What is your food and labor cost as a percentage of revenue? What’s your variance vs. budget? How do these figures impact operating profit? Articulate whether costs are improving or worsening relative to plan and why.
Next, frame food safety, compliance gaps, or waste reduction in economic terms. For example, when you can say you cut waste by $120 per 1,000 meals, which restored 0.4 percent margin, you demonstrate how you’re turning operational effort into a strategic win.
Include a forward-looking snapshot. With food-away-from-home prices rising faster than overall food costs — about 4 percent through late 2025 — forecast menu pricing, cost pressures, and their likely impact on traffic and check averages.
Finally, package your insights in a way that clarifies decision making. Using the variance + cause + action approach can help zero in on needed actions in parts of the business. For example, if your staff turnover was higher than normal in the previous quarter, assess what changed during that time, why, and what you’re doing now to change that for the better. This can shift reporting conversations into more of a strategic tool — and less of a compliance exercise — so CEOs can more clearly see performance trends and risks, then assess near-term results.

​It’s so much easier to bring existing guests back to your restaurant than to attract new ones – and your loyalty program is a vital tool to help inspire return visits and make them feel worthwhile to people. But at a time when loyalty programs are available at so many restaurants (as well as at more indirect competitors like convenience and grocery stores), it’s important to make a program relevant to each guest. McKinsey research found that businesses that excel at personalization generate 40 percent more revenue from their personalization efforts than businesses that are more average performers. But there is a lot of room for improvement here, according to a new loyalty report from Paytronix. It found that only 44 percent of consumers say the offers they get are relevant, indicating a desire for higher levels of personalization. Even if your business offers some kind of loyalty program segmentation – most brands do – are you sure it’s hitting the right notes with guests? The Paytronix research found that successful programs offer differentiation so each member gets what they crave, an emotional connection using such tools as historical data about past orders or celebratory offers on birthdays, and brand affinity so guests connect positive experiences with your business. This requires understanding guests at a granular level. AI and machine learning technology that is baked into many new platforms is helping to give operators a leg up in this area, delivering flexibility and deep segmentation so they can offer the kinds of extremely relevant experiences that make guests feel the emotional pull to return, do so more regularly, and spend more when they do. 

The battle to win loyal guests continues in the restaurant space – and lately, many restaurant brands are vying with each other to stand out in the market with perks including special experiences and merchandise in addition to food. Amid economic challenges like higher interest rates and more controlled consumer spending, loyalty programs have become critical for restaurant brands. However, some brands have been pushing so hard to attract guest sign-ups that those with franchisees are getting some pushback from operators about the new offerings (and therefore delivering an uneven experience with regard to the loyalty rewards offered). If you’re trying to fine tune your loyalty program right now, it’s most important to be able to run it consistently and efficiently. Above all, keeping your loyalty program members interested and engaged means keeping your program simple. It should be easy for your guests to sign up and understand how they can accumulate rewards – and they shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to redeem them. Your guests should have the same loyalty experience across your stores. When you can deliver these things, you may be surprised to see how much your loyalty members value them. Case in point: An annual loyalty survey from Deloitte found that as consumer participation in loyalty programs has increased, it’s been fairly even across paid and free programs. So you may have an opportunity to offer a paid program that allows you to deliver a more premium experience and incentivize additional guest engagement and spending.

Just a few years ago, the 7 p.m. dinner slot was the most coveted for people looking to dine out. But the pandemic shifted the dinner hour earlier to between 5 and 6 p.m., and it has largely stayed there since. That’s according to a recent Associated Press interview with OpenTable CEO Debby Soo. She supposes that with many people continuing to work from home, consumers may be looking to take a break in the early evening to get out of the house and enjoy a meal. The shift in timing may also change people’s appetites for food and drink, potentially creating more of a gray area between happy hour and dinner. What does your guest data say about people’s preferences right now? Are there more people coming in at 5 p.m.? If so, are they more apt to order bar snacks, share a pizza with friends, get shareable entrees suitable for a family, or order individual entrees? Are they in a happy-hour mood and more likely to order drinks? Could you adjust your food and beverage menus to accommodate those preferences? If you’re not seeing clear patterns in ordering behavior, you might test some limited-time offers and then track how guests respond.

​Most restaurant operators across categories are collecting a lot more data these days from a range of sources – whether it be from their POS system, loyalty program, digital ordering platforms, inventory system, labor management platform or some combination of the above. But when it comes to translating this information into actionable steps to grow sales, traffic and profits, a majority of operators still aren’t making the connection. New market research from Nation’s Restaurant News Intelligence found that 70 percent of operators wonder if they are optimizing the guest data they currently collect. This may be because inadequate data is being collected, or because the data is stuck in silos and isn’t easily or automatically combined to allow operators to extract actionable insights. Sound familiar? Using a data analytics platform – Keboola and Zoho are just two examples of companies in the market – can help you pull data from across your business and convert the information into proactive steps that can help you drive better results. Since your POS is the nerve center of your business, your POS provider may also be able to help you find ways to get your systems to talk to each other and minimize manual effort on your part.

In these uncertain economic times, there has been a lot of talk about how restaurants must build value into the experience they offer guests. This isn’t simply about making guests feel they are getting a good deal, but about making the experience feel like it’s well worth the cost – or that it easily justifies the decision to choose your restaurant over the one across the street, or over preparing a meal kit at home. Delivering that level of experience increasingly requires restaurant operators to anticipate their guests’ needs before those guests even know what their needs are. Collecting and dissecting data to deliver ever-greater levels of customization and personalization can help. As a recent report from Modern Restaurant Management says, technology is enabling operators to capture details about guests at every point of their experience – so they can know that one guest is allergic to dairy, or that she likes eating at a certain table. This also means that a server is equipped with food and drink upsell suggestions based on a person’s previous order. So a server may not necessarily offer the same special to every table anymore but instead can make a targeted seafood suggestion that complements the wine that guests at one table have ordered the past three times they have visited your restaurant – then promote plant-based specials to the vegetarians at the next table. This deeper level of personalization extends to a restaurant’s communications with guests too, so you have a range of targeted promotions going out to subsets of your email or text distributions. This year, how can you make your in-person and electronic outreach to guests feel more personal and less one-size-fits-all?

You may not need one – yet. Without a doubt, nailing your loyalty program can pay off: Harvard Business Review reports that increasing your loyalty following by just 5 percent can drive profits up by between 25 and 95 percent. However, Fast Casual reports that although the average consumer belongs to 14.8 loyalty programs, they are active in only 6.7 of them. So while much has been said in recent months about how restaurants can use their loyalty program to set themselves apart and drive business at a highly competitive time, a loyalty program on its own can become simply a discount program – and no great help to you – if it’s not deployed properly. That means tying it to consumer buying behavior, driving more frequent visits, and then learning more from those repeat visits. Your existing guests are your most important ones to focus on here. Before you get to launching a loyalty program, start with maximizing your tech stack – specifically your customer relationship management and customer data platform (CRM/CDP) – to collect information about your existing guests, what they buy from you and when. Once you’re armed with those insights, you will have a clearer path to using that information to influence their future buying decisions (and making them truly loyal members of your loyalty program).

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.

After a tumultuous year, restaurants are coming back in a big way – though the landscape is looking different than it did before the pandemic. According to Yelp’s Economic Average report released in April, which tracks the number of restaurants listed on Yelp by restaurant operators and consumers, more new restaurant businesses opened in the U.S. during the first quarter of 2021 than at any other period over the last 12 months. The restaurants across the nation that experienced the most growth during the quarter, the report said, tended to be those that offer takeout, outdoor dining and other Covid safety precautions. Restaurants with food-delivery services experienced the greatest increase – a 22.1 percent spike. This trend is likely to last for some time – at least for restaurants beyond fine-dining establishments – particularly as consumers have taken on new habits over the past year. Does your restaurant have a seamless system when it comes to offering food for off-premise consumption? A Restaurant Business report says it will continue to be important for operators to streamline their processes – e.g. continuing to offer curbside pickup and trimming menus to include items that travel the best, as well as leaning on data a bit more to predict traffic surges and lulls, craft new promotions to drive demand, and manage orders coming from multiple sources.

As the pandemic has called for people to work, learn, eat and shop from home, attitudes about the best places to live have shifted too. The suburbs and some rural areas have experienced a lift as people have left cramped urban quarters behind. A survey conducted by Zillow last spring found that the rise in remote working was generating a property-buying spike in suburbs and smaller cities. What’s less clear is how temporary that suburban shift will be. As a result, it’s become a bit more difficult for restaurant operators to know who their customers are – and how their preferences may differ from those in pre-pandemic times. Your in-store technology should be providing real-time updates to help you manage business day to day, but it’s important to keep an eye on the larger picture too. Datassential’s Firefly database is one new tool that lets users examine the restaurant landscape in any city or geographical region. It pulls from demographic data including average household income, median age and other factors to help operators get a better sense of how their community is changing – and how they will have to adjust as a result. Overall, the suburban shift has much to offer restaurant operators, including greater flexibility with space, lower costs, and less competition from other chef-driven concepts. A recent report from US Foods says succeeding with
current suburban diners is about offering value and variety, while accommodating their interest in being adventurous.