 When Mintel released its 2024 Global Food and Drink Trends report, they predicted that this year, we should “expect brands to help consumers live longer, healthier lives.” To be sure, consumer consciousness about health and nutrition has been on an upward trend in recent years, with growing awareness about functional food and drink, the degree of processing involved in what we consume, and the ability of food to help extend the healthy years of a person’s life. To that end, restaurant brands are responding to this environment in new ways. For one, Nation’s Restaurant News reports that the quick-service salad brand Salad and Go recently named its first-ever salad nutrition officer, registered dietician Maya Feller. On the Salad and Go website, Feller is providing tips to help guests incorporate more healthy food into their diets, as well as collaborating with the restaurant’s chef on a video series aimed at dispelling food myths and misconceptions, the report says. If making healthier choices is important to your guests and a key component of your restaurant’s brand, there are steps you can take – both direct and subtle – to nudge people in a healthier direction when it comes to their food and drink. You can promote the pleasure of healthier items with descriptions that focus on taste as opposed to health benefits – “citrus-glazed carrots” as opposed to “fiber-rich carrots,” for example. You can also place healthier options front and center when guests are reviewing the menu, flag them with special logos on your menu, or suggest them as side dish options when upselling an order.
 In the past, takeout business was often a nice-to-have option for restaurants – not necessarily the centerpiece of service. But that is changing – and restaurants are finding ways to translate the success of a brand with a solid on-premise history into one that doesn’t offer much of an on-premise experience. One example: Inspire Brands’s Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant. As CNBC reported recently, the sports-bar chicken wing brand launched a quick-service, delivery-and-takeout-only offshoot called BWW Go four years ago – and they have opened 100 locations since then, with another 50 planned for the remainder of the year. Takeout and delivery sales for Buffalo Wild Wings are now around 33 percent of all sales, up from 15 percent pre-pandemic, according to the business. The restaurant’s off-premise play seems to have worked because their customer base enjoys staying home to watch the big game, their product is not only popular and easy to customize but also travels well, and many customers know and trust the brand from their on-premise experience there. If, like many restaurants, you’re experiencing a surge in off-premise sales in recent years, how comfortable are you with how your brand translates outside of your dining room? Could you offer menu items that travel better? Are you finding ways to bring the personality of your brand into people’s homes with every takeout order? Are your delivery partners preserving your commitment to service – or could you incentivize customers to collect their food from you so you can strengthen face-to-face engagement? Or is your brand ripe for a Buffalo Wild Wings-style reinvention, with an off-premise offshoot that reliably provides the experience customers expect from the parent brand?
 Perhaps it has to do with the flexibility of post-pandemic schedules, the rise in hard-to-acquire dinner reservations in various places around the country, the need for restaurants to maximize sales opportunities, or all of the above, but the demand for quality lunch options appears to be on the rise. According to one restaurateur in a recent report from Eater New York, lunch has become the “new post-pandemic 5 p.m. reservation,” with multi-course, prix-fixe lunch menus popping up around the city. Offering enhanced lunch options could work well beyond major metropolitan areas like New York: Dinner reservations are becoming more difficult to secure at restaurants in many cities and towns around the country, and recent reports have indicated that restaurants are seeing more opportunity in catering (which has a lot of sales potential at lunchtime). Lunch could be an opportunity to give guests access to an elevated experience for what feels like a better value, provide your staff greater flexibility with scheduling, and make more efficient use of your space and inventory. Could innovating at lunchtime work for your business?
 Devoting more of the menu to vegetables isn’t simply on-trend right now – it’s also an ongoing strategy for managing supply chain snags and inflation concerns, particularly as restaurant pricing continues to outpace grocery store pricing. According to recent research from Nation’s Restaurant News, 58 percent of restaurant operators of all sizes and service styles name supply chain problems and inflation as their biggest pain points right now. But at a time when consumers are looking for their restaurant experience to feel like a good value, operators aren’t able to sacrifice service or menu development in an effort to cut costs. Could reimagining your menu help? A recent Restaurant Hospitality report says more chefs are looking to further reduce large-format animal proteins and incorporate vegetables in creative ways in order to counteract the high costs of ingredients, labor and transportation, as well as to better manage the availability of ingredients. That could mean pushing the vegetarian content on menus toward the 30 percent mark for restaurants that have traditionally served more meat. This summer could be a good time to integrate more local produce on the menu and preserve it in a range of ways for the cooler months – not in an aim to mimic meat but to offer an unexpected experience with plants. Combine these foods in vegetable-forward dishes with beans, legumes, hearty whole grains and other satisfying plant proteins to test potential applications in the center of the plate – and to gather guest input too.
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