It was recently reported by The NPD Group, an American market research company, that restaurant traffic in 2018 largely stayed flat and customer spending rose by just 2%. In the fast-paced society we live in, restaurants will have to adapt to consumer demands to attract customers and succeed in this competitive landscape. There are two key trends I see restaurants capitalizing on to drive their desired profits in 2019:
Breakfast: As rent and labor expenses rise constantly, culinary operators will need to offset these overhead costs with creative ways to generate additional income. One way to tap into a less-crowded market is by serving breakfast.
Long overlooked by full-service restaurants in the U.S., this is a rather interesting way to speak to core or new customers. Michelin-starred restaurants (Madera in Menlo Park, California, for example) are pioneers in this field. Increased demand for great, creative, healthy and tasty fare for any meal period makes this is a great opportunity for restaurants to attract new audiences. Direct costs are reasonable and the additional revenue covers fix costs.
Breakfast recipes can be pretty simple, use low-cost ingredients and relatively quick and easy to prepare and serve. It is also an area to show creative skills; restaurants can use breakfast menus to explore and launch crafty, possibly unorthodox dishes. It is a great chance to showcase a restaurant’s creativity in a low-risk way and test ingredients, recipes and culinary direction with a smaller sample audience.
Delivery: In a similar vein, consumers are overwhelmingly relying on technology to access the culinary experiences they’re looking for in this era of convenience. For example, the explosion of meal kit services like Blue Apron and HelloFresh indicate a consumer desire to have high quality cooking at their doorstep and even participate in the cooking process.
Fine-dining restaurants have been reluctant to embrace delivery services, as their product is so much more than food. However, I see more and more restaurants finding methods to cater to this trend in their own way. Utilizing high-end delivery services or curating delivery-only items to ensure that the dishes delivered represent something close to the restaurant’s quality standards are methods upscale establishments can use to combat the negative stigma that delivery lowers standards.
It would be a missed opportunity to be left out of this unstoppable trend because of optics and challenges surrounding delivery.
Contributed by Gert Kopera, executive vice president, Global Restaurants, Hakkasan Group, Las Vegas