Last summer I wrote about Klick Kitchen, an internet-based replenishment service for food service businesses. At the time it struck me as odd that despite all the press Klick Kitchen had been getting, there didn’t seem to be any feedback from real chefs/managers/owners in the field who could substantiate Klick …
Read More »Improve Restaurant Sales And Brand Recognition At Food Festivals
Summer food festivals have been a fixture in American culture for years. From the Taste of Chicago to the Alabama Crawfish Festival , food festivals large and small have kept growing and expanding, even through recent economic turbulence. Tens of thousands of restaurants participate in these festivals across the country. …
Read More »How To Make Your Restaurant A “Third Place”
The concept of the “third place” was first developed by Starbucks, and anyone who has been in a Starbucks immediately understands the principle: make your business feel like a home-away-from-home. Unfortunately for Starbucks they made way too many homes just as the economy turned south – tripling the number of …
Read More »Marketing Your Restaurant’s Core Values
In a previous post, I discussed the benefits of implementing Core Value Marketing as part of a successful growth strategy. This type of program creates a bond with your potential guests while providing tremendous opportunities for free publicity. Most importantly, it allows you to provide much needed support to organizations …
Read More »Why You Should Tell Your Guests To Order Themselves
If you do it right, guest prefer to order themselves. This has been proven by the advent of interactive electronic ordering kiosks, which have quickly become commonplace in European and Asian quick service restaurants. Americans are finally catching up to their European counterparts when it comes to self-service kiosks. Early …
Read More »NRA Announces 2009 Kitchen Innovations Awards
The National Restaurant Association (NRA) has announced the 2009 winners of their annual Kitchen Innovations award, which recognizes cutting edge advancements in improving the efficiency of commercial kitchen appliances and tools. Some highlights from this year’s list include: Advanced Composite Materials’ Silar Microwave Flatstone. This composite ceramic insert is designed …
Read More »Serve Sustainable Seafood
Seafood is a wonderful delicacy that helps form the backbone of thousands of restaurants. Seafood is healthy and great tasting, and customers love treating themselves to seafood when they go out to eat. Unfortunately, overfishing has increased exponentially in the last 25 years, resulting in the collapse of a full …
Read More »Online Ordering: Is It Your Future Blessing or Curse?
You can do anything on the Internet these days, and increasingly people are relying on the web to do all kinds of things that make their daily lives more convenient. On paper, the idea of introducing an online ordering service sounds exciting to restaurateurs. After all, who can complain about …
Read More »Menu Pricing’s Theory Of Relativity
In a previous oldie-but-goodie Back Burner post I talked about menu engineering – how to put together a menu that effectively markets your dishes and makes customers want to spend more and buy high margin menu items. One thing that post did not touch upon, however, was how to price …
Read More »Why Doesn’t Your Social Media Bring In Customers?
Meet Bob. Bob might be considered equivalent to the strategic design behind, and the effective level of marketing across your social media profiles. Let’s take Bob off the internet and put him in your dining room to see how accurately he reflects your online presence and your overall performance. You …
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