Takeout is here to stay (and even if you’re eager to serve a full dining room again, you have reason to be happy about the takeout part). The proof is in the numbers. According to a new survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers by Paytronix Systems, 63 percent of the money that U.S. consumers spent on food orders last year was on food eaten at home. Digital channels supported those orders by a large margin: Of the money consumers spent online on food orders, 89 percent was spent on orders placed via desktop websites, mobile apps and aggregator apps. What’s more, the research found that consumers spent 50 percent more on average when they placed orders online for takeout. Paytronix CEO Andrew Robbins says that in 2021, a consumer’s ability to order online, collect orders via a drive-thru or curbside pickup, and earn rewards through loyalty programs will create the most opportunities for restaurants. This makes it all the more critical to be able to use your POS to quickly summon information about what your recipes cost, which menu items deliver the most profitability, and what items a guest has ordered in the past. If your restaurant receives a grant from the American Rescue Plan, consider using it to fine-tune your tech to streamline your takeout so you can suggest the profitable items and combinations that a guest is most likely to crave time and again.
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Take out and curbside pick ups will be with us for some time. Some things to consider when building these menus are:
How well does a menu item travel? Packaging Tamper evident packaging Who's driving? Third party delivery service Expensive Who controls the customer data Self delivery You control data You control timing You control how product is handled Below we have offered some resources for your pick up and delivery program. |
On-demand food delivery is just getting started – and restaurants may be just one part of it. Uber announced recently that it had partnered with the on-demand delivery startup GoPuff to offer items from grocery and convenience stories in 95 cities within the next couple of months. (This is on top of its recent acquisition of Drizly, enabling the delivery of alcohol.) As grocery stores offer more ready-to-eat foods and companies like Uber appear to be making it easier for consumers to have food and drink delivered when they want it from businesses beyond just restaurants, where does this leave restaurants? To be sure, developments like this hint at how third-party delivery companies could be shifting gears to promote greater profitability after the pandemic – and potentially become less reliant on business from restaurants. In any case, as life begins to return to normal, restaurant operators need to continue to think about how they can innovate. That means studying developments in delivery and identifying new ways to make it work financially, whether through in-house options, partnerships with other restaurants or other avenues. It’s also about looking for new opportunities to get a restaurant’s brand in front of consumers – via such routes as ghost kitchens and partnerships with grocery stores that can offer hot or prepackaged restaurant food to go – or elevating and differentiating the in-restaurant dining experience so consumers feel the need to make it a bigger part of their lives again. A recent report from Restaurant Hospitality shared some things operators are doing to innovate, ranging from delivering food to lockers in apartment buildings to finding creative ways to minimize food waste.
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With operating cost increasing and possible incoming decreasing, it is more important than ever to look at your reveune streams and areas were you are spending more money. Chances are your delivery business has been increasing as well as your delivery costs. Now is the time to determine if you are going to use/continue to use a third party delivery service or if you will self deliver. Here are a few things you should consider:
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