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QSR Interview

It’s Easier to Be Green
If you went to a large chain and said, “We are going to raise your energy prices by 10 percent,” I think you’d get a pretty big reaction.

It can be a big number if you are a big company. If electricity is $1,000 a month and you know that you are going to be paying $1,100, then that sounds pretty significant—$100 more as a percentage of sales. But here in the Northwest and in the Portland area, too, there is a very heavy interest in the kind of things like the wind power. Our guests actually appreciate the fact that we are doing these things.

So do you think that it pays off in terms of customer loyalty or employee loyalty? Are those tangible things for you?

Yes. We get lots and lots of letters and e-mail from people commenting about these kinds of things.

Everything we do impacts the Pacific Northwest community.”
Can you see any difference in sales?

Well, we are having one of the best years that we have ever had. I think this year we are running close to 11- or 12-percent increase in same store sales, and this is very significant. I just think a lot of it has to do with our guest loyalty.

Your menu is very much centered around what ingredients you can get locally, including your somewhat famous Tillamook cheeseburger. What exactly is a Tillamook cheeseburger?

Well, Tillamook is a little community on the Oregon coast, and Tillamook cheese has been made down there for many, many years. It is a very well known and popular cheese in the Northwest—in fact, they’ve expanded now with some of the grocery chains. But the Tillamook cheeseburger is just the combination of a well-thought-of local supplier that we are proud to be partnering with.

If we took our concept and came out to where you are or into the Midwest or something, could we do what we are doing? I believe that we could, but we’d have to do a lot of legwork in advance and what we would be making for the guests in the restaurants there would depend on what’s available in that market.

Burgerville first opened in 1961 or so, and right now, you’re sitting with 39 stores. What are you are trying to accomplish in terms of growth?

We haven’t grown very quickly, and we’ve been around for a long time. For a long time, we were the only player in the market. We’ve always wanted to build our restaurants where we felt there was a need for us to be there, rather than just to build a certain number of restaurants. Our goal hasn’t been to be big, but obviously, we want to grow the company.

We’re going to do some investing in our existing restaurants. We want to go back and keep them fresh. We are trying to create Burgerville to be more of a fast-casual rather than fast-food kind of a restaurant. We are doing some different things around service models and production models and things like that. We have also created a new restaurant concept this year. We rebuilt a restaurant just north of Vancouver and created what we call our Northwest concept, so we are playing with that, and we’ve got some tweaking to do.

QSR subscribers: get the answers to these questions and more in your March issue!!
  • Wind power, though, is not all you’re doing to create a more environmentally friendly restaurant. Tell me about recycling cooking oil into bio-diesel.
  • Would you recommend employing these sustainable practices in a bigger chain environment?
  • Yes, you have the luxury of testing concepts, like the noodlin’ concept. But that’s closed now. What did you learned from that?
  • You’ve talked about making a conversion from quick-serve to fast casual. How is that going at Burgerville?
  • You have the somewhat dubious distinction of being a quick-serve restaurant where Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser says he would dine. How does that feel?
  • Franchising is often a part of growth, yet right now, all of your stores are company owned. Have you thought about franchising lately?
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