Today’s market is slightly different. Americans are still looking to make the job of feeding themselves and their families easier; the difference is that during that first shift 20 years ago, customers switched from grocery stores to restaurants—boosting the industry. Today’s trend, however, has them switching among restaurants, mainly gravitating toward those that are most convenient. This leads to a flat market.
“If someone orders a takeout meal at a restaurant, or from a supermarket, it’s not being replaced from the home, it’s being replaced from some other place you used to buy a prepared meal,” Balzar explains. “So, it’s become a market-share battle.”
McAlister’s Deli Vice President Pat Walls says that this kind of competition will only improve consumers’ dining experiences. “People who might not have been in the game, like an Applebee’s, Chili’s, or an Outback two or three years ago become major players, and it makes everyone go up another level,” he says.
Don Hasulak is managing director at FITCH, a design company whose clients include takeout staples like Starbucks Coffee, Paradise Bakery & Café, Pei Wei Asian Diner, and Jamba Juice. He says that more and more clients are coming to him looking to implement to-go programs into their concept designs.
“In a majority of cases, if you’re lucky enough to get the real estate, they are going as far as: step one, building a separate counter; step two, a separate entrance, that usually requires a drive-by window or a person who runs the food out to you,” he says.
Hasulak says that more clients than ever are requesting preferred parking for their takeout customers and even a separate POS system within the unit, just for to-go orders.
Increasing Competition
Each month the restaurant industry serves about five billion customers and does $33.5 billion worth of business. Not wanting to miss out on potential customers and their accompanying food dollars, restaurants and nontraditional foodservices are beginning to focus more on providing convenient meals.
In July grocer Publix, with locations in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee, launched a pilot curbside program for its deli offerings in Fort Myers, Florida, in an attempt to capture a larger share of dining dollars. Customers using the curbside program call in their order to the deli and then a food runner delivers the meal to their car once it is ready.
“Supermarkets are not just based in traditional competition from other supermarkets anymore,” Publix’s Brous says. “Now we face increased competition from super centers, natural food stores, from restaurants.”
Though Publix’s 77-year-old reputation has been built on the classic grocery store image, it is responding to the market and looking for new ways to “think outside of the box and to offer our customers convenience,” Brous says. So, in addition to the pilot curbside program, Publix added nine prepared-meal stations at its Lake Mary, Florida, location and even a Carrabba’s restaurant at its Sarasota, Florida, location.
It’s not just decades-old grocery stores that are looking to grab a piece of the convenient meal market, though. The young meal-assembly segment is joining the competition too.