The next big ideas and strategies were already underway before the COVID pandemic hit in 2020. But, “We had these predictions over the next 10 years … and it just all got accelerated into a couple of months,” said Alex Canter, CEO of virtual brand developer Nextbite, to Nation’s Restaurant News. The article discusses the phenomenon of virtual brands (and ghost kitchens) that exploded during the pandemic—a classic example of making the most of an opportunity.
As dining rooms across the United States were shut down for quarantines, virtual brands in development, like Nextbite, seized the new necessity: how to keep restaurants open and get food into the hands of consumers. ““Pre-pandemic, [we knew] that already 90% of restaurants have excess capacity in their kitchen to make more food, and we wanted to create this turnkey process very easily in a non-disruptive way,” Canter said. With restaurants suddenly empty, there was ample space to test out the new ideas without disrupting in-house dining and operations.
But launching a virtual brand is more than simply making food available to order online, and this is what Canter explains to NRN. ““There’s a huge learning curve getting it right,” he said. “There’s so many investments that need to be made to get it off the ground in the right way, from high-quality photos, to setting up the menu correctly, to opting into the right promotions on these delivery apps and the direct-to-consumer marketing side and the social media strategy.”
This is important perspective as the effects of the pandemic wane, but expectations for online options remain. Restaurants may be looking to join the digital dining realm, but they need more than kitchen space.
Richard Weil, principal and owner of National Restaurant Consultants, suggests, “Take the time to look at your menu and consider what you can do best to further your online presence. Which foods will travel well, which have raving fans, and which offer good profit margins—these are the best ones to start with, similar to a menu engineering process.”
Our restaurant consultants have closely followed these modernizations and technological developments and see the benefit in some implementations. Because of our business evaluation expertise, our consultants can find where some of these new applications and projects might fit into your restaurant business—and where they won’t.