Want to boost your restaurant’s profit margins by about a quarter? Try marketing to people with food allergies.
That’s one of the big takeaways from a report this week published by tech supplier EveryBite and the nonprofit Food Allergy Research & Education, or FARE.
According to the report, people with food allergies are great restaurant customers. They tend to spend more when they dine out, and they are more loyal to their favorite restaurants than the average consumer. They are also a significant market: About 1 in every 10 Americans has a food allergy, and together, they spend $19 billion a year on food.
That makes the food allergy community a potentially valuable untapped opportunity for restaurants, which could increase their profit margins by up to 24% by offering allergy-friendly meals, according to the report. But the industry has not historically done a good job of catering to this group, said Sung Poblete, CEO of FARE.
For instance, staff are not always trained to ask customers about allergies, or they may not even be aware what allergens are in a given dish. This can be frustrating for people with allergies, and it creates friction for both sides.
At the same time, restaurants typically have no idea just how many of their customers have food allergies.
“We have to educate restaurants and the restaurant workers on how to manage allergens in the back of the kitchen and also in the front of the restaurant,” Poblete said.
At the root of this whole issue is, of course, the menu. What’s on the menu and how those items are presented can make or break a food-allergic customer’s decision to visit a given restaurant.
With that in mind, FARE teamed up with EveryBite, which helps restaurants create dynamic digital menus that can be filtered by allergen, ingredient or other dietary preferences.
The menus, which can be viewed on the restaurant’s website or via a QR code, are designed to take some pressure off of both employees and customers, especially when it comes to allergies.
“It’s a bit much to ask the front-of-house staff to really know what’s going on” with allergens, said Lucy Logan, co-founder of EveryBite. At the same time, the personalized menus allow customers smooth out what can be an awkward interaction.
Besides aiming to make the ordering experience less painful, EveryBite also allows restaurants to collect data on their customers’ preferences. For instance, they can see how many of their customers have a wheat allergy or a dairy allergy, putting hard data behind what is today largely anecdotal.
“What [restaurants] see is front-of-house rumors: ‘I had another one ask me about wheat,’” said Sid Conklin, CEO of EveryBite. “What we now can do is show the restaurant all their diners and how many they are and all their information.”
The restaurant could then use that data to better align its menu with what its customers are looking for, Conklin said.
More than 50 restaurant brands use EveryBite across more than 4,000 locations.
The company, in partnership with FARE, aggregated data from 1 million diners to produce the new Diner Trend Report, the first in a quarterly series aimed at giving restaurants more insight into the food allergy community.
The report includes data on top allergens and dietary preferences and shows where food-allergic customers tend to be concentrated geographically.
It also highlights dishes that are popular within different segments. For instance, crispy cauliflower is a favorite among the gluten-free and dairy-free crowds, while Southwest chicken and rice is a go-to for people with egg allergies.
“This is one way to begin to measure and demonstrate the opportunity and create a different dynamic between the food allergy community and the restaurant industry,” Poblete said.
It comes as food allergies are on the rise. Prevalence among children rose 50% from 1997 and 2011 and another 50% between 2007 and 2021, according to FARE.
The report also dovetails with restaurants’ transformation into a more data-driven industry. The rise of online ordering has given restaurants more insight into customer preferences than ever before. Food allergies are a crucial data point that operators may want to take into account.
“Our goal is, if we do our job right, we’re gonna bring these two communities together,” Conklin said of EveryBite’s work with FARE. “We will make it economically viable for restaurants to really go after these audiences.”
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