Partnerships are key when navigating the complex process of converting restaurant dishes into retail success stories.
That was the central theme of a National Restaurant Association Show session Monday, presented by two industry experts from Johnson & Wales University.
“Just because you have a successful restaurant item, doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful at retail,” said Jeff Binczyk, director of the university’s Larry Friedman Center for Entrepreneurship, who conducted his doctoral research on food launch failures. “I recommend following this process, because within each one of the steps, it’s wrought with potential errors that could lead to a failure.”
The process Binczyk mentions includes identifying a problem; outlining a solution; performing a competitive analysis and consumer research; identifying a target customer; navigating pricing, placement and promotion; leveraging social media and, of course, making sure financials are in check.
“Approximately 80% of small food company launches fail,” he said. “I don’t mean to scare you.”
Restaurant operators can opt to bring their signature dish to retail on their own, Lynn Tripp, associate professor of food science at the school’s College of Food Innovation and Technology, said. Sure, they’ll keep all of the profits. But choosing to partner with a co-manufacturer may be a better strategy for those who are new to the industry, Tripp said.
“Our overarching theme today is that you will need partners in this process,” she said. “It’s very difficult to do this alone. It’s very risky and it’s very expensive to do this alone.”
Say your restaurant makes fantastic eggrolls, eggrolls so good you think grocery store shoppers would want to buy them, Tripp said. First, you need to “optimize” the product for retail sale. That may mean employing research chefs or food scientists or a co-manufacturer to help create a new product that can be refrigerated or frozen and eventually reheated.
You’ll need to be able to source your ingredients on a large scale, evaluate how long of a shelf life the product has, create a shelf label that complies with regulatory guidelines, consult with packaging designers and more, she said.
Just navigating the rules set forth by the USDA and FDA can require expert advice.
“The FDA has jurisdiction over processed fruits and vegetables,” she said. “USDA, raw fruits and vegetables. FDA, shell eggs. USDA, dried, frozen and processed eggs …” Tripp said. “It’s not intuitive … Seek help. This is my greatest point of advice. Work with professionals through individual steps or the entire process.”
Some parts of the process, however, are a bit easier for novices to unravel.
For example, a restaurant operator could go to Yelp or Google and copy-paste all reviews from competing brands into AI with a prompt asking for the positive and negative themes from the competition, Binczyk said.
“Get the answer that helps you understand how you can be different,” he said. “Going through this step is really critical, because a lot of companies launch products that are ‘me-toos’ versus their competitors, and they fail because there’s no difference. There’s no differentiation.”
Follow that up with consumer research, to understand who your key consumer is.
“Some of my students tell me, ‘My product is sort of marketed to everybody,’” Binczyk said. “That is a formula for failure.”
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