The pandemic forced restaurants to get more creative than usual this year. The upshot is that many of the solutions worked so well they’ll probably outlast the virus. Here’s a look at a handful of winners.
Curbside pickup
Count curbside among the many old-fashioned services that found new life amid the pandemic. Restaurants quickly realized they could turn their parking lots into de facto drive-thrus with the help of technology and a little creativity.
Roughly 70% of restaurants added curbside during the pandemic, up from 15% before, according to research firm Incisiv—and many plan to continue it. Fast casuals are building curbside capabilities into new prototypes, and full-service chains such as Texas Roadhouse are working to improve the service with things like two-way text messaging.
Virtual concepts
Pandemic dynamics—reduced dine-in traffic, a shift to off-premise and a need to generate revenue, fast—created the perfect environment for virtual brands to proliferate in 2020.
Thousands of restaurants began adding these off-premise-only concepts that exist solely online, often producing multiple of them alongside their existing menus. One estimate pegged their total number at more than 100,000.
Most focus on popular delivery items like wings and pizza. And some have performed quite well. Pasqually’s Pizza, which became a bit of a laughingstock when the internet found out it was a Chuck E. Cheese offshoot, was accounting for 10% of CEC Entertainment’s sales in July.
The concepts do face questions about marketing and kitchen complexity. But with such a low barrier of entry and delivery still booming, the trend appears to be just getting started.
Family and holiday meal bundles
With people stuck at home, restaurants began offering family meal packages designed to easily feed entire households, streamlining the menu and easing operations in the process. When the holidays rolled around, restaurants used the same concept to offer large-format feasts for groups ranging in size from two to 10.
The idea appears to have legs with consumers: Delivery provider Postmates reported that orders of family meals increased by 175% year over year. And 73% of diners said they’d be likely to order a family meal bundle even after restaurants reopen, according to Technomic’s 2020 Delivery and Takeout Consumer Trend Report.
Subscription programs
Multiple restaurant brands ventured into subscriptions in 2020, none more successfully than Panera Bread.
The chain’s $8.99 monthly unlimited coffee program boasted 500,000 paid subscribers as of October, and 90% of that business was incremental, Panera said.
Perhaps catching wind of that success, Dickey’s and BJ’s launched subscriptions of their own, for meal boxes and beer, respectively. And in the delivery sector, DoorDash and Grubhub were both bullish on their membership programs offering unlimited free delivery.
Outdoor dining
Persistent limits on indoor dining meant restaurants had to look outside their four walls to serve customers on-site. In addition to existing patios, they made creative use of parking lots and other spaces—Cracker Barrel, for instance, replaced the rocking chairs on its old-timey covered porch with tables and chairs. Some municipalities helped out by closing down streets or devoting other public spaces—and funding—to outdoor dining.
In cold-weather areas, outdoor heaters flew off the shelves, and a variety of contests and grants looked to help restaurants fund outdoor operations through the winter.
For many restaurants, including The Cheesecake Factory and BJ’s, the added capacity had a significant impact. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see some of those dining room extensions become permanent where weather permits.
SPACs
“If you haven’t created a SPAC in 2020, do you even exist?”
My colleague Jonathan Maze posed that question back in August, in a blog post about the formation of yet another special purpose acquisition company in the restaurant industry.
A SPAC is a shell company that sells stock to investors through an IPO and uses the proceeds to make an acquisition. It then takes the acquired company public.
2020 was a big year for such ventures: As of early December, 222 SPACs had made initial public offerings, compared to 59 in 2019, according to the website spacinsider.com.
Some of that action took place in the restaurant industry. In June, Opes Acquisition Corp. acquired BurgerFi for $100 million with plans to take it public. That was followed by the formation of Starboard Value Acquisition Corp., Fast Acquisition Corp. and Tastemaker Acquisition Corp., all of which have their eyes on restaurant companies.
Restaurant SPACs don’t have a great track record. Still, given the appearance of so many fresh ones this year, we’ll likely be hearing about them for a while, successful or not.
Members help make our journalism possible. Become a Restaurant Business member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.