Podcasts about qsrs

As independently owned and operated small businesses, fast-food restaurant franchisees have unique business needs. They have mobile and often part-time workforces, complex inventory management and the constant challenge of managing both a small business and being the face of a major brand. On the latest episode of the ABA Banking Journal Podcast — sponsored by Bix2x — Wendell Bontrager talks about how Sonata Bank is working with this unique market segment. For example, “we can come in at fractional costs to provide them things like telehealth, mobile phone insurance, pet insurance, in a way that is free to the employee but is done and sold through the franchisee,” says Bontrager. He outlines Sonata's business of lending to “quick-service” restaurants, as they're often called in the trade, paired with employee benefits, treasury management and a software-as-a-service platform for QSRs. Bontrager also talks about the health of the Nashville, Tennessee, market where Sonata's community bank franchise is headquartered and how the organization has been able to capture talent with hybrid and remote workplace offerings.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Digital menu boards have long been marketed and positioned as a way to deal digitally with how what's available to order can change through a business day. I'd argue much of the critical thinking around how to do menu boards well hasn't progressed much beyond ensuring the item descriptions and prices are large enough for customers to read from the other side of an order counter. New York-based software and services firm SmarterSign has been in the digital signage industry for coming on 20 years, and has found something of a niche in working with QSR chains on optimized menu boards that are not only legible and visually pleasing, but boost sales performance for operators. Co-founder Gregg Zinn has an interest and passion for the science of advertising and marketing, and he's started writing a series called Digital Menu Board Mastery that gets into the design and psychological weeds of how to lay out and manage menu boards that influence customer ordering decisions and drive higher profits for operators. In this podcast, we get into some interesting things that most menu board sellers and users have probably never considered - stuff like psychological pricing anchors and the so-called golden zones for menu layouts. It's a really interesting chat ... Greg, thank you for joining me. Just to get started, can you give me a rundown on SmarterSign, what it is, how long you've been around, that sort of thing?  Gregg Zinn: Sure. Thank you very much for having me. SmarterSign was founded in 2006, so we've been doing this for just short of 20 years and it was founded by me and my primary business partner, Peter. We got together and both came from technology consulting, building applications for larger organizations, helping them understand how to use technology to make their businesses operate better.  I had actually done some digital signage. My first digital signage was done at Mall of America in the mid 90s working with Mel Simon, I have always been very intrigued by it. I had this vision of a Blade Runner future, where every surface was a communication vehicle and I was just very fascinated with the concept of digital signage, and I also saw that it was gonna be a burgeoning industry that had a lot of runway for the industry to grow and when we looked at the industry, we really found that there were two kinds of providers in the industry, and you probably remember back then, there were providers who were very technology oriented like Cisco, who were very good at moving data around networks, but didn't really have a lot of tools for content control. And there were companies like Scala who had a great software platform, a really powerful software platform, but it didn't really allow business operators to take complete control, and we saw that as the sweet spot for digital signage is moving business operators closer to their message and being able to impact their communication, whether it was in a corporate communication environment, a retail environment, or really what became our biggest market, which is food service, restaurants, digital menu boards.  I think a lot of the reason why digital menu boards became such a big and important part of our business is because of this approach of moving that communication control closer to the business operator. We've spent close to 20 years really working on perfecting as much as we can the tools to bring that vision to life.  So would you describe the company as a CMS software company or more of a solutions firm?  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, that's a great question. So really we view ourselves as two parts of the same solution. One is, one is a software provider that provides great software for controlling digital signage networks, and that's end-to-end from content creation, scheduling, distribution, and playback, and then the other piece is really the services piece of it, and I think that is equally important to the software piece of it, because these business operators are using a new tool, even business operators who have been doing it for 15 years, it's still relatively new to them. So being able to provide that layer of service and support underneath them, and when I say service and support, I'm not just saying, here's how to use our software. I'm talking about how to use this tool for your business. Here are the business opportunities for you. Here are the things that you can do with these tools. I think it's really important, and, for me, as part of the business, it's been a big focus, and I try to influence the software development to accommodate as much of that as possible and make it as intuitive as possible. But a lot of it is just working with business operators, so the service piece of it is really important.  Where's the company based?  Gregg Zinn: Our headquarters is in New York and I am based in Chicago. I moved to Chicago, just short of eight years ago. My wife's family is from Chicago. I was living in Chelsea in Manhattan, and my young sons are getting to school age and New York City is very challenging for raising children. We were living in 700 square feet in Chelsea and the truth is, it was fantastic. I love New York. I'm a New Yorker through and through. But my wife's family is from the Chicagoland area, the suburbs of Chicago, and we decided to pick up and move here, and now instead of looking at concrete and windows, I'm looking at a lake.  Yeah, it's good to have that relief valve as well, the in-laws and extended family where you can say, “hey, we need to do this, can you guys take the kids?” Plus they see more of their family.  Gregg Zinn: It's incredible. We do Sunday dinners and I love having the family around and it's great for me, it's great for my boys and now they're getting on in their teen years and doing all that stuff and it's great to see them grow up in this environment. I got in touch because I noticed on LinkedIn you posted a piece about Menu Board Mastery and I clicked through and had to look at it and I thought, oh, this is interesting because as somebody's been around digital signage as long as you, maybe not quite a few, mid 90s, I only got in late 90s, but nonetheless, we've both been around it a long time. I know that menu boards can be done badly, but I tend to think they're done badly when they're eye charts and there's way too much stuff on there, or quite simply, they're just not working. But your Menu Board Mastery pieces take a look at the science of it and of layout and the thinking and everything else. So I thought that would make a great conversation to get into, first of all why you felt it useful to put this together and then get into some of the key tenets of it.  Gregg Zinn: Really the thing is, I've had so many conversations with business operators, at all levels, and that could be from single location operators to multinational operators and all of them seem to struggle with putting a strategic foundation underneath the concept of what they're gonna display, and even this many years into it, many of them just see digital as a more efficient way to get their print menu up on the screen, and even when they were doing their print menu, I don't really believe that they were tapping into some of the core ideas of using this as an incredible marketing tool.  When I look at digital menus, I think a digital menu should be your perfect salesperson. If you could have that person talking to that customer and guiding them through consuming from your restaurant in a way that is ideal for you, and ideal for them, having it be the perfect salesperson. I think that's really important, and a lot of businesses have struggled to do that. So I took a look at this, and I thought, what if I put a series together that takes very interesting, proven, scientific complex ideas and makes them highly practical? And this has really been a core philosophy for me since I was a teenager.  When I first read BF Skinner's Beyond Friedman Dignity and David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man, I became fascinated with how people interact with information and how behavior is impacted by communications, and those various tools and many boards are no different. So I thought about giving people some very practical ideas. I want to make this industry better, like ever since we started SmarterSign, I don't want to just have a great business in the industry. I want this industry to be important. I want this industry to really impact businesses and be indispensable as part of the complete operation for every business. Obviously that helps my business. But it also energizes me. It engages me.  Another key piece of my philosophy has always been moving people from theory to practice as quickly and easily as possible. Nobody ever said theory makes perfect. Practice makes perfect and helps people move to practice practical ideas and I use the phrase, “Is this practical?” all the time. You can have all of these great ideas and all of these visions for what can be, and you can sit there and ruminate, but really, when it comes down to it, where the rubber meets the road is where value is created, and can you put this into practice was the vision behind this series. The first article that you put out was about visual attention. When you talk about visual attention, what do you mean? Apart from the obvious.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and it's funny because there are some very obvious things, but there also are some well-studied scientific understandings about how people's eyes move in the interpretation of information and I think in the article, we point out two very well-known, established patterns of how people interact with information.  There is the F-pattern of how your eyes scan information, and that is typically for menus or information that is very text rich, and your eyes go across the top and then they go down to the middle and then across a little bit more, and then they go down to the left hand side and understanding the way that people's eyes are gonna be moving across your information helps you prioritize where you put your information that's important to your business, and I want to talk about what information is important to your business because getting to businesses do not really know how to take advantage of this tool. I think this is a really important piece of it, and I am going to be writing an article about this, and it's been a big focus as well.  But let me continue on with the other way that people interpret information, and that is The Golden Triangle, and it starts in the middle, moves to the upper right, moves to the left, and these two visual patterns have been proven time and time again with eye trackers and studies to see how people interpret visual information in front of them. The Golden Triangle is very helpful for highly visual menus, and really the key spot in that menu is that upper right hand corner. If you can put your really high value items in that upper right hand corner, you are going to see a change in your outcomes, for the better. It's such an interesting thing, and this is part of getting back to why the series is here. I want to be able to provide tidbits of information like that to help businesses change their outcome, and obviously for the better.  Is this something you discovered or you've known because you've had that interest for a very long time in it? I'm curious if you started working with QSRs and restaurant chains and advocated doing this, and then did the reading and found out, oh, there's actually a science behind this.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it's really a mixture of both because I had studied these concepts, and they were very interesting to me, all the way back in the 90s. They were very interesting ideas to me. Even before that, managing behavior was always interesting to me. But as I started to work in the practical environment of working with businesses, I was able to apply those ideas and see how they impacted. So I was able to grow a clear understanding of how these ideas very specifically relate to these types of business problems. So it has been a full circle since I was interested in it, I was able to apply it, and now I'm able to move and help businesses perfect it.  So one of the things you get into is positioning, like what should go where and how you wanna have prime positions for your high margin items and signature items, that sort of thing. I've not thought about that at all. I've just thought that companies just laid things out the way they laid out their print menus and didn't really think too much about that stuff, or maybe they don't.  Gregg Zinn: Many of them don't think about it and actually very early on, working with businesses, 2006-2007, I had come up with this idea called The Prominence Pyramid. The idea behind The Prominence Pyramid was to help businesses identify. What are the most important menu items on your menu? And most businesses couldn't identify it. I was really surprised to walk into the c-suites of large organizations and ask them very simple questions about what are the most important items on their menu and they were not able to answer that.  But we would guide businesses through this process of putting items on a pyramid, say at the top of the pyramid. These are the most important items for you, and they're the most important for top line revenue. They're the most important for margin, they're the most important in terms of branding and customer experience, and those are the items that should have prominence within your visual space because they're the ones that are gonna help push your business forward. There are so many moving parts to this as we're moving forward, and as AI has become part of the mix of tools, it's a very exciting time for me because I feel like we can use these tools to help give insights very quickly to businesses using real data using, using these known scientific ideas to help them get these ideas in front of them, and then once you know that, once you know what should be presented in these prominent areas in the visual space, then you could do things like change the sizing, change the coloring, add boxes around them, animate those sections, put little tags, customer favorites.  Actually, we have a customer who just did this who just did this. He wanted to promote this one item, so we put a tag that said “Customer favorite” and sales immediately increased on this item. So we know that these tools can help change business outcomes. It's just a matter of helping businesses get there. And I think this series is gonna help people get there in bite-sized movements.  So when you talk about things like prime positions, that's in your F-pattern or Golden Triangle, there's certain positions that are gonna be optimal. That's where the eye goes naturally?  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy to think that these are actually things, but they've proven, studied, scientifically that this is the way eyes move to interpret information.  So some of the other variables, and you've already mentioned it, are things like white space and borders around stuff, contrast, the font size.  To me, being a knucklehead and not really spending a lot of time talking about QSRs, I just see ones where I can't read this, and my eyesight's assisted, but when I've had my glasses on, it's 2020, and I still struggle to read it.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, it drives me crazy and I don't know if you have seen this, but I can send you a link to it. I had done a series called the Digital Menu Board Scorecard, and it was an evaluation of menu boards in the wild, not necessarily SmarterSign customers. But menu boards that we had seen, we'd take pictures of them, and we'd break down what are they were doing well, what are they doing poorly and we give them a score on a number of characteristics like branding, layout, organization, and actually, it's funny, just last week I was in the airport and I saw a menu from a pretty big QSR, and I just thought: Who made this menu? This is just terrible.  I won't mention their name because I don't want to get in trouble.  When you did the scorecard, were you handing out as many “A”s?  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, there were some As, there were few, very few, but every once in a while we'd come across a menu board where the business had a really good balanced sense of brand presentation, strategic organization, overall design, effectiveness of the menu to get people to order. That's actually one of the key things when you look at menus. Outside of getting their attention, it is how quickly can you get somebody through the process of making a decision and this is particularly true for digital drive-through, has been a real focus and we've seen some really interesting things done in that realm. For example, having the menu change at 8:00 PM to be a more limited menu on the drive-through, so that it changes the operations from a kitchen point of view, but also gets people through the line quicker.  One of the questions I wanted to ask was, is the thinking and the layouts and everything else different between the screens over the counter, the screens in a self-service ordering kiosk, and then the screens in the drive-through? Gregg Zinn: Yeah, absolutely, and if you look at our customers who are doing interior menu boards and exterior menu boards, the layouts, the structures, the approach to the menus are different. It's just different. It's a different mind frame. It's almost a different form factor in many cases because a lot of times the drive through's gonna be portrait, and many times the interior board's gonna be landscape.  But the whole business mission is really different, and taking advantage of what each of those environments do better. We don't do any touchscreen ordering. I have a love-hate relationship with the concept of it. I'm old school. So when I go into a sandwich shop, I want to talk to the person who is going to be able to take down my details of what I want, and I want to be able to say them and have them articulate that to the kitchen. Personally, I find it very difficult to do the touchscreen ordering and get that right and have the same level of customer experience.  AI is gonna change that because AI is going to somehow offer voice to AI ordering, which will take some of that UI cloudiness out of the mix. You mentioned AI. I'm curious about computer vision and the idea that, I've heard this said, I don't know what it is really being done in-store. I've heard about it in drive-throughs, but dynamically adjusting menus based on the profile of the people who are approaching the counter. Gregg Zinn: Yeah, there's a few things that we've been working with in terms of studying, how this can be done in an effective way. It's a highly strategic concept and, as I mentioned earlier, businesses are really just struggling to translate their static menu to a digital menu in a very strategic way, but we're pushing this forward, and there are other technologies.  There's license plate reader technology for drive-throughs where the same car is coming through, and you could tie it to their past consumption and we're gonna get there, and I think with AI, we're gonna get there much quicker and I'm super happy about that. Because I have been sitting in the running blocks waiting for the gun to go off and I'm excited about what AI means to accelerate some of this progress.  When you started, almost 20 years ago now, APIs were known but they weren't widely available and I suspect it was very difficult to talk to a restaurant about actually jacking into their restaurant management systems in any way, but we're now in a very different world, and that's all possible.  Is it being done? And how do you best leverage that other than the very simple stuff like price changes in the store system, you want to automatically change on the screen? Gregg Zinn: Right now the two primary mechanisms that are interacting, that operating data with the marketing data on menu boards, are price changes. So having the POS system be the source of that price, that's your operating data, and that operating data points should be filtered through to your menu boards. You shouldn't have to manage it in two pieces.  The second piece is inventory. We work with a lot of customers who run out of individual products, and that creates frustration for the customer, and it creates frustration for the person taking the order. So having the ability to show that something's currently sold out, is something that we're seeing being used. Again, this comes down to: Can so much more be done? Yeah, so much more can be done.  But getting over that, what should be done, as opposed to what can be done. It's also part of my core philosophy is, a lot of things can be done, but only some things should be done. So we've stayed away from novelty. We've stayed away from a lot of the things that people are saying, whoa, what about this? What about that? We try to keep it as practical as possible. But we're gonna see a big shift. I don't know if you know the company Palantir. I love Palantir as a company. I love what their vision for using AI is. People ask me questions about it all the time because I'm in technology. People ask me about AI people who are late, not in the technology industry, and late people, and I always point to Palantir as somebody who is an applied AI company. They're using the data to determine what should be done as opposed to what could be done and I think they're doing a really great job of it. They're really leaders in that space. Now, they're not menu boards, but I do follow what they're doing because I think that they're very innovative in terms of how they're looking at the connection between data operations, real world and practical application. In my years doing consulting, I've done quite a bit with some big companies, but the only QSR I worked with was a coffee chain and when I went in to start working with them, they talked about a bunch of things and I asked them about menu boards and takeovers, which I had seen in some of their stores where all of the menus went away and they had a tiled piece of creative, pedaling a particular promoted product and they said that they did some interview intercepts with customers and pretty uniformly the customer said, stop screwing around, just show me the damn menu, and I've since been in a number of restaurants where I had to wait for the menu items that came up because they were promoting something or other on the screen for 5-10 seconds and it irritated the living hell out of me. Is it something you advocate? Just get to the point; don't try to be fancy here. Forget the video, just show me the items and pricing.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, intuitively for me, that customer response is obvious. They're trying to interact with a piece of data to place an order, and then all of a sudden it's gone and they're waiting. They have no idea how long it's gonna be before it comes back, and then they've gotta go find their spot on the menu again. So intuitively for me, we have always guided people against it. We've had customers asked to do it. Of course, our platform can do it. But it is not a good idea. Now, that being said, with digital menu boards and you've seen them in QSRs, there's a lot of visual space, so you can use a portion of that visual space to do those kinds of marketing techniques. One of the really interesting things that we had seen, so we did an observational study of a food court, working with a customer who had a restaurant, a pizza restaurant, and a food court. We did an observational study, and we saw that nobody looked up at the menu when they came over to the counter to order. They didn't care about the pricing, they didn't care about anything. They never looked up. But the menu boards were not being used properly to get people over to their restaurant as a choice. So what we recommended was: these really aren't digital menu boards in so much as they're digital billboards, and you need to use these as a “come eat pizza” sign, as opposed to thinking of it as a digital menu board. So we used some of the visual space as a “come eat pizza”, and we were able to draw some of that audience thinking maybe they'd go get Chinese food or Chipotle or another option over to them. So that's another way where you can impact outcomes by using the visual space as opposed to just menu boards.  What do you do with restaurants? I think about one up here, Tim Horton's here in Canada that started out doing coffee and donuts and pastries and now does endless kinds of food items, and they've got a menu list that's far longer than it was when the chain first started.  What do you do when you have customers who have like 40 SKUs and you've only got so much real estate on a screen?  Gregg Zinn: It's a big challenge, and it's a funny thing because, when I look at operations like that, I've never run a restaurant, but when I think of the ideal process to get customers through and order your food, I think of a business like In and Out Burger. They've got a very specific menu. People come there for those items. They love those items.  We have a lot of customers who have these extensive menus. I don't love it from an operations point of view, but from a presentation of the menu point of view, it's a matter of just being very organized in how you present that information so that you are able to get that broad menu into somebody's eyes, get them to where they want to order. If they want something that's savory as opposed to something sweet, get their eyes to that.  A good example of that is Dairy Queen has a pretty extensive menu, and they've got food and ice creams and just being able to segment that out. So on their drive-throughs, for example, we do a number of franchisees for Dairy Queen. On their drive-throughs, they've got one complete panel, that's just their sweet treats. They've got a middle panel that is promotion, key promotional items, LTOs and things like that, and then they have a right screen that is their savory items, their burgers and sandwiches and hot dogs and things.  The post that you have up right now about this Mastery series has to do with price anchors. That's not a term I know much about. What do you mean by that?  Gregg Zinn: It's another behavioral technique where you can establish a baseline in a customer's mind by putting an item that you don't really expect anybody to consume, but what it does is it creates a mental baseline of price expectation, so that you can have them pay a premium price for that second level item, without feeling like this is too expensive. So it really is a decoy. It's like look over here, this item is $30, but here's a really good value item at $22. It's so interesting to me because particularly in the past five years, pricing's gotten outta control, and, for so many reasons. Supply chain issues, obviously going back to 2020 with Covid but pricing has gotten crazy, and my favorite burger place in New York City, actually where I got engaged, when I got engaged, the burger was, yeah, I'm a huge burger guy, but it was my second date with my wife. We went there, and we're both burger people, and that's where I proposed ultimately.  You got engaged on our second date?  Gregg Zinn: Oh, no, we went on our second date to this burger place. Seven years later, we got engaged, but in that same spot, but the burger was like $6 at that point, and now it's like 18.  Oh, for God's sake.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and even the QSRs I go into sometimes, and I just think, who could afford $60 for a family of four?  It just doesn't seem like an affordable approach and I will tell you that from a pricing strategy point of view, all of the QSRs are recognizing this, and they're trying to adapt. We're already out of time, but I wanted to ask one more question, just around when you're going into a new customer and you start talking about what we've just discussed, kind of the science and the thinking behind it, are minds a little bit blown because they're wanting to do digital menu boards because it's a pain in the ass to change the print ones, and they haven't thought much beyond that? Gregg Zinn: We take it slow. It's been over 20 years and we've learned you can't just go in gangbusters and put all of these ideas in their heads about what's possible because it'll just confuse the situation. So we go slow with our customers. We meet them where they are. Fix the first obvious problem, and then you can go from there. Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and I've said it a number of times in this call if it's not practical, it can't be done.  All right. This was great. If people wanna find out more about SmarterSign and read these articles, they can find 'em on smartersign.com.  Gregg Zinn: They can, yeah. All the articles are there. In the resource section, right? Gregg Zinn: Yeah, and we've got a bunch of videos on our YouTube channel, of course, posting on other social channels like LinkedIn. But yeah, the primary source would be on smartersign.com.  Perfect. All right. Thank you, sir.  Gregg Zinn: Yeah, thank you so much. It was really nice talking to you and re-meeting you again.

Send us a textThis week on The Digital Restaurant, Carl is joined by Yaro Tsyhanenko, founder of PickPad, to break down the headlines shaping restaurants and tech:⏱️ Timestamps 00:00 – Intro: Meet guest host Yaro, CEO of PickPad 01:00 – Why did Yum Brands partner with Nvidia? 05:37 – What does Qu's State of Digital 2025 Report reveal? 13:06 – Why did Starbucks acquire Empower Delivery? 18:47 – Are loyalty programs evolving or stuck in the past? 26:02 – Could Bolt disrupt Uber and DoorDash in North America? 30:00 – What is PickPad, and how is it improving restaurant pickup?

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT All kinds of people in this industry are very aware that while there is lot of dodgy stuff, there is also lots of well made display technology available from Chinese manufacturers who have zero brand recognition outside of that country. Buy potential buyers don't tend to have the time or resources to make the big flights over the Pacific to visit China and directly source reliable manufacturing partners. And they really - if they're smart - don't want to just order stuff, and then cross their fingers and toes hoping the stuff shows up, lines up with what was ordered, works, and then meets necessary certifications. Jacob Horwitz saw an opportunity to create a new company that functions as something as a boutique digital signage distribution company that sources, curates and markets display and related technologies that its resellers can then take to market. Horwitz will be familiar to a lot of industry people for a pair of installation companies he started and ran the U.S. - IST and later Zutek. In both cases, he sold the companies, and he could have just retired ... but he didn't want to retire. Nor did his wife, because a Jacob with too much time on his hands would make her crazy. So he started Illuminology with a longtime industry friend and business partner Stephen Gottlich, who for many years ran the digital file for Gable. I caught up with Horwitz to talk about the origins and rationale for Illuminology, which is just spinning up but has some big plans. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jacob, it was nice speaking with you. You have started a company called Illuminology, which sounds like you started a cult, but I think that's not what it is.  Jacob Horwitz: Not yet, no, We hope it will be at some point, a good following, but first off, Dave, thanks for having me. It's been nine years since you and I first chatted on a podcast. I don't know if you realize that. It was December of 2016, and we had just finished, I think maybe the nationwide rollout of Burger King, you and I had a chat about that, and it's hard to believe nine years have gone by.  This was when you had IST?  Jacob Horwitz: Installation Service Technologies was a nationwide installation and service company, that was sold in 2018 and then a year later, I restarted a company called Zootech, and I was approached by a customer who was looking to be entrepreneurial and that company is now owned by Karen Salmon. It's a woman-owned business mow, and her father was the founder of Powerpoint of Sale. I took a couple of years off. I have a person that I have worked with for 30 years, my business partner, Stephen Gottlich. I think you've met Stephen, and he has been working with Gable Signs for the last 17 years and I think what Illuminology is now is a culmination of really two parallel journeys. Stephen took a traditional sign company 17 years ago down a path of innovation, and Gable went from a bending metal traditional sign company to a visual solutions company my background, which has been installation and service for the last 20 years, brings together two people who are a little bit older than when you and I first talked nine years ago.  It was probably 60 pounds ago when I talked to you for the first time. I'm a little gray or a little wiser and a little bit older. So the two of us come from really parallel journeys in different areas of digital signage, and we wanted to create something a little different in the United States. We'd seen some business models and other parts of the world that seem to be working. So we wanted to create a marketplace that would expand digital signage to companies interested in expanding their scope of business. So we focus a lot on traditional sign companies other technology-type companies, and installation companies. They all have some type of footprint in the verticals with technology but they're not carrying digital signage.  So we thought, how do we expand digital signage to reach a lot more people? And we've come up with this business model.  So for people who are completely unfamiliar with it, how do you describe it in your elevator pitch? Jacob Horwitz: The easiest way to describe it is to think of us as a traditional distributor of digital signage to authorized resellers. Much like a Blue Star, B&H, except that we're very boutique, and we're very focused, and we're very passionate. Stephen and I are not, we've been fortunate in business. I'm 65, Stephen is 70-ish, so we know we don't have a lot of time to build something that's going to take years and years, but we wanted to build something special.  So you would be like, an Almo or those kinds of companies, but much more focused specifically on digital signage?  Jacob Horwitz: … And being able to support them differently. So take a digital traditional sign company, next month, we'll be at the International Sign Show in Las Vegas, the USA, and a lot of those people are digital, but it's amazing how many fast signs, and banners to go, those types of places that are selling digital signage today and have no idea what digital is. They're very old and traditional.  I think of it if you sold typewriters or telephones a couple of decades ago and you didn't evolve in the IP phones and computers, you're probably not in business anymore. So we're taking a lot of those types of sign companies. We have a course called Illuminology University. We take them through an 8 to 10-week course. These are live training classes and curricula we put together to train them about what is a sign in digital singage, what's LED, what's LCD, what is GOB versus COB, just really teaching them about the industry and they have a lot of reach in the verticals that traditional people selling digital signage today don't have. The other thing that makes us unique. When you go to traditional companies like Blue Stars, you don't have everything available under one distributor. We have an experience center that's opening next week in Kansas City. It's a supermarket of visual solutions, so you'll be able to see not just LED or LCD, but you're also going to see light boxes, you're going to see different kiosks, you're going to see where AI comes into play with digital signage, you're going to have a good understanding in our experience center of the programmatic side of how things can be monetized with a digital retail network. I think that because of the 30 years that Steven and I have been involved in technology and in the last twenty in digital signage, we can be much more of a boutique to help people with a wider range of solutions, not just a traditional 55-inch monitor, but LED posters, you had on your blog a few weeks ago that digital desk, which is part of our showroom, so I think it's about innovation. I think it's about a wider range of solutions, and it's hopefully in our last chapters of life, having a lot of fun with our partners.  So I assume if I call or contact one of the larger distributors who do unified communications, do all kinds of different things, and I start asking them about it, I'm a POS company, I have a customer who's asking me about menu boards and things like that. I don't know where to start.  If you talk to a larger distribution company, they have a sheet or a system that lists all the stuff they have and they can rattle off, here's what we have, what do you want, whereas you're saying because you're much more focused on this area and you have an experience center, people could come in and you can try to find something that's tailored to their needs as opposed to what we have.  Jacob Horwitz: Yeah, I think that all those traditional distribution models are very good at taking orders and taking money. A couple of them even have some departments where they're trying to help you with that consultive part of the business but I think at the end of the day, from my installation side, conservatively, we installed well over 400,000 displays in every kind of vertical you could imagine when I owned IST.  We did the new SoFi Stadium. We did all of their point of sale. Arlington Stadium, we did all of their digital assets when Daktronics had contracted us. And Stephen has done every kind of hardware installs you could think of when he was with Gable. So I think that being able to work with a company and be there to hold their hand too, we've already gotten on a plane and gone to sales calls with our partners. You're not going to get that from a traditional distributor. We work and do the RFPs with them. We work with them on pricing and quotes. So it's a little bit different than just trying to take an order so I think that's what makes us unique and the education and our school of hard knocks, you know, god knows, we've made an awful lot of mistakes in 20 years So I think we're gotten pretty good at what we do.  So are you selling strictly third-party stuff, or are there products that fall under the Illuminology brand or a related brand?  Jacob Horwitz: We've been going back and forth for a decade now to China. Stephen and I's first project together, was Simon Properties, 250 malls, and one of the largest media networks for digital out-of-home in the country, we designed the kiosk 10 years ago that they were still using and running in their malls, and that was a factory direct where we worked directly with the factories, built a kiosk, and were able to give Simon an amazing solution, especially where technology was 10 years ago.  So through that experience and over the last decade, we've met absolutely the best factories in China. There are a lot of stereotypes of what a Chinese factory could look like, and until you go and you see the automation and the technology there, God knows you've done it. You've been all over the world. It's not what a lot of people think. So we work directly with factories. We are creating two brands. There are more later on in the year, we are white labeling or branding our product. There'll be a line of displays called LightScapes, and then there'll be a line of kiosks called EasyOSK. So these are part of our longer-term business plan to have a brand. So you're not just saying, well, we bought these from some factories in Taiwan Korea Vietnam and China. We work very closely with the factories. We work very closely with people like AUO who are on the display side, and the panel side, and we will have some things that are unique within that brand. It will not just be the same product that everybody can buy. But because we're doing factory direct because we've got ten-year relationships with these factories, and they know Stephen and me well. We've been going except during COVID several times a year to China. I think that we're able to buy from them at incredibly good pricing and pass those savings on to our resellers. So what if you had a Chinese manufacturer that's strong domestically in that country and has a lot of them trying to come to the U.S. or over to Europe and say, here we are, and not get anywhere, would you sell their product under their brand or would it have to fall under one of your brands? Jacob Horwitz: No, we sell generic products as well. So for example, that desk that you talk about, I was in that factory last month. The person who owns that factory is a very small equity owner within Illuminology because we've known her for ten years and anything that comes from any factory out of China, she will go do that quality check before it ever hits the container to get over here. So she's a very instrumental part of our business over there, but we sell some of the stuff out of her factory as a generic product. It's not necessarily branded with LightScapes. It might be branded with Illuminology, but when you go look at the certification tags and serial numbers, it's still her company name on it, whereas LightScapes and EasyOSK are true white-labeled products that are going to be unique to us. Does that get around any regulatory issues in terms of what can come over from China if it's coming through you?  Jacob Horwitz: The regulations that are driving everybody in our industry crazy right now are the tariffs. But, to us, I think some of the big things that you don't see out of Chinese companies are the right approvals. We're very focused right now on our products being a UL or UL equivalent. There are five or six laboratories that are like MET. That is exactly like UL. It's UL-approved. We had a very large factory send us apart to test and they looked at it yesterday and we already rejected it because the power supply was not a UL-approved power supply. We said, we're not even going to test it.  So I think that those are things that are not regulatory from the U.S., but they're important to us, from a safety side, especially when you're working with enterprise tier one customers, they, have to have the right certifications, but I think the only thing that's causing us headaches is not the regulatory side, but, trying to figure out the right pricing with tariffs and how we handle that. Cause it's changing by the day.  Jacob Horwitz: Every time I look up, I'm afraid to look at the TV to see if it's higher or whatnot, but all of our pricing that we post to our dealers today is a landed cost from Kansas City. So it's including if we had inbound shipping or we had tariffs, we don't want our resellers to have to worry about that and they know that this is the pricing and if the tariffs go away, then we can lower that price. But if it goes crazy, they need to be prepared. We're working closely with some factories right now in Taiwan, Korea, and others in Vietnam so that we have a backup solution because right now the lion's share is coming from China.  If it's touched in Taiwan or touched in Vietnam, but with Chinese components, does that make a difference? Jacob Horwitz: Yeah, we just had that problem. We had ordered some stuff that came in from Canada, and this was before the Canadian tariff of 25%. This was two-three weeks before that, and we got a bill for tariffs, and we were talking with the U.S. Customs and the experts at DHL and UPS, and it turns out, if you're buying something from, for example, the great area of Canada, where you're sitting at home, but the company we bought it from manufactured their part in China when they ship it to us and their commercial invoice to U.S. Customs asks the company in Canada, where the country of origin it was manufactured and even though I bought it from Canada, had no idea that the part I ordered was not manufactured in Canada, we got hit with that 20 percent tariff on that product, and that surprised us. We didn't think it through or understand and the hard part is even when you talk to the absolute top people at U.S. Customs at the borders that are doing this, they're not even sure hour by hour what the rules are. So it's been hard.  We had another container come in and we had, I think, a $7k or $8k tariff. This is when it was 10%, but it landed in the U.S. before the tariff started and they still would not release it without us paying the tariff. Two days ago, we got that money back from U.S. customs. They realized they shouldn't have even charged it. It was before the date the tariff started. But unfortunately, by the time we released it, they held it hostage for a bit. So it's a hard situation, but we're going to work with other countries and I think that everybody's in the same boat, and I think in terms of pricing, our distribution model is much like the traditional guys. It's on a very low margin. So we have to have a lot of resellers that are looking to expand their business. So I'm curious about markets like Vietnam and India, which I keep hearing about, having gotten into electronics and being alternatives to Korea, Taiwan, particularly China, is that industry, particularly on the display side, mature enough now to buy products from there?  Jacob Horwitz: Since September, I've visited sixteen different countries across the world, I think on three or four continents and getting ready for the right factories and the right things and just enjoying travel at the same time, and the one thing that surprised me is how far behind the U.S. is compared to a lot of parts of the world and how much digital signage you see. Also, when you talk to these people what they're paying for digital signage throughout other parts of the world is far less money than the U.S. customers paying us companies for digital signage. The margins in Asia and Europe are much thinner than the traditional margins that resellers have been getting in the U.S.  Our motto, and you see it across our website, is “The Best for Less”, and we have tried to find the best factories in the world and be able to give it at a price that is not greedy. That's a win for us, for our resellers, and most importantly for the companies that are trying to buy and put that digital signage into their business so they can inspire and tell a story to their customer. And I think that even in the smallest towns of Vietnam, you still see digital outdoor LEDs on the sides of buildings and you go into the shopping malls and it's far more digital than you see here. So that was interesting to me as I've got to travel the world in the last four months. Is it a function of cost or awareness?  Jacob Horwitz: I'm not sure, but I'm assuming first it's a function of cost because where they're working on margins that are so much less, it allows that to get into people's businesses, and when you're charging $1k for a 55-inch commercial grade LCD, 500 nit monitor, it's a barrier to entry. So we're trying to brand something and bring something to the market where we can be 20% less to the end user than a lot of the traditional things, and we think we've accomplished that. The tariffs hurt us a little bit, but they hurt everybody by and large. So I think that's really why the U.S. is slower. I don't want to use the word greed. I own businesses, but people have tried to get margins that I don't think you can get anymore, and I think that you're going to have to find other ways to monetize your business through the installation side, through the content side, and I think that it's also helping companies. It's a big part of what we do. I think of Chris at Stratacash, he has a whole area where he helps monetize their solutions and it's helped, and we're looking at that closely. We're working with three or four companies right now where we can have our resellers work directly with them and educate their end users on how they can monetize the solution, through advertising in certain verticals. Not all verticals are conducive to digital out-of-home, but most are.  So that's an important part of how we're going to help move products into places that normally maybe couldn't afford to put the right solutions in. I assume that there are all kinds of people in North America, the U.S. in particular, who are aware that they can buy stuff via AliExpress or whatever. But they've heard enough to know, yes, you can pay substantially less, but you have to cross your fingers when it shows up.  Is Illuminology positioned as a safe harbor way to do it? Like we're doing the sourcing, we've figured that part out so we could pass on those savings without all the worry. Jacob Horwitz: Look to me, those sites are a lot like a box of chocolates. You never really know what you're going to get when that product shows up. As I said, even with the sample we got from somebody yesterday not being the right display, UL, and approvals, we're not going to be a website where you can buy whatever you want. It's going to be very focused on innovation. It's going to be the same factories. As I'm sure you've seen I get if I get one I get at least three emails every day from some Chinese factory trying to sell you whatever and everyone is a nickel cheaper than the other and I think that's just Pennywise and quality foolish.  So we're not going to be that it's going to be the best for less, and if we can create this supermarket of visual solutions, and it's a great product and the pricing can hit the street to an end user, double-digit, less expensive, and we are distributing through companies that have reached where the traditional resellers aren't touching, then we think that will help expand digital signage across the U.S.  So these would be reached to like the sign companies you mentioned, maybe the point of sale technology companies, those kinds of companies?  Jacob Horwitz: I have a guy I talked to a couple of days ago who sells medical devices. Nothing to do with digital signage. He's out there every day selling blood pressure machines or whatever medical devices he's selling and in the last few days, I've probably talked three times to him now about the opportunity he has to do stuff in the medical world because he's already out there calling on places to put in screens and some LED posters. And, so I think it's all kinds of places that maybe haven't even thought about incorporating digital signage into their end-user business, and these people are now educating why being able to tell a story through digital is so much better than a static sign.  So yeah, it's been enlightening to see all the different verticals you can all of a sudden make inroads that you never thought about. Yeah. So many companies are just going down the same familiar path of chasing QSRs, chasing retail, and I've always advised people to look at those other kinds of companies that already have established trust with your target vertical who supply other things to them and partner with them. Jacob Horwitz: Yeah, it's been interesting. When I was doing the installation side, we did a lot of QSR, McDonald's, Burger King, Sonic, Del Taco, that type of stuff, and a lot of them have seen a few of the first initial posts we've done and they're calling and asking more of what we can do and I'm excited just about window technology whether that be an LED, a double-sided LCD hanging in the window of a fast food restaurant is so much more effective than printing two breakfast sandwiches for $5 and shipping it out to the store, hoping the manager puts it in the window during the promotional time. Half the time, three weeks after the motions are over, they still have that digital thing in there saying breakfast sandwiches or the static poster thing, and then at 10:30 when breakfast is over, they're still talking about breakfast sandwiches instead of talking about Value meals or other desserts or other things they could be buying during dinner. So it makes nothing but sense to have those assets in there.  But the people who are buying their outdoor digital menu board don't even offer that product. So we feel that a supermarket with a full set of solutions, in a C-store to be able to do a stretch screen and a gondola and still do their monitors over their register and doing their digital menu board and having things that inspire people to walk in from the pump into the C-store, we have that full range of product where a lot of people just don't have a full range of offerings to that.  When you say a full range of products, is it purely display technology, or does your supermarket have other things?  Jacob Horwitz: We do light boxes, which are just an aluminum extruded frame that hangs on a wall with backlit LED, but it's a fabric, you see them in every airport. So we do a lot of light boxes, and that's a very affordable and very effective solution. It's a static display, but it pops.  We are doing music. We have partnered with CloudCover. CloudCover is owned by SiriusXM, I believe, and Pandora, because we think that it's part of the whole experience, it's touching all the senses of when you go into that business, we think music is a really important part of branding your business. So there are several out there that are there. We've hitched our ride there on the software side. Because we have to support the dealers, we have, we offer two software platforms, and it's because of relationship and stability and they're the best. There's a saying, if you're the smartest guy in the room, you're in the wrong room and so we've partnered with people that make me where I am not even close to the smartest guy in the room. We love working with Navori. We think Jeffrey Weitzman is amazing. So we offer to our partners and we've worked aggressively to have a good distribution model in Navori to our partners and potential end users. So if I'm sitting in a room with Jeff Hastings, I'm not the smartest guy in the room anymore. So we offer BrightSign, and BrightAuthor, and the players we go with are either the Navori or the BrightSign players, and we offer that CMS. They're not. The cheapest CMS, you had a great interview with Alistair and what they're doing and I listened to you last night. So there are a lot of options, but we have to support the dealer network. So to be able to have a dealer that wants to go off and do a different CMS, we support that. They can send us software and we'll test it to make sure, particularly if it's going to be SOC, that what they're using is going to run properly on that version of Android. So we'll support them that way or just before we order the product, we'll go into our lab and throw that on, but we can't support that dealer network on how to use the CMS. We have BrightAuthor and Novori, and we're good, and then we have two full-time people thatwho NOVA certified. So on the LED side, we're no, we have NOVA-certified experts, so we can help them with Novastar. So we can support that, but we can't support every CMS. So we encourage them, especially if they need a 4-a-month CMS, then I think that Alistair is a great solution, and there are a lot of those types of companies out there. But that won't be us. We'll have a couple of CMS, we'll have the music solution and we hope we can create a visual experience and a sensory experience that when they walk into an end user that's bought a product through one of our resellers, that product's inspiring consumers to spend more money. You and Stephen are hands-on with this, but how many other people do you have working with you?  Jacob Horwitz: Oh gosh, I've tapped into a lot of my old employees in a lot of years, so Stephen and I have known each other for 30 years. For us, it's more passionate at this age. It's certainly not about really the money. This is because your wife said you need to do something.  Jacob Horwitz: After years of being in the house and driving her crazy every 10 minutes, she made it clear I will either go find a job, or I'll have to support her next husband. So that had a little bit to do with it. But Stephen and I are wired the same way. It's about quality. It's about good solutions. It's never been about trying to make money on this. I think it's helping people. The people that I've brought in, I have a Project Manager who worked for me starting 15 years ago, and now she's ahead of our marketing, Becca, and she's been with me for a decade and a half. The girl in my accounting department has been with me for over 15 years. I have a fragment in the house Legal who is my full-time in my old business and they've all been around at least 10 or 15 years. My CIO has been with me since 1999. So he was in college when he started. So we've got a good, like Stephen and I, that these are not newbies to this industry. One of my Project Managers started with me when we first talked nine years ago when she was a Senior Project Manager for Burger King. So, everybody that I've surrounded myself with so far, there's been at least a decade of hitting the shows, doing the installs, and that school of hard knocks. So have you got 20 people, 40 people? Jacob Horwitz: Right now, we're a team of maybe ten or eleven people. I have three people coming in next week for interviews after the experience center is open that are all industry veteran types and we're just getting started. The idea started in September. I went to Infocomm and then maybe I saw you and just started feeling the waters. We were going to launch in early January or February. We're a month old. The container of our showroom sat in Long Beach for six weeks before it got. It took longer to get from Long Beach to our offices than it did from China to Long Beach. So we're just getting started. But we're going to stay in a boutique. We don't want to be all things to all people.  Right, and they can find you online at Illuminology.com?  Jacob Horwitz: Illuminology.com and there's an online brochure of the product and we thank you. And Dave, I said this to you the other day, but I want to say it again. I need to thank you because, for everybody I've ever hired for the last decade, the first thing we have them do is go through your podcast and your blogs and learn about the industry, and what you do for us is so valuable and I mean that with all sincerity.  Thank you.  Jacob Horwitz: We hired a new sales guy and he started a month ago. He called me yesterday and said, Do you know this Dave Haynes guy? He didn't know, he did not know I had a podcast today. He goes, I am learning so much from him. And, I go, yeah, I'm chatting with him tomorrow. So thank you for what you do as well.  Thank you. That's very kind.  Jacob Horwitz: Very well deserved. So thank you for the opportunity to share our story and we look forward to working with the people in the industry, to help and expand digital signage into places that can be more like your Europe where it's everywhere. All right. Thank you!

Popeyes, a leading global QSR brand, is renowned for its consistency and ability to keep loyal customers. Hear how foodvenience retailers can effectively compete with QSRs and why “surprise and delight” is a bad way to go about it. With special guest: Jordan Cusner, Former Head of Guest Insights, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen Hosted by: Carolyn Schnare and Harry Milloff

Amid inflation, restaurants need to get more creative to help bring customers through the door. What exactly can they do to improve traffic? André Moraes of PepsiCo Digital Lab shares how experiences, microinfluencers, and the Local Eats program can help propel restaurants in 2025. More About André Moraes: André leads Digital Marketing in PepsiCo's Global Away from Home division, across all beverage, snack, and food brands. Prior to joining PepsiCo, André worked at both the tech and agency sides of the marketing world - leading consumer strategy and marketing intelligence at Google within the CPG food and beverage sector, as well as heading up some of OMD's global Marketing Sciences efforts. André is also an Adjunct Professor at NYU where he teaches Marketing Analytics to students in the Integrated Marketing masters program. He holds a BS in Finance from Fairfield University, an MS in Digital Marketing from Full Sail University, and is a Fulbright Scholar.   More About PepsiCo: PepsiCo products are enjoyed by consumers more than one billion times a day in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. PepsiCo generated more than $91 billion in net revenue in 2023, driven by a complementary beverage and convenient foods portfolio that includes Lay's, Doritos, Cheetos, Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew, Quaker, and SodaStream. PepsiCo's product portfolio includes a wide range of enjoyable foods and beverages, including many iconic brands that generate more than $1 billion each in estimated annual retail sales. Guiding PepsiCo is our vision to Be the Global Leader in Beverages and Convenient Foods by Winning with pep+ (PepsiCo Positive). pep+ is our strategic end-to-end transformation that puts sustainability and human capital at the center of how we will create value and growth by operating within planetary boundaries and inspiring positive change for planet and people. For more information, visit www.pepsico.com, and follow on X, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn @PepsiCo. Visit the PepsiCo Foodservice (now known as Away from Home) LinkedIn Page: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/pepsico-foodservice-/ More About PepsiCo Digital Lab: The PepsiCo AwayFromHome Digital Lab is a first-of-its-kind group built to connect foodservice operators with exclusive PepsiCo solutions and services as well as the companies, services, insights, and solutions best suited for their specific digital growth needs. Powered by extensive proprietary and partner solutions, the Digital Lab is the first offering of its kind from a foodservice manufacturer directly helping operators of all sizes drive traffic, build check size, and develop their digital business – serving everyone from local single location restaurants, to the largest global QSRs. Check out FI Videos Here: https://foodinstitute.com/category/video/ Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@TheFoodInstitute

Megan Hastings, head of customer insight strategy at Quantum Metric, joins QSR editorial director Danny Klein to discuss Chick-fil-A's recent decision to get into the engagement game and, more broadly, how mobile platforms and devices are paving way for QSRs to foster innovative digital experiences with customers. 

Traffic finally turned positive for QSRs this fall. The union drive has come home to Starbucks. And why are so many legacy brands spinning off new concepts?

The restaurant industry is experiencing significant changes, with major chains like Chipotle investing in innovative technologies such as collaborative robots and autonomous delivery vehicles. However, challenges persist, exemplified by BurgerFi's bankruptcy filing, signaling potential market consolidation in the fast casual segment. The blurring lines between QSRs and fast casual concepts are intensifying competition, while economic pressures may impact consumer spending habits. Franchising and refranchising strategies are being explored as ways to generate cash and reduce costs. As the industry looks towards 2025, success will likely depend on a brand's ability to innovate, clearly communicate its value proposition, and adapt to evolving consumer preferences.RestaurantInnovation #FastCasualChallenges #FoodTechTrends

After graduating from UCF, Austin Holmes embarked on an adventurous path as an EOD Tech in Navy Special Operations. Alongside this demanding role, he developed a keen interest in real estate, acquiring and managing multiple properties before deciding to sell his entire portfolio. In the latter part of his Navy career, Austin crossed paths with Heather, a dynamic entrepreneur committed to making a positive impact while building wealth. Together, they have played a pivotal role in scaling PFG to a seven-figure business, with aspirations to grow even further. Their team of 27 is driven by shared vision and excellence. As the business thrived, Austin and Heather expanded their ventures into new territories. They launched a digital media outlet, established three e-commerce stores, and became partial owners in 23 QSRs, collaborating with exceptional partners. Their journey also included a year and a half of traveling across the country in an Airstream, culminating in their marriage and the selection of a new home. https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaustinholmes/ https://publicityforgood.com/

Burney Jennings is the CEO and president of Biscuitville. Burney took over the leadership reins from his father and founder of Biscuitville Maurice Jennings in 1996. Burney's bold leadership, vision and keen sense of knowing what customers want has contributed to the company's growth and success. Headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, Biscuitville Fresh Southern is a family-owned company serving authentic Southern food made fresh daily from locally sourced ingredients. Known as the Home of the Biscuit Window Since 1966, Biscuitville serves scratch-made biscuits baked fresh every 15 minutes. Biscuitville employs over 2,400 people and operates more than 70 restaurants in North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina. In July 2023, Biscuitville was voted the nation's Best Fast Food Breakfast & Best Regional Fast Food restaurant in the 2023 USA Today Readers' Choice 10Best contest. Burney's father inherited his mother's famous biscuit recipe after his ailing mother gave him a choice of his inheritance – the recipe or the farm. Burney's father chose the recipe and the rest is history. Biscuitville has stood out from the competition for not working with food delivery services like Uber Eats and GrubHub. According to Burney, the decision was based on several factors including the inability to accommodate to-go orders because the restaurant is so busy. Biscuitville has made headlines with its “Life After 2” program in which each of its locations close at 2pm each day. The program allows employees to pursue other interests and spend more time with their families.  QUOTES “(My grandmother) gave my dad – since he was the oldest – the choice: My biscuit recipe or the farm. He chose the biscuit recipe.” (Burney)“The key to a good biscuit is love.” (Burney)“Growing up, my dad was fascinated by chain restaurants. My dad told me, ‘We all know how to make a McDonald's hamburger. We know the ingredients. It's not about the burger, it's how they do it. It's the system they put in place. It's the marketing, it's the brand, it's the people, it's the execution.'” (Burney)“We started closing at 2pm. Our food quality went up, our food costs went down and our employees are much happier. Now of course, you need to be a morning person. If you're not a morning person, we're not a good place for you.” (Burney) “We really strive to work with local companies first, and if we can't be local, we work with family businesses.” (Burney) “We've been able to differentiate ourselves in the breakfast space because we close at 2pm. People know breakfast is our focus.” (Burney)  TRANSCRIPT 00:00.01Burney JenningsI can, this is not too close. 00:04.65vigorbrandingNo, ye you’re perfect. 00:05.35Burney JenningsNo video? Okay. 00:06.54vigorbrandingYep. Okay. You ready to roll? 00:08.75Burney JenningsNow I’m ready to roll. 00:10.09vigorbrandingAll right. Welcome, Fork Tales fans. The best biscuits in the world are made in the South, of course. And the best place to buy those biscuits is a restaurant called Biscuitville. Today’s guest is the chairman of bisop but Biscuitville, Bernie Jennings, and we’re going to talk about biscuits, family, and a whole lot more. Bernie, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome, and we’re looking forward to hearing your story. 00:35.38Burney JenningsThank you, Michael. I appreciate you inviting me to your podcast. 00:39.08vigorbrandingVery cool. So, okay. We’ll start sort of in the beginning here. Your father founded Biscuitville in 1966 and you were raised to eventually take over the reins, which you did in 1996. You often joke that your birth date and your higher date are the same date. ah Talk about that a little bit. Talk about the start and how you got into the business and how you were raised basically in the business. 01:03.01Burney JenningsSure, so I feel like I was born into the business watching my dad as an entrepreneur, um you know, try different things in the restaurant business. He started out with, you know, really a bread store um and he was selling day-old bread and um through his travels and he was also selling flour as not flowers as in roses but flour um by the train carload um and he saw pizza and he thought that was a pretty neat concept so he started a concept called pizza to go 01:28.83vigorbrandingWow. 01:35.86Burney JenningsI eventually added biscuits in the morning because it was of as in a slow day part to no day part. And to make a long story short, change the name to Pizzaville. The biscuits were doing really well. I said, but let me just see if I can make a go at a biscuit concept without the pizza. and opened up one in downtown Danville, Virginia called it Biscuitville and the story goes on from there. Eventually converted all the pizzavills over to Biscuitvilles and we’ve been growing ever since. But to answer your question, watching my dad go through that and I remember yeah he used to do his own training videos and 02:15.96Burney Jenningsyeah middle of the night, yeah know I fell asleep at about 1130 and he woke me up at 630 in the morning when they were doing the videos and I just feel like I grew grew up in the business. um But you know how did I get into the business? 02:27.33vigorbrandingThat. 02:31.64Burney Jenningsum I call myself a late bloomer. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was growing up. I didn’t know if I wanted to be in the restaurant business, in the real estate business, oh just didn’t know. So when I got out of college, I started working for my dad doing odds and end jobs and eventually worked my way into a restaurant we called, what we had called the cutting board, which was a steakhouse in Burlington. um From that started managing a Pizzaville restaurant. And you know from that went over to the Biscuitville side and really worked every department in the company. 03:08.55Burney Jenningsum I didn’t run all the departments, but I got an exposure to that. And around 1996, my dad made me president of the company. But it wasn’t like I set out to the be in it. 03:17.62vigorbrandingWow. 03:22.29Burney JenningsBut once I started getting a taste of it, I loved it. 03:25.85vigorbrandingThat’s awesome. So like I have a rule like for my daughters, ah not that they’re interested whatsoever in what I’m doing ever, but if they want to get into the business, my my rule was you have to work somewhere for two years and get one promotion. Did you guys have anything like that? 03:40.12Burney JenningsRight. 03:41.12vigorbrandingOr is there any kind of rules that you set up that way or anything you know to that to that thing? Or is it just a coincidence? It just happened happened to work out. 03:48.73Burney JenningsIt just happened to work out for me. However, I also learned that rule. having you know I have four kids. One of them does work in the company, my oldest son, Blake, and he had to do the same thing. He worked about five or six years outside of our business before he joined us. And his skillset is real estate development, did that in Washington, DC in Raleigh. But I think that’s really important, joining a family business to have that outside experience before joining. 04:12.40vigorbrandingMmhmm. 04:18.74Burney JenningsAnd I’m sure I would have benefited from it. 04:19.01vigorbrandingAmen. Yeah, well, and you know, look, we I talked to a lot of folks that are part of family businesses and, you know, it’s it’s awesome, right? yeah And there’s there’s nothing more important than family, right? 04:29.60Burney JenningsYeah. 04:30.37vigorbrandingand but But family owned businesses, I mean, it can be it can be a difficult run. I mean, you know, there’s we we, you and I certainly know of a lot of of of of family businesses where there’s turmoil and problems. So ah to navigate that, I think it’s good to have those rules set up out front and And you gotta abide by them, right? I mean, it’s ah it’s an important thing. 04:49.95Burney JenningsYeah. 04:51.07vigorbrandingSo now, is your son, is he going to be, I mean, what is his role right now? 04:56.05Burney JenningsHe does a real estate development work, yeah repair which would include the construction repairs and maintenance site selection. 04:57.93vigorbrandingOkay. 05:03.21vigorbrandingMm-hmm. 05:03.88Burney JenningsI mean, that’s that’s his job. 05:07.45vigorbrandingYeah, which is not nothing, because you have how many locations? Like 50 plus, right? 05:10.79Burney JenningsYeah, we’re about 79 locations a day with four under construction. 05:13.16vigorbrandingWow. Okay. Wow. Jeez. 05:16.06Burney JenningsYeah. 05:16.19vigorbrandingThat’s fantastic. So yeah I want to take it back to the beginning because I love, I always say there’s always these great stories, right? So I love this story. Your ailing grandmother called her grandsons to her bedside, which had been your father, asked them to choose their inheritance. 05:28.11Burney JenningsRight? 05:31.03vigorbrandingSo you want to tell that story? 05:33.05Burney JenningsYeah, so he she gave my dad since he was the oldest on the choice between the biscuit recipe or the farm and he chose the biscuit recipe and my brother might hit my uncle which was his brother got the farm. 05:49.20vigorbrandingSo how did the farm work out? I mean, is was he happy with that trade? 05:51.52Burney JenningsYou know, I say my dad, and and I think it’s just a great story. Interestingly enough, um my uncle used to ask me, where’s the farm? He was he he still was looking for the farm. um it’s eastern east and My grandparents lived in eastern Tennessee, in a great area. 06:09.33vigorbrandingOkay. 06:11.84Burney JenningsIn fact, there’s a Jennings Cemetery there, lots of Jennings there. 06:14.51vigorbrandingWow. 06:17.11vigorbrandingWow. So, so the farm does exist. 06:17.94Burney JenningsYeah. 06:19.03vigorbrandingYour uncle got the farm. Did he ever, was your uncle ever a part of the business? 06:20.61Burney JenningsYeah. Um, so when we look at the business side, I mentioned early on that my dad was a flower salesman. 06:28.81vigorbrandingYep. 06:28.91Burney JenningsUm, that was with, that was something that his dad or my grandfather, this is my grandfather had. And that’s a business. My uncle, who was a younger brother took over when my dad got into restaurant business. 06:40.71vigorbrandingGotcha. 06:42.31Burney JenningsMy uncle did the flower business. 06:45.72vigorbrandingThat’s funny. 06:46.46Burney JenningsYeah. 06:46.48vigorbrandingDoes a farm in Tennessee still exist? 06:49.04Burney JenningsNo, I mean, that yeah, it exists, but it’s not family owned anymore. 06:50.00vigorbrandingOkay. 06:52.36vigorbrandingNot in a family. That’s funny. 06:53.42Burney JenningsYeah. Yeah. 06:55.24vigorbrandingSo I guess without giving away the secret recipe, the thing that that your father chose, what’s what’s the key to a good biscuit? 06:55.37Burney JenningsYeah. 07:03.02Burney JenningsYeah, so my dad was very, very practical. And I’ll answer the question, the key to the good bisits the key to a good biscuit is love. And what I mean by that is growing up, my um yeah my dad was fascinated with chain restaurants. And he he told me, look, we all know how to make a McDonald’s hamburger. We know the ingredients. It’s not about the McDonald’s hamburger. It’s how they do it. It’s the system they put in place. It’s the marketing. It’s the brand. It’s the it’s a people. It’s the execution. He said, so yeah when when we look at making a good biscuit, 07:44.93Burney JenningsIt’s pretty simple ingredients. It’s self-rising flour, shortening, and buttermilk. 07:50.23vigorbrandingMm hmm. 07:50.31Burney JenningsIt’s what do you do with it? How do you market it? How are, you know, it’s a friendliness. How do you make the people who are buying it feel special? So I call it love. It’s that’s how you make a good biscuit. 07:59.82vigorbrandingYep. 08:02.26vigorbrandingYeah. Well, you know, bra I’ve known you for a long time and you’re very engaging and you can it’s amazing because it’s I can tell you care. and And you know, people might be listening saying, okay, right, you make it with love. 08:10.06Burney JenningsYeah. 08:12.71vigorbrandingBut like family, not just your family, your company, you see your company as a family. And I think that whole, that passion and that caring for people really, really comes through. 08:17.61Burney JenningsRight. 08:22.62vigorbrandingAnd I think I commend you for that. And ah I mean, I just think that’s an ah it’s an amazing attribute to you and your company. 08:29.06Burney JenningsWell, thank you. 08:30.68vigorbrandingSo Biscuitville has made some great headlines in recent years for going against industry trends. And I’m i’m always impressed by things like this. It’s hard to stand by, I’ll say, you’re your your beliefs, if you will, and you know i mean from just being open for breakfast ah you know to to you know all the other things that you that you do and that you keep sacred, I guess. um So the one of the huge trends, obviously, especially since COVID was ah third party delivery services like Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub. um you You are not working with them, is that correct? 09:05.54Burney JenningsThat is correct. Yeah, I can expand. 09:07.88vigorbrandingwhat And the thinking there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 09:09.57Burney JenningsYeah, 09:10.23vigorbrandingi’d like to yeah I want to hear a little bit about thinking there because i’ I’m intrigued. 09:14.03Burney Jenningsyeah so it’s it’s several things. One, um we have worked on our packaging so our food can travel well. um An example in in in the restaurant business is french fries. How do you keep a french fry hot and fresh for 20 minutes while it’s going from your restaurant to to be delivered? 09:30.01vigorbrandingMm hmm. 09:35.33Burney JenningsSo our biscuits are best eaten fresh. um When we look at our business, we’re opened basically eight and a half hours a day, 5.30 to 2 in the afternoon. And we do a lot of business in a short period of timeframe and getting to go order like an Uber Eats order on a 930 on a Saturday done workforce because we’re having trouble. you know, taking care of those guests that are in front of us. um yeah Chipotle, I think, has done a really good job in their restaurants of making a second makeup line just for to-go orders so that it doesn’t mess up their dining. 10:15.27Burney JenningsWith us, we we we have the dining room and we have the drive-through. Drive-throughs went from pre-COVID around 63% of sales to now 75% of sales. 10:26.94vigorbrandingWow. 10:27.69Burney JenningsIt does seem to be coming off a little bit, but it’s holding holding in that number. um So we’re doing a tremendous amount of business in a short period of time and it’s part of a capacity issue of how do you fit those orders in. So it’s on our radar. 10:42.93vigorbrandingMmhmm. 10:45.08Burney JenningsI think we’ll end up solving the packaging and solving some of the back of house stuff but for right now it’s not it’s not top of mind for us. 10:53.42vigorbrandingWell, and again, you know, going back to to like what I was saying earlier about you and the way you, ah your personality, everything, you know, you say you make these biscuits with love. Well, you’re not, you you refuse to sell them ah through a delivery service because it’s not about the delivery service, per se, it’s more about like the quality of the product that they’re going to get at the end of the day. And at the end of the day, that’s your brand, right? I mean, your Biscuitville and, you know, you don’t want to have, a you you don’t want to to have um anything happen to that product that diminishes the the experience, the consumer experience. 11:13.52Burney JenningsYeah. 11:20.02Burney JenningsRight. 11:23.16Burney Jenningsand I agree. And I like those delivery services. I use them my so my myself. 11:26.72vigorbrandingYep. 11:28.08Burney JenningsIt is definitely not about the delivery service. They’re doing a great job in providing ah a good service. 11:33.84vigorbrandingYep. The other thing, and i’m I’m curious about this too, because again, I commend you for it. So I’m not, well, by no means am I questioning it, but 5.30 a.m. ah to closing at two, I mean, you know, again, most most restaurants out there be like, okay, well, that’s great for them. 11:41.49Burney JenningsYeah. 11:47.45vigorbrandingWhat are we gonna do for the the you know lunch? You know, we’re gonna make this, we’re gonna make that. What about dinner? We’re gonna make this, we’re gonna make that. I mean, everyone would try and open up as many day parts as he absolutely humanly could. And look at some of the different QSRs, like I’ll say, like McDonald’s. I mean, they’re they’re in the basic dessert business, they’re in the coffee business, they’re in the whatever the next trend du jour is. 12:05.27Burney JenningsRight. 12:08.55vigorbrandinghow How hard was it for you to stay sort of, ah for lack of a word, true to yourself and just do this this morning, 5.30 a.m. to closing it to? 12:17.24Burney JenningsYeah, so we started out open till eight o’clock at night. We had bone-on chicken. 12:20.36vigorbrandingOkay. 12:21.92Burney Jenningsum We added vegetables. and We had a lot of different products. And to make a long story short, from about one o’clock in the afternoon till 5.30, it was pretty much dead. 12:33.71vigorbrandingMm hmm. 12:33.98Burney JenningsAnd when you’re in the quick service business, people want a great product that’s fresh. And you can imagine how it’s difficult it is to do that when you really don’t have much business between one and 530. 12:41.66vigorbrandingYep. 12:49.41Burney JenningsAnd this was before snacking, you know, the snacking concept and the coffee concepts and people, you know, going to a restaurant um in mid afternoon really existed. 12:53.51vigorbrandingMm hmm. 13:00.21Burney JenningsSo we dropped that day part, started closing it too. um Our food quality went up, our food costs went down, and our employees were much happier. 13:11.53vigorbrandingMm 13:11.84Burney JenningsSo now we call it when we’re hiring, it’s called life after two. So we use that as a selling point to hire people. Now of course you need to be a morning person. If you’re not a morning person, We’re not a good place. We’re not a good place for you. um You definitely need to be a morning person. um So that means I’d say the majority of our management team is geared towards closing it to being at home with their family, having worked out if they do have a family who’s going to take care of those kids in the morning so they can be there in the afternoon. 13:37.79vigorbrandinghmm. 13:46.54Burney JenningsIt’s a big decision staying open later and how many people are you going to lose because that’s not what they signed up for. 13:46.59vigorbrandingYeah. 13:53.07vigorbrandingThat’s right. And that’s very smart of you to look around the corner because let’s face it. I mean, I love that that life after two. I think that’s super smart. I mean, and again, I say this because knowing you for a while, I could tell that like company culture, you treat everything like family and that whole life after two plays right into that. 14:06.26Burney JenningsYeah. 14:08.75vigorbrandingSo it’s not a It’s not another gimmick or it’s not a, well, we you know we got we got to worry about our employees. It’s something you’ve always done. 14:14.95Burney JenningsYeah. 14:15.45vigorbrandingand and Candidly, I think that’s reflected in the quality of the product. you say you The biscuits are made with love. I think that’s what you know people sign up for this life after two and they’re they’re’re they’re dedicated to you and your brand and the family. i think that’s ah I think that’s very commendable and something I think people try to build or create later, but you’ve always sort of had that incorporated, haven’t you? 14:36.98Burney JenningsRight. 14:38.19vigorbrandingSo, okay, three quarters of your sales come from drive-through customers. That’s in line with most of the fast food industry, which is around 70. 14:41.54Burney JenningsYes. 14:45.17vigorbrandingLast year you opened your first drive-through only location. Do you see a lot of potential for more drive-throughs? Is that like maybe the future? ah Or is it still in the test and learn phase? 14:56.76Burney JenningsYes, in the test and learn phase, um we opened up eight restaurants last year. All of them had a dining room, except for that one. That is a test location. And then the next eight, we were planning on the the dining room. We found the dining room does add to our return on investment. And we got 25% of our guests coming in into the dining room. Now, about 10% of them are taking it to go, but another 15 are staying in the dining room. So we see it as something here to say, here to stay. 15:24.63vigorbrandingMm hmm. 15:27.23vigorbrandingOkay. Good. Good. So what do you think? What’s the best thing on your menu? Other than the biscuit? I think that’d be the obvious answer. 15:33.01Burney Jenningsah my my favorite is so My favorite is sausage, egg, and cheese with sc with scrambled egg. 15:34.25vigorbrandingWhat do you think? 15:37.33vigorbrandingOh, there you go. ah Perfect. 15:39.76Burney JenningsYou know, our our sausage is made by Swaggerty. It’s a third, and I think getting ready to go on a fourth generation family business out of Servirville, Tennessee, which is right by Dollywood. 15:46.88vigorbrandingWow. 15:50.29vigorbrandingUh huh. 15:50.62Burney Jenningsum And, you know, I didn’t mention it early on, but we really strive to go with local companies first. And if we can’t be local, We want them to be family business doesn’t always work out that way, but you know a fourth generation family business for our sausage, a third or fourth generation for baking bacon coming out of um Ohio. um yeah Our helm is made locally you know in Wiltsboro. Um, yeah, it’s that, that local or family is really important. 16:21.46Burney JenningsOh, and we decided community coffee about three years ago and they’re in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 16:25.31vigorbrandingVery cool. Yep. 16:28.26Burney JenningsGreat, great family business. 16:30.10vigorbrandingThat’s awesome. Very cool. 16:31.05Burney JenningsYeah. 16:31.56vigorbrandingWell, you know, it’s like, you you know, some of the things are like the shift to drive-throughs and then, you know, take out. 16:38.39Burney JenningsYeah. 16:38.47vigorbrandingAnd, you know, I mean, that, that happened. COVID really, you know, moved a lot of that along fast. You know, like we see things like Pizza Hut’s practically eliminating dine in, but it really feels like the Biscuitville brand and just sort of the way you feel about family and the folks. It feels like the dine-in is here to stay as far as Biscuitville, right? i mean that’s like It feels like that’s a it’s a really integral part of your brand and and your your brand promise and the the love, the fresh and all that kind of thing. 16:58.74Burney JenningsYeah. 17:05.66Burney JenningsNo, it is. Yeah. Have no, no, no plans on changing it. And even it you when we look at this drive through only um test, that’s a concept that we would put on a smaller site where we couldn’t fit a restaurant with a dining room, but we want, we definitely wanted to be in that market. 17:27.96vigorbrandingYeah, that makes total sense. 17:28.74Burney JenningsSo we we to to us, that’s an add-on, not a replacement. 17:29.00vigorbrandingand Yeah, absolutely. 17:32.16Burney Jenningsbut Yes. 17:33.48vigorbrandingSo you’ve got more than 70 locations, as you mentioned, in the Carolinas and Virginia, which is ah a lot of restaurants in a, I’ll say not a small area, but a tight, tight, tight footprint. 17:41.34Burney JenningsRight. 17:43.47vigorbrandingAll of your locations are company owned, no franchisees. ah That gives you a lot of control of the brand, the product. and But does does that does that limit growth for you as well? And talk about the the idea of not franchising versus franchising and the benefits. 17:57.73Burney JenningsSure, let’s go with the first one, the growth. ah We just moved into South Carolina two years ago and that’s a big part of our growth. 18:04.29vigorbrandingNice. 18:07.28Burney Jenningsum are Three years ago, all of our restaurants were within the two-hour drive of Greensboro, North Carolina, which is our headquarters. Now we’re in about a three and a half hour drive. So we just opened up in Columbia, South Carolina, in Florence, in Harpsville, and one in Neuber, North Carolina. um The growth rate is limited. I mean, the being company owned limits your growth rate. 18:31.08vigorbrandingMhm. 18:31.28Burney JenningsWe don’t have an unlimited supply of cash and equity to grow. So you can only grow as fast as the money that you’re borrow able to borrow or the money you’re able to put into it. 18:36.86vigorbrandingRight. 18:44.16vigorbrandingRight. 18:44.52Burney Jenningsum You could certainly grow faster having private equity come in and buy a big stake, but just not interested in going down that path. 18:48.70vigorbrandingMhm. 18:53.37Burney Jenningsanother growth Another way to grow faster is the franchising model, something I have zero experience with. We may do that one day, but right now um where we want to own it and control it, and you mentioned it earlier, we feel like it gives us a lot more control over um the operations piece. 19:16.52vigorbrandingI think it does and I think that, and um look, we have a lot of brands that are franchised and it’s great and they’re smart business models, but but just again, going back to like how you feel about it. And you know, you said your biscuits, I love it. In the be beginning, they’re made with love. Well, there has to be an extreme amount of control there. So you’re not willing to just ship them out and into through a delivery service for quality sake. 19:35.75Burney Jenningsright 19:40.16vigorbrandingYou’re not willing to just sell your your your brand to other people and put it in their hands you know with the fear that maybe it won’t be up to the to your standards. I think there’s a whole lot of ah things that you’re doing or you’re choosing not to do that are actually making you successful. I think that’s really commendable. 19:55.96Burney Jenningsyeah but Thank you. 19:55.98vigorbrandingI think it’s very difficult to do because you know business is business, right? And like you know it’s about it’s about revenue and growth and all that. So I commend you for kind of sticking to your guns, if you will, and and doing things the way you do it. um So yeah last year Biscuit Fills voted best fast food breakfast in the u and in a USA Today readers poll. that’s That’s huge and congratulations on that. 20:16.39Burney Jenningsright Thank you. 20:17.83vigorbrandingSo we’re seeing a lot of the fast food breakfast wars and and they’ve been raging for a long time. Everyone’s kind of getting into it ah and the that’s a huge win for you. do you what What do you attribute that to that win? So you’re up against all this competition. You guys are voted number one. 20:32.80Burney JenningsYeah, for us, um in fact, every now and then I’m talking to somebody and they get us confused with Chick-fil-A. And by the way, we’re not Chick-fil-A. It’s a different concept, but they go they think we’re closing on Sundays. 20:46.25vigorbrandingMm hmm. 20:46.27Burney Jenningsit’s yeah we are we’ve put us We have worked hard to put us into a premium QSR category. 20:54.35vigorbrandingMm hmm. 20:55.03Burney JenningsSo when we look at how we compare ourselves, certainly we’re comparing, um we do competitionensation competition shopping with Chick-fil-A, Bojangles, McDonald’s, and Hardee’s. 21:07.89vigorbrandingMm hmm. 21:07.96Burney JenningsAnd those are really the core ones in our market. But when we look at our pricing and the quality of the ingredients we’re using, We want to make sure we’re using better ingredients than they are. Now, granted, an egg is an egg is an egg. you can’t yeah You can’t do anything different there, but you can do something different with your bacon, with your sausage, with the, you know, using a center cut ham. um yeah the The chicken, like our chicken, is the Springer Mountain Farms label, which is what you see in high-end restaurants. 21:36.08vigorbrandingMm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 21:42.29Burney JenningsIt costs us more money, but that’s important to us because we think it’s a better product. And when you yeah when you have what we think, really which we know is a better product, you gotta charge a premium price for that. So when we look at our pricing, it’s not gonna be the same. You put our pricing up against any of the people we competition shop with, I tell our folks, it better be higher. It better be more expensive because we’re spending more money than they are putting that product in front of the guests. 22:04.64vigorbrandingRight. 22:10.85vigorbrandingAbsolutely. so we’re like ah There’s obviously a consistent thread here as far as quality. ah Working with family-owned businesses. 22:18.86Burney JenningsYes. 22:19.09vigorbrandingah you know i’ll say so I’ll say smaller types of companies. how Where did that come from? i mean like Is that all you? i mean Was that something instilled by your father? Where did that sort of dedication to, I’ll say family, quality of life for your employees, and and and and clean ingredients and and and and the like, where did that all come from? 22:39.35Burney JenningsYeah, I’ll give a, it’s a two-part answer. One, on the you know ingredient side, we did some research about 10 years ago, and it was internal and external. And it what we found, and it was just by chance, being a smaller chain and local chain, We had, by chance, been dealing with family-owned businesses and local businesses, and many of our customers knew that, but we didn’t play on it. ah like We didn’t point it out, and we said, wait a minute. 23:16.79Burney JenningsThis is something if our customers know about it and care about it, there’s probably some who don’t know about it but do care about it. So we we made that part of our strategy on a go-forward basis to really focus on local businesses first and family owned businesses second. And then the second um is is the how we treat our people. I think that’s what you were asking in how we operate in our business. 23:42.88vigorbrandingMm hmm. 23:47.78Burney JenningsPart of that is being a family businesses. I truly believe family businesses approach business and how they treat people different than public companies and different than private equity. So in part of it was my upbringing from my parents on how you treat people and treating people with respect and treating people how you want to be treated. So my team kind of knows this if there’s ever a dilemma when it comes to the people. but be yeah so How do you, if this was you how do you, how would you like to see the answer? 24:19.95vigorbrandingright 24:20.20Burney JenningsAnd sometimes it’s financially, I mean, it hurts us financially, but it I think we benefit in the long run. So, you know, I try not to be penny wise and pound foolish in making those financial decisions. 24:31.67vigorbrandingyeah 24:34.34vigorbrandingI have a strong constitution when it comes to that. I think I really commend you on it. 24:37.00Burney JenningsYeah. 24:37.76vigorbrandingI think that’s wonderful. um You know, so you’re also voted best regional fast food chain. ah There’s a lot of Southern fast food chains that wanted to win that. 24:46.13Burney JenningsYes. 24:47.59vigorbrandingCan you talk a little bit about that? Who the competition might have been and you know, why, why, why do you think that you you guys were picked? 24:54.29Burney Jenningsum you know There were several big operators who the competition might have been, um and I think they’re really good operators, and I’ve already you know i’ve already mentioned them. 25:02.52vigorbrandingMm hmm. 25:07.43Burney Jenningsum They got some great franchisees, McDonald’s, Bojangles, Hardee’s, Chick-fil-A. 25:07.67vigorbrandingYep. 25:13.23Burney JenningsThey’re all really, really good competitors and operators. um You know, for us, I think we are able to different differentiate ourselves in the breakfast space because we close it too. And we’ve already talked about that, but people know breakfast is our focus. And I think when you have that type of focus, it does put you ah in a better position to compete in that space. 25:40.12vigorbrandingamen and you know I’ll say on that focus, and I you know i know that i think you kind of answered this in a different way earlier, but I can’t help as ah as a marketer and an entrepreneur. i mean you know I have one marketing firm that does restaurant marketing, and I have another another marketing firm that does CPG, food and beverage, right two different companies. and you know you think well they are In my mind, they are very different because you know a restaurant is a retail business that just happens to sell food and beverage. and I don’t mean that to take that lightly, but CPG is you know is what it is. 26:06.40Burney JenningsRight. 26:10.39vigorbrandingit’s ah It’s branded food that is sold at at retail, usually at a gro obviously grocery store. so ah Different businesses, different business models, they just happen to both be food and beverage. 26:16.09Burney JenningsRight. 26:20.65vigorbrandingI’ve been seeing over the years a lot of crossover and you you know we have mutual friends that have restaurants on one side, but then they’ve taken their they’re they’ their primary item and they’ve moved it into the grocery chain. And I got to think with with the with the brand that you have at Biscuitville and the reputation, that if if you could figure out a way to package up those biscuits and get them in a grocer’s freezer, I gotta think that’s a home run. 26:44.98Burney JenningsYeah. 26:47.04vigorbrandingBut can you talk a little bit about that? I have a feeling it goes back to, like you were saying, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh. So can you talk a little bit about that? Have you thought about that? Or is that maybe something on the horizon? 26:57.12Burney JenningsIf it’s not on the horizon, we have put very little thought into it. It does go back to yeah know the freshness of the product and how it would reflect on the brand. We may do that one day and you know it may be, um you know doing we have we have party biscuits. 27:11.41vigorbrandingHm. 27:15.09Burney Jenningsyeah We used to call them silver dollar. They’re just small biscuits that you’d see third on a platter or passed around around at a party. Something like that would be really good in my opinion, for yeah a freezer section in a grocery store. 27:29.85vigorbrandingYeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you see like ah some of the guys that, the you know, some of the folks have done parbake. So ah instead of it being like, for lack of but a better word, just a frozen ingredient built product, they’ll they’ll they’ll go so far as to, you know, partially bake it and then freeze it. 27:41.28Burney JenningsYeah. 27:46.77vigorbrandingAnd I think that makes one heck of a ah lot better, fresher product. And so 27:50.44Burney Jenningsyeah 27:50.83vigorbrandingthere there might That might be ah an opportunity for you. And hey, look, far bring it for me to tell you how to make biscuits. That’s the last thing I’m going to do. But from a marketing standpoint, I mean, boy, I got to tell you, I think you have such a great brand. And it comes down to just because of the fortitude and and really focusing on a ah breakfast segment, the biscuit, a time frame, fresh and making it with love that I think is 28:06.90Burney JenningsYeah. Right. 28:12.43vigorbrandingWell, that’s what makes great brands. So I think I think that’s awesome. 28:14.41Burney JenningsYeah. 28:15.70vigorbrandingSo I mean, you know, before we go here, like what’s what’s next for Biscuitville? What else? What else? you you For lack of a better word, cooking up. Is there new locations? Are you moving into any new areas? What would what excites you? what’s What’s going on at Biscuitville? 28:29.14Burney JenningsYou know, it’s the growth. We were a very slow growth company. I wouldn’t call us a fast growths growth company, but the new markets is where we’re focused. You know, South Carolina ah moving into Greenville next year, you know, just expanding in that South Carolina market is really important to us. 28:38.95vigorbrandingAwesome. 28:48.30vigorbrandingYeah that’s excellent and you know I’m a big trends guy I mean you know at Quench we do the food and beverage trends and the restaurant trends I’ve been doing it for I think it’s like 17 years now and I will say I mean you know that that focus 28:48.35Burney JenningsHope to get to Georgia one day, but that’s a good five or six years down the road. Yeah. 29:09.19vigorbrandingon a product and a focus on a day part. And if just the overall, again, the Constitution you have and the focus that you have and the fortitude you have is what makes brilliant and great brands. So I commend you for it. You check a lot of boxes. I’ll tell you as far as what’s on trend, what consumers want. And I think that’s that’s ah very, very admirable. So I guess keep up keep up the great work. 29:29.37Burney JenningsThank you. 29:31.24vigorbrandingso So now I have to have a good 29:31.64Burney JenningsThank you, Michael. But you know, hell ah you know, um I do read your material and Quench does a really good job at the market research. I love the presentations you do. They’re exciting, they’re engaging, and they are full of a lot of tidbits of information that I can walk away with. So you guys do a great job with that. 29:51.36vigorbrandingI appreciate you saying that. That’s very kind. Now before I let you go here, I have one last question. I’m going to, you know, you can’t say one of your biscuits. So it’s got, you got it. I’m going to steer you off your biscuits, right? You don’t have to mention any other brands, but if you had one final meal, What would you eat and why? 30:05.37Burney JenningsHmm One final meal my wife makes the best pepperoni pizza And I’ve had a lot of pepperoni pizza, especially since you know growing up we had a pizza pizza pizza restaurant um That’s I would say that that’s it 30:07.21vigorbrandingAnd maybe even where, if it’s a special restaurant or a special place or whatever else. 30:13.51vigorbrandingYeah. 30:22.52vigorbrandinglike ah Pizzaville. Yeah. 30:30.62vigorbrandingWell, maybe one day. 30:31.37Burney Jenningsits It’s very simple, pepperoni, cheese, sauce, and a great crust. 30:33.12vigorbrandingyeah 30:36.69vigorbrandingWe know history repeats itself. So maybe one day there’ll be this thing where, I mean, your grandmother, ah you know, gifted your father the biscuit recipe. 30:45.38Burney JenningsRight. 30:46.74vigorbrandingMaybe one day you’re your wife gifts the pepperoni ah recipe to one of your your your kids and maybe maybe it all comes back around, you know? 30:54.79Burney JenningsYou never know. 30:56.77vigorbrandingPizzaville reborn with with your with your wife’s recipe. 30:57.78Burney JenningsThat’s right. 30:59.55vigorbrandingI love it. 31:00.15Burney JenningsRight. 31:00.19vigorbrandingThat’s awesome. Well, Bernie, you are fantastic as always. I really appreciate your time and thank you so much. And again, congratulations on such a great brand. And again, brands are built on promises. And I mean, your promises of of ah fresh and and love and and all that just really comes through and everything. And that’s that’s it’s very admirable. 31:21.02Burney Jenningshi Thank you. Been a pleasure. 31:25.08vigorbrandingCool. All right. i think 

Is Brian Niccol up to the challenge that is Starbucks? Subway is cooking up a new value offering. And here's how California's minimum wage boost at QSRs appears to be impacting restaurants there.

Will Panera Bread's decision to phase out its controversial Charged Lemonade derail my energy drink “on-premise 2.0” trend prediction from April 2019? With energy drink brands like Celsius paving their own path in the consumer's mind, beyond the traditional categorical need states, there's undoubtedly still a long runway of growth opportunities remaining within the foodservice channel. This will prove especially true within quick service restaurants…where energy drinks are starting to take lunchtime consumption share from carbonated soft drinks. But how does the functional beverage category unlock this massive market potential right now…when QSRs don't want to be lumped into the Panera Bread Charged Lemonade negative news cycle? There are two helpful underlying forces: the self-serve beverage dispenser era is ending and functional energy “cans in hand” have become a key accessory when signaling a wellness-focused lifestyle. FOLLOW ME ON MY SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LINKEDIN⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YOUTUBE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠TWITTER⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠INSTAGRAM⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠FACEBOOK⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/joshua-schall/support

Food sales continue to grow at convenience stores, especially during a few key dayparts. However, competition from QSRs could encroach on your sales. Hosted by: Jeff Lenard About our Guest: David Portalatin, Senior Vice President and Industry Advisor, Food and Foodservice, Circana David is a trusted industry advisor who works closely with leading food manufacturers and retailers as well as foodservice distributors, manufacturers, and operators. He shares data and deep expertise on how U.S. consumers eat and drink, their attitudes and motivations, their personal characteristics, and their use of restaurants and other foodservice outlets. Portalatin is also the author of Circana's Annual Report on Eating Patterns in America, a compilation of food and foodservice research.

Key Takeaways:Inflation is significantly impacting QSR tenants, so it's important to consider risks for single-tenant net lease investments in that sector. Relationships with local authorities, neighbors, contractors, and banks are critical for successfully developing commercial properties.Off-market deals can offer better terms than on-market listings, but creative thinking allows finding value in on-market properties as well. Handling difficult situations professionally, such as by negotiating solutions during COVID-19, can turn problematic relationships into valuable partnerships over time.Commercial real estate investing offers various opportunities, from rehabilitating mills to partnering on sale-leaseback deals to developing education programs.

SummaryIn this episode, Joe Sharp of Meadowbrook Facility Services shares his journey from being a facility manager of QSRs to creating Meadowbrook Solutions, a company that handles its own repairs and services. He emphasizes the importance of providing quality service, building trust, and adding value to the operators he works with. Joe also discusses his approach to creating content and networking on social media.TakeawaysOrganic growth can be achieved by providing quality service and building trust with operators.Adding value and consistently meeting expectations are key to establishing long-term relationships with clients.Creating valuable content and networking on social media can lead to meaningful connections and opportunities for growth.Enjoy!Interested in closing the skills gap? Check out our friends at Interplay Learning!

Be A Better YOU with AI: Join The Community: https://10xyou.us Like this? Subscribe to our newsletter at https://thinkfuture.com Get AIDAILY every weekday. Subscribe at https://aidaily.us --- In this episode, Roy Baharav, CEO of Hi Auto, discusses how his company is transforming the drive-through experience with advanced voice AI technology. Hi Auto aims to automate order-taking at quick service restaurants (QSRs) using a combination of AI and human supervision to ensure high accuracy. During COVID, drive-throughs became crucial, with sales increasing by 20-30%. Roy shares his journey from being a Google engineer to co-founding High Auto, initially targeting the automotive space but pivoting to drive-throughs due to high demand and labor shortages. Hi Auto's approach mirrors Waymo's autonomous vehicle strategy, where human intervention supports AI systems to maintain accuracy. This hybrid model allows AI to handle most tasks while humans step in when needed. Currently, High Auto operates in nearly 500 stores and plans to expand, especially in regions like California, where new labor regulations increase costs for restaurants. Roy emphasizes the importance of maintaining high accuracy in order-taking and how AI can enhance customer experience and operational efficiency. The future vision for QSRs involves more automation, akin to a podcast setup requiring fewer people to operate smoothly. With bilingual capabilities and continuous improvements, Hi Auto is set to revolutionize the drive-through industry. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thinkfuture/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thinkfuture/support

Join us for our very first episode of “insight.tech Talk” where we talk about how voice AI transforms the QSR experience—boosting efficiency and creating a smoother experience both for customers and employees. Just as our new name reflects the ever-changing tech landscape, this episode explores how voice assistants enable QSRs to take orders faster and more accurately, reducing staff workload and handling complex requests. The result: shorter lines, happier customers, and more consistent service. Listen in as we explore benefits, address potential challenges, and peek into how voice AI impacts other areas of the industry. Join us as we explore these ideas with: Salwa Al-Tahan, Research and Marketing Executive, Sodaclick Stevan Dragas, EMEA Digital Signage Segment Manager, Intel Christina Cardoza, Editorial Director, insight.tech Salwa and Stevan answer our questions about How voice AI enhances QSR experiences Voice AI infrastructure and investments Technological advancements making voice AI possible Real-world examples of voice AI in QSRs Voice AI opportunities beyond QSRs Related Content To learn more about conversational voice AI, read Talking Up Self-Serve Patient Check-In Kiosks in Healthcare. For the latest innovations from Sodaclick, follow them on Twitter at @sodaclick and on LinkedIn. For the latest innovations from Intel, follow them on Twitter at @sodaclick and on LinkedIn.

We're talking about all things loyalty in this block-buster episode with Zach Goldstein, the CEO of Thanx. Zach and Jen discuss why loyalty is broken, with 80% of Fast Casuals and QSRs looking to improve and invest in better loyalty strategies. The conversation emphasizes that the future of restaurant loyalty is here, now. It's data-driven, personalized, dynamic, and poised to redefine how guest loyalty is built and delivered for restaurant brands.Moments to listen for:The true definition of “loyalty” Shortcomings of "Loyalty 2.0" and the potential of "Loyalty 3.0”Learnings from other industries - hotels & airlines The shift towards digital-first strategiesWays personalization has proven to improve engagement and customer retentionThe unspoken element all loyalty programs need to succeed (hint: it starts with a "C")Related Assets:Loyalty 3.0: Elevating Guest Engagement Through Deeper InsightsQu's 5th Annual State of DigitalRestaurant Loyalty is Stuck in Neutral, by Joe GuszowskiThanx is the leading loyalty and guest engagement platform to grow restaurant customer lifetime value in the digital era - without relying on expensive discountsConnect with Zach on LinkedInCheck out Qu's Annual State of Digital for Enterprise QSR & Fast Casual Brands

This week on the Extra Serving podcast, a product of Nation's Restaurant News, NRN editors Holly Petre, Alicia Kelso, and Joanna Fantozzi discussed the state of the consumer.There have been many conversations over the past few months about what consumers wants, what they consider “value” in an industry that's seen prices rise substantially over the past five years.Quick-service brands like McDonald's and Burger King have announced plans for $5 meals. Jack in the Box is planning a $4 menu.Meanwhile, casual-dining brands like Chili's and Applebee's are emphasizing their value propositions in advertisements.Amid these changes, there have been multiple studies that show consumers are not only noticing the changes but are turning away from QSRs all together. Some consider fast food a luxury, while others are trading up to fast casual as the price difference closes.So, how can restaurants address this consumer's needs?

A recent CNN study of earnings calls and analyst notes finds that the word of the summer – on Wall Street, at least – is “bifurcation,” or the division of something into two parts. In this specific instance, bifurcation means that high-income consumers are plugging along just fine, while low-income consumers are really starting to struggle.Indeed, 80% of American households have less cash available than they did in 2019, while credit card debt has reached a historic high. Meanwhile, a JP Morgan survey found that over 70% of low-income consumers are having a hard time making ends meet. Notably, middle-income households are also feeling pinched; 67% believe their income is falling behind the current cost of living.

Bob Duprey is no stranger to creating consistent training systems. In this interview, Jeff Kahler explores how shift leaders can really elevate restaurant service, especially in quick service restaurants (QSRs)! Bob and Jeff also dive into Shift Leader Playbook, the newest course from Restaurant Playbooks.   About Our Guest:  For the last 20 years, Bob Duprey has worked with Fortune 500 clients to develop custom eLearning solutions. As the founder of Restaurant Playbooks, he formed a team of passionate pros with proven expertise in the restaurant industry, and Learning & Development. Bob's goal is to create engaging eLearning experiences that develop behaviors and deliver results.

Last week, we talked about the tech takeaways from the Restaurant Leadership Conference. Today, executive editor Alicia Kelso is joining us to talk about her takeaways.The main takeaway is labor. There was a lot of discussion about labor and wages against the backdrop of California's AB1228 which went into effect earlier this month, raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour. One operator told Alicia he'll “never” expand in California again, while another felt confident about the combined pricing and technology strategies her team has put into place to soften the inflationary blow. We've seen plenty of stories so far about layoffs and kiosk implementations and even menu adjustments to navigate these higher wages, but time will tell how it ultimately shakes out. Will this $20 watermark trickle beyond QSRs? Likely. Other markets? Maybe. Will California's restaurant growth stagnate a bit? Perhaps among smaller players, but not likely among the bigger players who have the advantages of scale to absorb the higher costs.

In the latest edition of Omni Talk's Retail Fast Five live from the World Retail Congress in Paris, sponsored by the A&M Consumer and Retail Group, Avalara, Wiliot, TGW-Logistics and Sezzle Chris Walton and Anne Mezzenga discuss: How Long It'll Be Before We See Zoom Cashiers At More QSRs? For the full episode head here: https://youtu.be/CtdgYyYnafs

On this episode, Ryan Ostrom, the Chief Marketing Officer of Jack in the Box, discusses how the brand has separated itself from that pack in the QSR industry by placing an emphasis on speed, quality, and consistency. Plus, Ryan explains how innovation can drive business growth and enhance the customer experience, and he reveals how Jack in the Box continues to satisfy constantly evolving customer cravings with digital innovations as well as in-store service.Tune in to learn:Why speed and quality are crucial in the QSR industry, but why it's important to find a balance between the two.Why consistency is key in creating a loyal customer base in QSRs.How innovation plays a vital role in driving business growth and enhancing the customer experience in the QSR industry.How involving consumers in the innovation process through ideation sessions and consumer taste tests can lead to successful menu innovations.The ways Jack in the Box sets itself apart through its diverse menu, all-day breakfast, and customization options.Why fostering a culture of innovation and creativity requires exploring food trends, conducting consumer research, and prioritizing the guest experience.Why cutting corners in the pursuit of cost savings can negatively impact the quality and consistency of menu items.How regularly monitoring guest insights and sales data can help identify changes in consumer preferences and make necessary improvements.--How can you bring all your disconnected, enterprise data into Salesforce to deliver a 360-degree view of your customer? The answer is Data Cloud. With more than 200 implementations completed globally, the leading Salesforce experts from Professional Services can help you realize value quickly with Data Cloud. To learn more, visit salesforce.com/products/data to learn more.--Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at http://www.mission.org.

In episode 51 of Kantar's Retail Sound Bites, Barry Thomas, senior retail thought leader, and Rachel Dalton, head of retail insights, discuss challenger brand disruption, Kantar's Brand Glee research, and what was driving this growth in the Digital Age.     Have a topic you'd like us to cover? Contact us at Kantar's Retail Sound Bites Podcast. Find the Brand Glee report here: https://www.kantar.com/campaigns/brand-glee 

IIHF - Home 2024 IIHF WORLD JUNIOR CHAMPIONSHIPVegan meat company claws its way forward - by Hanna RaskinMcDonald's Ice Cream Machine Hackers Say They Found the ‘Smoking Gun' That Killed Their Startup | WIREDKytch - The platform for smart, connected QSRs.mcbrokenThe McDonald's Ice Cream Machine Hacking Saga Has a New Twist | WIREDListeria monocytogenes in the retail deli environment: A review - ScienceDirectAndrew Cruickshank, Author at Canadian Business – How to Do Business BetterIs Baikiain in Tara Flour a Causative Agent for the Adverse Events Associated with the Recalled Frozen French Lentil & Leek Crumbles Food Product? - A Working Hypothesis(2) Laura Tashie on X: “@benjaminchapman Thoughts on this? An email from an Exponent scientist to the lead scientist on the study you like so much with the DH attorneys cc'd. Then there's your name in this email. I hope someone can actually call them out on this biased bogus science. It's awful. https://t.co/KRUT5UvcNR” / XSoylent (meal replacement) - WikipediaSeries of tubes - WikipediaTed Stevens - WikipediaOne dead following cheese recall over E. coliHome | Mrs Kirkham's CheeseOur Story | Mrs Kirkham's CheeseGraduate Thesis Or Dissertation | An Exploration of Cheese Safety Parameters and Aging as Mitigation Strategy for Foodborne Pathogens in Cheese | ID: qj72pg91m | ScholarsArchive@OSUBehavior of Different Shiga Toxin-Producing Escherichia coli Serotypes in Various Experimentally Contaminated Raw-Milk Cheeses - PMCLancashire cheese - WikipediaCantaloupe outbreak in Canada kills another person; patient list continues to grow | Food Safety NewsShrimp Ring | M&M Food MarketHealth department report traces E. coli outbreak at Huntley High School to food handlerFinal Report - Shiga Toxin E. coli (STEC) Outbreak: Huntley High School, Huntley, Illinois September 2023

Cole Jones is the Founder & CEO of Local Line, an e-commerce network connecting local farmers with restaurants and grocers. In this episode, we'll talk about the importance of keeping food dollars within local economies, how large QSRs like Chipotle are using the platform to purchase tens of millions of pounds of local produce, and how farmers can tap into a marketplace of buyers looking for new suppliers. Watch on YouTube Subscribe to the HNGRY Newsletter

Sean Tresvant, Chief Global Brand and Strategy Officer at Taco Bell, joins Suzy Founder and CEO Matt Britton on the latest episode of The Speed of Culture podcast in collaboration with Adweek. Sean unveils Taco Bell's consumer strategies to establish itself as a lifestyle brand in the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) space. He also shares how the company leverages customer loyalty and authentic partnerships for brand success, Taco Bell's education strategy to expand globally, as well as the role of digital and AI in modern marketing.Follow Suzy on Twitter: @AskSuzyBizFollow Sean Tresvant on LinkedInSubscribe to The Speed of Culture on your favorite podcast platform.And if you have a question or suggestions for the show, send us an email at suzy@suzy.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sweetgreen wants to do more dinner business. QSRs continue to dominate restaurant traffic. But eatertainment has also been a big winner.

US equities finished lower in Tuesday trading, ending just off worst levels and more than reversing Monday's modest gains. The Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq finished down 1.14%, 1.47%, and 1.57%, respectively, with the Dow finishing below 200dma for first time since May. All sectors were lower with Big Tech a notable drag, while semis, auto complex, QSRs, media and entertainment, machinery, cosmetics, grocers, and China tech also underperformed. Meanwhile, Biotech, pharma, airlines, AG chemicals, oil majors, E&Ps, and apparel retailers fared a bit better. Overall, the markets were unable to shake risk-off throughout the entire Tuesday session despite some mixed economic data takeaways. It seems as though there is a catalyst vacuum until around mid-October, when the market gets the September CPI on the 12th and the earnings season begins.

US equities were lower in a quiet Thursday afternoon trading session, near worst levels and extending Wednesday's declines. The S&P had its worst session since March; and the Nasdaq more than doubled Wednesday's sharp drop. Big tech was again among the biggest drags. Networking/communications, homebuilders, REITs, oil services, exchanges, auto suppliers, QSRs, and casinos were some of the other laggards. Among the outperformers were refiners, managed care, media apparel retailers, and food. Oil price spike, seasonality, dampened momentum in pockets of big tech, consumer headwinds and the United Auto Workers strike are some of the other higher-profile areas of caution.

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Jason Ault was working in the traditional sign business back in the late 2000s when a customer contract came along that required a digital sign. He had an IT background, so he stuck up his hand and took it on. He caught the bug, so to speak, and has been in digital signage ever since - putting together an initial team that launched in 2010 as Coffman Media. The Columbus, Ohio-based solutions provider has found a niche in the middle of buying market - not the little guys who can't offer much scale, and not the Fortune 500s that are going to opt for a national integrator, major software firm or even a giant consulting firm. Coffman is particularly active providing a solution, plan and services in workplaces and in regional and mid-sized QSRs, notably coffee chains. Jason and I chat on this podcast about its services, how the marketplace and needs have evolved, the gulf that still exists between conventional and digital sign companies, and the steady need for educating end-users. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Jason, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me a bit about Coffman Media and your role there?  Jason Ault: Absolutely. Coffman Media is a digital signage integration firm that we started almost 14 years ago and I am the co-founder and chief operating officer. You guys are in the Columbus, Ohio area and then down in Jacksonville as well?  Jason Ault: That's correct. We just opened the Jacksonville office just over a year ago. But servicing customers all across the US, Canada, and Mexico.  How did you get into it?  Jason Ault: Back in 2008, I was with a traditional sign company, and we were doing a big mall redevelopment project, and some of that scope called for digital signage and back then, my background was computer information, so we decided to say yes to that part of the scope as well. Took it on, partnered with CoolSign way back then before Haivision acquired it and really caught a bug for the industry, started formulating a team that we wanted to put together, and launched the shingle of Coffman Media in February of 2013. It's interesting, that the traditional printing industry seems like this is something that they have to go towards and evolve into, and while we've seen some of it, it still seems like an industry that's not really made the jump or evolved into it. Jason Ault: I absolutely agree, and we see the same thing as well. Just knowing that industry, from my previous life and also working with a lot of traditional sign companies, it is a struggle for them to get into because it does require some computer skills and some networking skills. Obviously, they may have some content chops and metal fabrication chops, but they still need that networking and computer element.  Is that something that you guys help out on?  Jason Ault: Absolutely, everything from traditional sign companies to managed service providers, because they don't know the signage side, even they don't know the IT side, architects, really anyone trying to get into digital signage side, we can help them in pre-sales support, demos from CMS partners that we have, training up their clients, passing it off, supporting their clients, really however far they want us to go into the weeds with them, we can help them out.  So you start all the way at the ideation stage with some customers and can take them all the way through managed services? Jason Ault: Absolutely. It depends on where they want to jump off and take over. We can come in under their banner; we can come in as partners with our logo. This depends on how they want to present us as a partner to the end customer. It's interesting because the digital signage market, particularly the software companies tends to present their products as being very easy to use, and very intuitive. They spend a lot of time explaining use cases and everything else but still seems to be a big leap for traditional companies who don't think about this stuff sometimes. Why is that? Jason Ault: At the surface level, we are right in some aspects, it is easy to use but as digital signage use is evolving, content is getting dynamic. People want to integrate into data that's living out on the web somewhere or integrating into a point of sale or a plethora of other things that you can plug into. That's where things get lost and they need someone to come in and help tie all those things together. I refer to companies such as yours as solutions providers as opposed to integrators, which sounds like an arms and legs hang and bang situation. Is that a term that fits? Jason Ault: Yeah, at the end of the day, we are a solution provider. We live on both sides of the world, but at the end of the day, we're always starting with the end in mind, working backward, and figuring out what solution fits that customer's needs. We're not just one CMS partner shop. We're not just one hardware shop. It really is what fits customers' needs the best. And so you don't have your own software, you don't have proprietary hardware or anything else, so you're able to just look at a job and figure out, okay, based on what Mr. Customer's tell us, here's what we'd recommend.  Jason Ault: Exactly. We've got three core CMS partners that we've formulated over the years with Signage Live being our longest tenure at 13 years running, and then hardware runs the gambit to whatever that platform supports, and then we pick from that bucket.  So, why would you have three software partners? Jason Ault: This depends on the customer. Sometimes a need is going to lean towards their benefit more. So if we need a native POS integration, we can look to engage Spectrio. If we need a lot of data binding, we can look at Wallboard, but our largest partner is really Signage Live because they approach it from an API-first headless perspective so we can do a lot of unique things with them and we developed really great projects over the years, so that's the standpoint but again the need is justifying the partner that we bring to the table for that total solution.  That's interesting. I obviously have a relationship with Spectrio and know their product very well because of the ownership position. But the Signage Live component when Jason Cremins, the CEO of Signage Live, told me three years ago now, that he was going down the path of headless CMS, it was early days for that, and I had to ask him to tell me what that is and he did, and I thought I could see the marketplace moving towards this thing just because of the flexibility that it presents. Is that what you found?  Jason Ault: It is, and then it correlates to what came out and the Invictus reports last year or this year, I can't remember which one it was, where it's talking about the new wave of architecture that's gonna have to come down the pike for CMSs partners and that's really where I think Signage Live was a little bit ahead of the curve and had already gone down that path of headless API first and how they were going to market three years ago. Yeah, I think Stefan from Invictus describes it as the old style is very monolithic, and the new style is composable, where you can come at it from different angles and inject content and make things happen. Plus, you can use your own tools.  Jason Ault: Exactly.  Have you found over 14 years that customer needs have evolved? Jason Ault: A hundred percent. I'd say 30% of our business this year will be Gen 2, and Gen 3 digital signage partner relationships for us. And it's not because they were unhappy necessarily with their partner, but the infrastructure or solution that they had in place for however many years, it'd be no longer able to suit their needs. Everything from being able to ingest outside content in unique ways, supporting new hardware that has security measures being able to pass all these, security requirements now. So everything is secure from the customer's standpoint. Those kinds of things are changing quite rapidly.  Yeah, and you're sitting up above this. I'm very curious because you have your software partner, and I'm sure you spend a lot of time looking at everything that's out there. I'm curious, if you find that a lot of software companies are stuck in their lane and don't have the mechanism to expand and make what they have more open. Jason Ault: Yeah, I think it's absolutely true. Whether it comes down to how it's built or just where they're in the market and they can't really move past it. They do have their niche and that's just where they stay. That's where I think we have three great tools in our tool belt that can handle pretty much anything thrown at us, from a unique perspective one of mail digital signage to something that's experiential. I talk to companies a lot about the importance of identifying the marketplace understanding, what you do, and what you're particularly good at versus general offers.  As a solutions provider, have you started to focus on particular vertical markets, or is it somewhat generalized?  Jason Ault: We're starting to focus really in the last 12 months, and that's really between corporate communication and quick service restaurants. We had some really great wins in each of those sectors and found our identity in those, but that's still not to say that we won't serve other opportunities that come to our direction either through partners or just by knocking on the door. Those are two incredibly competitive markets to go after. How do you set yourself apart? Jason Ault: It's a great question. In a way, it's hyper-competitive. So, we are not necessarily fishing for the whales or maybe not even the tunas, but in that mid-market space, someone with 100 locations, or maybe they're just coming up to that three-digit all the way to approaching the four-digit mark, we really found a nice little lane where we can help them out from setting up what a total solution should look like, rolling it out and being that consultative arm for them, vverything from clearance bars through headsets to digital signage, really every piece and stack that could be around that whole ecosystem, and we're bringing it together as one package. That's where we're setting ourselves apart from and then serving that kind of middle market.  Yeah, I suspect when you talk about the whale accounts in QSR and even in Fortune 500 companies for workplace communication, the large ones are not as price-sensitive. They're somewhat conditioned to working with big consulting companies and just large service providers versus, as you described, the regional ice cream chain or whatever where those kinds of companies come in to see them. They're looking at them like, you want two extra zeros from us, and that isn't going to happen. Jason Ault: Exactly. A lot of the time, those mid-market franchise orders are struggling with the balance of how do I either roll this into the total package for new stores or they want us to deal with the franchisees directly, and a lot of times, that can be very cumbersome for an organization, but we take that on, and yes, it comes with our own licks, shut doors and we don't get paid, or we are served bankruptcy papers but we've been able to make some wins at it.  We are hyper-focused within the QSRs side, and we found a home with coffee chains, I don't know how they fell in, but it just started to snowball. I think it's one of those cases where they don't quite understand what they're asking for and why they need it, but if they can see an example of another chain that they compete with or are familiar with, they can see, okay, this is what they did so yeah, we want that too.  Jason Ault: It's kind of a way of Keeping up with the Joneses' aspect, and that's where we're able to show them, here's the package that we do, obviously skewed for their particular organization, but helping them along the way, getting them familiar with understanding what they're asking for and then making sure that the value is perceived from the dollar they are spending. The pandemic and the lockdown compelled QSR, in particular, to start looking more at this because maybe they had to do drive-through, which they didn't do in the past, and they had to do self-service kiosks because staffing became an issue.  Jason Ault: It did, and it didn't. We actually had a couple of partners that reverted away from digital because they were now just doing takeout as more on the piece of the side where they were having dine-in. They just realized that it's not going to change. They're doing a lot more just from the mobile pickup delivery, that kind of aspect. But then, on the other flip side of more traditional quick-service, absolutely, really force them into thinking how we can work better in the current market? And then that's just propelling it forward three years later. I still see pretty substantial QSR chains out there that have issues with what's on the display and that they're not integrated fully or properly with their restaurant management system. So they're doing things like putting stickers over the top of items that aren't available or wrestling with them, do I stroke something out on the screen, or do I make it disappear?  Are those things pretty elemental? Jason Ault: It is, and it is a struggle, and seems to me, the larger the organization is, the less process there is in order to ensure that screens are operated in the correct fashion. We see it all the time, whether it's a drive through which I'm personally going through or one we're trying to win the business up. You can set things in motion, and one of them starts with integration and giving some autonomy for people to fix the screen. That way, your corporation does not necessarily have to be the big brother that's managing everything.  There are roadblocks to put in place to stop those things from happening. Physical tape is a little bit harder unless we shock somebody when they touch it, but there are ways to put those stops in place. When you're dealing with the small regional to mid-size chains, is it more challenging technically because maybe they're not standardized on restaurant management systems, point of sale systems, that sort of thing? Jason Ault: It's a little challenging. One thing that we try to do is bring in partners if that is the case. Talking with point-of-sale companies, they don't necessarily go that route, but at least we can bring in some people to help in that scenario. We do like to at least have them unified on point of sale, so we're doing only some kinds of integrations, but it is a struggle for sure.  Even a chain of a hundred stores we're currently working with, they've got two or three points of sales because some people are still on legacy contracts and things like that, and we just have to work with those as they pop up. Do you have to spend a lot of time educating franchise owners that this is why you want to do this, because they really don't wanna drop $15,000 on a drive-through display? Jason Ault: Hundred percent. Pretty much every partner who a customer, whom we are aligned with, at their annual conventions talking, teaching, and explaining the value, because we just had one that was doing dual lane drive-through, and that obviously doubled the cost.  They went static rather than digital. They just didn't see the extra value of spending the 50 grand to do all of that. So, it still needs to improve the current partners that we have today.  I'm curious about the workplace side where you're seeing traction. Like how is it being used? Jason Ault: That's a great question. We do a lot of manufacturing right on the plant floor. Keeping those folks up to speed on what's going on, and then we're also doing a lot of just traditional workplace communication, between multi-sites and multi-silos within the organization just to generalize workplace communication. Still, manufacturing has had a pretty big uptick. Everything from screens down at the machine level to doing some video walls on the plant floor that everyone can see with some workplace KPIs and things like that to get some real-time information to the floor folks.  Yeah, that's always struck me as more useful in many respects than white-collar environments like offices because there are typically ways to communicate to people all the way down to the level of a manager walking out and talking to somebody, but when you're in a desk-less environment, and you've got a whole bunch of workers who maybe don't even have English as a first language, how do you reach these people? How do you tell people what's going on? How do you motivate them? All those things.  So it's encouraging to see that now, really starting to get some traction. Jason Ault: Yeah, absolutely, and we're also seeing a couple of the real estate players that are in the commercial side, taking a look at putting in digital signage as part of these packages to make it an entire scene for someone coming into renting the warehouse for the manufacturing business. So, it is just part of their infrastructure?  Jason Ault: Exactly. So it's, “Hey, this is why you should choose me over the competitor's space. We have this great infrastructure”, and then when that tenant leaves, they can wipe it all clean and have it ready for the next person. Do you have to future-proof those sorts of things? Because if there are tenants and they sign a five-year lease, and somebody else comes in, are the screens still in the right place, or maybe a five-year window is enough, and you don't worry about that?  Jason Ault: I don't know if we can have the right data for that. We've only been doing it for about two and a half years in that space. We're keeping it at a five-year warranty window for those particular devices going in once a year, doing some maintenance, doing some checks on those particular locations. But time will tell as the next two-and-a-half-year cycle comes up on what we have our hands on. I'm curious about very elemental digital signage in office environments. I've got another press release today from a CMS company that's integrated with a video streaming platform. This one's with Zoom, but I've seen at least three companies integrating with Microsoft Teams. The idea is that you can use the video conferencing collaboration displays in meeting rooms as digital signage screensavers. But it strikes me as interesting, but awfully elemental, and what does that really accomplish?  Do you fight with that at all?  Jason Ault: We don't necessarily fight with that. We have some CMS partners that can do that with the Mersive solstice pods, with the Barco click shares, and turn it into some digital signage when that is not in use for the huddle rooms or the conference rooms. But it's not been a huge adoption, at least from our book of clients. Yeah, it just hits me, and some of it, I suspect, is probably pretty good, particularly those that started with a full-throated digital signage, CMS. But some of the particular ones that the companies like, maybe Mersive, I have yet to see their stuff, but I assume it's pretty basic. I wonder if it's if the end user customers look at it and go, that's all we need. Jason Ault: In those situations, even when we're doing the ones with Barco click share and putting signage live on those devices, when it's not in use for its screen sharing capability, they have the full-fledged option to treat it as a traditional screen. But, sometimes, these are in huddle rooms with a door that may not be open. I wouldn't put, “Hey, there's a fire alarm going on”, because someone may not be in there. So, in our opinion, an odd industry because those rooms were not in use. Are they ever seen? It really depends on the client. We have a client, Washington Prime Group, here in Columbus, Ohio, that has glass conference rooms and huddle rooms, and it makes sense for them because everyone can see as you walk through, and it's above the privacy shelf. Yeah, I was curious about an announcement by Mersive. They were going into a whole bunch of WeWork co-working locations, and I thought what they were doing was interesting because it's probably quite elemental, but their whole business rationale is they've got sensors that recognize that somebody's coming into the room, and when that happens, the screen goes on and says, hey, you need to book this, or have you booked this? If not, it needs to be booked; get the hell out. It didn't say that part, but it's all about addressing operating concerns just in the same way that meeting room displayed when those started coming out about 6-7 years ago, addressed a pain point as well.  Jason Ault: Absolutely. I think tying it into a sensor could definitely alleviate that concern. It also gives you analytics on how much it actually is being used.  Jason Ault: Exactly. Let's talk a little bit about AI. It's on everybody's minds these days. Have you looked at that as something that can help support your customers and support your business, or is it something you're just kind of watching? Jason Ault: We're playing with it and watching it. It has not made it to assisting our customers at this point, that something is coming down to the pipe with Signage Live and some of their offerings, where we can do some AI-generated things. But probably the first thing that's going to help our customers is an AI driven chat bot for our support team, to take the load off of them and then see if we can drill down some response and some resolve times. So somebody comes in and if they can get a question answered just by going through the chatbot prompts and delivering a solution or at least some information to them without having to wait for 5-10 minutes for one of your support people, that helps?  Jason Ault: Exactly. So that's probably the first thing that we're playing with and, of course, just like everyone, we're playing with it from a marketing and writing perspective. But just still watching it on how we can best utilize it by putting it into production for customer sake.  Yeah, my son is heavily into AI to the point where he is doing consulting for some people on what tools to use and everything else, and I've got him doing some work for me, and I've looked at things, and the image generation is interesting, but it's still very weird and surreal in certain respects, and on the writing side, it's great for people who can't write to save their lives, but for people like me, I've been in journalism for 40 years, it's like this stuff is so elemental and it can crank something out in 30 seconds, but it's not very good. Jason Ault: It's definitely still a jumping-off point, but it's gotta have someone of skillset to reread that and fix those mistakes or add in professional tone or the writing tone of the organization.  We've talked about headless and AI, obviously. Are there hardware sides of technology that you're watching and thinking it is going to be a big deal going forward? Jason Ault: We've pretty much set in our lane from a hardware perspective. Of course, we watch Direct view of the market that's evolving there. But, we're really just watching the products of our current partners, the big three screen manufacturers, and seeing the products that they are rolling out, coming off the line with, that we can put into the marketplace, but shiny balls and things like that, not really.  I try to keep my blinders on so no one gets confused or takes us too far down a rabbit hole. So we try to just keep main hardware partners, and main software partners and run the race.  To me, the thing that's going to be interesting is when micro LED gets to a level and maybe complementary technologies or very similar technologies that you start to see, non-traditional display services, whether that's architectural glass or even countertops, that you can start to see content arrive on and be crisp and visible and everything else. Jason Ault: Yeah, I definitely think that can go a long way with micro LED and the cost being affordable at scale for sure. We are getting more architectural requests, flying things on the ceilings, and whatnot. So we're watching in that regard just to see how we can help those architect partners that we talked about earlier on in our chats, fulfill some of their needs, that they design it. When you bump into new customers or potential customers and they ask you, alright what's a good reference account? What's something I could go check out? What do you tell them that you've done? Jason Ault: Yeah. We take a look at obviously, who they are, and if they're talking about quick service, we're pointing them in the line of Biggby Coffee or an up-and-coming chain, Crimson Cup Coffee. If we're talking about retail and malls, we'll take a look at malls for Washington Prime Group, and their 120 malls across the country. When it comes to Directview LED, we've got a couple of convention centers in Columbus and Texas, and then some adjoining hotels that have some direct view installations. If they're looking at cameras, we can tell them to jump into a number of hundred different areas across the country to take a look at. So we're not short on pointing people in the right direction, that's for sure.  Okay, if people want to know more about your company, where do they find you online?  Jason Ault: They can find us online at coffmanmedia.com or on LinkedIn with our Coffman Media company page. And where's the Coffman coming from? Jason Ault: So, we weren't really creative 13 years ago. So there was a founding family in Dublin, Ohio, the Coffman family, and we decided to make it a regional name play.  Fair enough. Is the Coffman family still involved?  Jason Ault: No, they were never involved. We just decided to name it after them; they probably don't even know it. Everyone asks, is there a Mr. Coffman who started it? No, there's not. Sorry, it's a boring story.  I know, but you can blame it on him. “Coffman did that, but he's gone.”  Jason Ault: Good point! Alright, Jason, thank you. Jason Ault: Alright, thanks, Dave. I appreciate it.

The Culinary Edge is a food and beverage innovation firm that was started by Noveshen over twenty years ago and Starbird is a fast-casual chicken chain that their team created after identifying chicken was about to grow significantly. The guys talk to Noveshen about the success of marketing Starbird's limited time offers, better known as LTOs including the Cali Bacon Dutch Crunch. The Dutch crunch bread is baked in house and the chicken sandwich has made it to the menu. Novenshen says that their secret sauce is their Star Sauce. Starbird earlier this month made QSRs best brands to work for list. The company is known for developing talent and its people first culture as well as provides incentives and educational programs for their employees as well. “Good food can come and go, restaurant concepts can come and go but the people are what it's all about,” says Noveshen. He adds, “our tagline is positively delicious chicken, it's our goal everyday to create positivity, not only in the lives of the people walking in the door everyday but also the people who are working there everyday. We want to make a difference in their lives.” Noveshen asks the guys how they prioritize everything they need to do everyday during the talking back segment. Frischling says how he loves to create lists and loves what they do. Schatzberg and Frischling both feel strongly about their hospitality community and said that their village helps them do what they need to do everyday.

The Culinary Edge is a food and beverage innovation firm that was started by Noveshen over twenty years ago and Starbird is a fast-casual chicken chain that their team created after identifying chicken was about to grow significantly. The guys talk to Noveshen about the success of marketing Starbird's limited time offers, better known as LTOs including the Cali Bacon Dutch Crunch. The Dutch crunch bread is baked in house and the chicken sandwich has made it to the menu. Novenshen says that their secret sauce is their Star Sauce. Starbird earlier this month made QSRs best brands to work for list. The company is known for developing talent and its people first culture as well as provides incentives and educational programs for their employees as well. “Good food can come and go, restaurant concepts can come and go but the people are what it's all about,” says Noveshen. He adds, “our tagline is positively delicious chicken, it's our goal everyday to create positivity, not only in the lives of the people walking in the door everyday but also the people who are working there everyday. We want to make a difference in their lives.” Noveshen asks the guys how they prioritize everything they need to do everyday during the talking back segment. Frischling says how he loves to create lists and loves what they do. Schatzberg and Frischling both feel strongly about their hospitality community and said that their village helps them do what they need to do everyday.

Streamlining merchant onboarding can be a challenge, especially with quick service restaurants, which, not surprisingly, put a lot of emphasis on simplicity and speed. Here are four keys to streamlining POS installations for QSRs.. (1) Seamless merchant account set-ups (2) Free equipment, or at least no upfront investment required for new hardware (3) Deployment processes and procedures designed for smooth set-ups (4) An intuitive user experience for Admin Snack POS, the sponsor of this Merchant Sales Insight, has really streamlined the POS installation process for QSRs. If you want to see what that looks like, visit ccsalespro.com/snack.

In this episode, Barry Westrum - CMO at Taco John's, discussed the brand's current position and strategies for growth in the restaurant industry. With a focus on providing higher quality options in the quick-serve restaurant (QSR) sector, Taco John's aims to capture a niche between fast casual and traditional QSR chains. This write-up delves into the key points discussed during the interview, highlighting Taco John's efforts to bring back a nostalgic brand while catering to changing customer preferences.The Taco John's Strategy:Taco John's has historically been viewed as a fast casual concept, blurring the lines between QSR and fast casual. However, the brand now firmly identifies itself as a QSR with a commitment to delivering higher quality offerings. While lower-end QSR chains compromise on product quality and fast casual chains focus on higher-end options, Taco John's aims to fill the gap by providing a higher quality, faster alternative with the convenience of a drive-thru. This positioning is expected to drive long-term success for the brand.Embracing the Drive-Thru:The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a shift in consumer preferences, with a greater emphasis on takeout, drive-thru, and quick service. Taco John's recognized this opportunity and embraced the drive-thru aspect of its business. By enhancing their drive-thru operations, Taco John's has achieved parity with other competitors, with approximately 75% of their business now coming through the drive-thru. The brand has invested in innovative technologies to improve speed, consistency, and order accuracy, ensuring a seamless and efficient experience for customers.Balancing Quality and Value:Taco John's strategy revolves around positioning itself as a quality/value brand in the QSR market. They have gained recognition for their higher quality ingredients and are now focusing on communicating their value proposition to consumers. By offering higher quality menu items at affordable price points, Taco John's aims to cater to customers seeking quality food at a reasonable price. Their value menu, featuring hand-cut sirloin steak, crispy fried chicken, and handmade pico de gallo, has been instrumental in changing consumer perceptions of the brand's affordability and attracting repeat customers.Expansion Strategies:With over 400 locations across 23 states, Taco John's has established a strong presence in the Mexican QSR segment. To continue their growth trajectory, the brand has forged a partnership with Meritage, Wendy's largest franchisee, to open up to 50 new units over the next five years. This expansion is focused on tapping into untapped markets outside their core regions. Taco John's has found that their brand resonates with consumers beyond their traditional markets, and they aim to position itself as a compelling middle ground between Taco Bell and Chipotle, catering to consumers seeking higher quality options.Breakfast and Digital Innovation:Taco John's has recognized the potential of the breakfast daypart and has invested in offering portable, high-quality breakfast items such as their meat and potato breakfast burritos. These breakfast options have gained popularity, especially for catering and delivery, contributing to the brand's growth. In addition, Taco John's acknowledges the importance of digital platforms in today's market. Their app has become a tool for increasing customer engagement, loyalty, and frequency of visits, and they foresee the application of digital technology in enhancing the breakfast experience and driving further growth.Recommendations on how to bring back a nostalgic brand like Taco John's:1. Embrace the quick-serve restaurant (QSR) positioning: Taco John's should firmly establish itself as a higher quality, quick-serve option within the Mexican quick-serve marketplace. This will help differentiate the brand from lower-end QSRs and fast-casual competitors.2. Focus on drive-thru efficiency and convenience: Given the shift in customer preferences towards takeout and drive-thru during the COVID-19 pandemic, Taco John's should continue to prioritize and invest in drive-thru operations. Implement technologies and strategies to improve speed, consistency, and customer experience in the drive-thru, such as advanced ordering systems, suggestive selling, and streamlined preparation processes.3. Offer a value menu with higher quality ingredients: Taco John's value menu has been successful in improving consumer perceptions of value and affordability. Continue to innovate and offer higher quality ingredients at attractive price points, catering to consumers who seek both quality and value in their dining choices. This approach can help Taco John's appeal to Gen Z and alpha demographics who may be price-sensitive.4. Expand into untapped markets: Taco John's should consider expanding into second-tier and exterior markets where the brand has been less present. Utilize partnerships with experienced franchisees, like the one with Meritage (Wendy's largest franchisee), to open new units in strategic locations. Leverage the brand's nostalgic appeal to attract consumers who have a connection to the Midwest or who are looking for a quality and affordable Mexican fast-food option.5. Capitalize on breakfast offerings: Breakfast presents a growth opportunity for Taco John's. Enhance and promote breakfast menu items, particularly portable and flavorful options like breakfast burritos. Highlight their convenience, quality, and suitability for catering and delivery. Leverage digital platforms and the brand's app to drive breakfast sales by offering incentives and personalized offers to customers.6. Prioritize digital presence and app development: In line with industry trends, continue investing in online ordering, pickup, delivery, and third-party integration. Enhance the digital experience for customers through a user-friendly app, loyalty programs, and targeted promotions. Leverage the app to increase customer frequency, average spending, and overall engagement with the brand.These recommendations aim to position Taco John's as a nostalgic brand that combines quality, value, convenience, and digital innovation to cater to evolving consumer preferences and stand out in the competitive Mexican fast-food market.The Future of Taco John'sTaco John's is repositioning itself as a higher quality, value-driven QSR brand, leveraging its strengths in the drive-thru market and emphasizing their commitment to providing affordable, quality menu options. With strategic partnerships, expansion plans, a focus on breakfast, and innovative digital initiatives, Taco John's aims to attract customers seeking a nostalgic brand experience with a modern twist. By combining convenience, flavor, and a touch of nostalgia, Taco John's strives to capture the hearts and taste buds of both loyal fans and new customers in the competitive Mexican fast-food market.

Stefan Hertzberg is the SVP of Growth at ItsaCheckmate, an integrator between POS systems and online ordering channels for QSRs like Wendy's, Five Guys, and Jet's Pizza. In this episode, we'll talk about the recent M&A activity in the fragmented restaurant tech space, how operators can own their customer data on third-party delivery platforms, and the challenges facing many startups in the space. Watch on YouTube Join the HNGRY Newsletter

In this episode of "Small Steps to Big Business", we sit down with Porus Arora, an entrepreneur, foodie, and traveller who has made a name for himself in the food industry. Porus is the Chairman and Founder of Enoki and Dream Oven Kitchens, which are a blend of delivery, QSRs, and restaurant chains bringing some of the best Asian, Italian, and Indian food to the market. Hosted by Priya Sachdeva, this episode explores Porus's journey of building profitable food businesses from scratch. Porus shares his insights on how he started small and grew his businesses, the challenges he faced along the way, and the importance of persistence, hard work, and innovation. Porus also discusses his passion for travel and how it has influenced his business decisions. He shares his experiences of exploring different cultures, cuisines, and business models around the world, and how it has helped him to stay ahead of the competition and offer unique experiences to his customers. This podcast is a must-listen for aspiring entrepreneurs who are looking for inspiration and practical tips to start and grow their businesses. So, sit back, relax, and join us for an insightful conversation with Porus Arora on the art of building profitable food businesses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yes. You need sales to make money. But not all sales are profitable. It is about chasing the right sales. Sales that create a profit. Way too many people only chase sales without ensuring those sales will be profitable. It is a huge mistake that can crush your business.   _______________________________

It is natural to be attracted towards a business that looks to be successful. You want to learn what that business owner is doing so you can copy or implements their best practices. But beware, sometimes a mentor might look successful but they are not as profitable as you think. Learn from them, but look how to leverage your profits at the same time. _______________________________

By not accounting for expenses in your pricing, you risk not having a business profit. For every sale you do, a certain percentage needs to be set aside to cover your expenses. It is important that you are reviewing those expenses on a regular basis to keep that percentage at a minimum. _______________________________

Does the thought of raising your prices make you want to be sick? Feel you just can't raise your prices? You might be surprised to learn that you could be costing yourself thousands of dollars of profit each year due to making an emotional decision on your prices vs what the market will actually pay. _______________________________

Are you working a full-time job and building your business on the side? Have you found that your sales are at a standstill because you can't grow while you have this full-time job? Are you wondering what it is that you need to do at this point in order to be able to grow this business and make that leap to full-time entrepreneur? _______________________________

Is your business in a rut? Can't seem to grow your sales or profits? Odds are it might be due to one of these four reasons. Or probably a combination. If you want to get unstuck, rate how you are doing and see where the log jam might be happening in your small business.   _______________________________

Even when small business owners know they need to read their Profit & Loss Statements on a regular basis, they still don't. Why is that? Isn't the goal of your small business to earn more profits? Why wouldn't you look at your #1 tool to help you?   _______________________________

Each year opens up the opportunity to start fresh and leave any bad business habits in the past. The key is staying motivated throughout the same year vs falling into old habits of the year prior. Here is what I'll be doing… How about you? _______________________________

One mistake I see all the time with small business owners is, they think if they work harder, they will make more money. But that isn't always the case. You just burn out and wake up to the reality that all these hours aren't providing the profits you thought you were going to see. _______________________________