From quick-service to fine dining, restaurants are turning to retail to get a sense of how to engage with consumers’ quick-changing habits and expectations. Take, for instance, the pop-up. The New York Times recently reported on the creation of ADMO, a 100-day pop-up restaurant spearheaded by Alain Ducasse, Albert Adrià and Romain Meder, advertising views of the Eiffel Tower. The high-profile, fine-dining pop-up has the opportunity to leverage the sense of exclusivity and scarcity created by the limited timeframe to drive sales, capitalizing on consumers’ fear of missing out.
Pop-up retail first began to take hold in the early ‘00s, but the restaurant industry didn’t join in until years later, once the concept was already familiar to many consumers. Now, pop-up restaurants can be found in most major cities, allowing restaurateurs to benefit from instant buzz around concepts that may not have the staying power to support a permanent restaurant.
The Context
While the restaurant industry has a reputation of being slow to digitize, retail tends to be at the leading edge of innovation. Many of the tools that made it possible for restaurants to survive the pandemic — such as mobile order-ahead, delivery marketplaces, and curbside pickup — came from retail. Even now, with the return of consumer mobility, restaurants continue to benefit from digital integrations popularized by retailers, such as QR-code-enabled experiences and mobile wallet payments.
What Insiders Are Saying
One place where restaurants continue to trail behind retailers is in displaying their inventory on digital platforms.
“[With] most things we buy as consumers … you always have all of this decision criteria at your fingertips,” Brendan Sweeney, CEO and co-founder of Popmenu, told PYMNTS in an interview. “I mean, how much is on one page in Amazon? You’ve got all the photos, all the reviews, all the specs, all the ratings, all the social validation … then there’s the opposite of that for restaurants.”
Read more: Restaurants Lag Behind Retailers in Showcasing Digital Inventory
Ken Chong, co-founder and CEO at restaurant solutions provider All Day Kitchens and former product manager at Uber, predicted to PYMNTS that within the next decade, virtual kitchens, like eTailers, will increasingly become the norm.
“I think a ton of innovation has to happen in this space in order for it to grow for the next five to 10 years,” said Chong. “I think it’s going to be a long transition, because that’s what we saw in retail — with eCommerce, we’re still seeing innovations — and so we are at probably the earliest beginnings for the food and beverage industry to transition to this sort of model.”
Related news: All Day Kitchens: Recovering Restaurants Can ‘Capture the Learnings’ of Digital Shift
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