Continued: New approach to efficiency
Tapping vendors to simplify back-of-house work seems to have picked up, with companies from Wendy’s to Honeygrow also taking this route. Wendy’s recently shifted its salad prep tasks from in-store to suppliers, for instance, while Honeygrow switched from fresh to canned pineapple. “We sell a lot of pineapples in our stir fry, so we were buying pineapples and hacking them and it’s labor intensive, it’s inconsistent, the yield is variable based on how well you know how to cut a pineapple,” Honeygrow founder and CEO Justin Rosenberg said during the April edition of Nation’s Restaurant News’ Emerging Restaurateur Live Learning Series. “Our GM asked why we were doing this. We tested canned pineapple and everyone preferred it. We adopted canned and reduced costs by $320,000 annually. It was a really simple thing we could do to be more efficient.” Of course, all of these efforts yield more labor efficiency. Sometimes, however, that efficiency comes from the implementation of the right technology, like a kitchen display system or labor scheduling app. For Ruth’s Chris, such labor efficiency came from its recent development of a proprietary demand forecasting platform, which executives say has resulted in a 10% improvement in hours per entrée. From the kitchen layout to SKUs to the back- of-house simplification and labor optimization, restaurant companies are itemizing every facet of their businesses to achieve that goal of efficiency. And yes, that goal has become more critical than ever as operators continue to grapple with labor shortages and inflation while essentially balancing two businesses: on-site and off-premises.
better experience for team members while finding the right give and take of efficiency?” Caroline Skinner, COO at Tupelo Honey, also believes the idea of efficiency has “absolutely” changed because of the pandemic and its impact on restaurant staffing. “We’ve become smarter because of a lot of the things we learned about through the pandemic — our buildings, kitchens, products, how we get things off the line faster and into more channels and reduce ticket times,” she said. Skinner adds that becoming wiser has been a necessity as restaurants juggle more channels and traffic with less staff. “We got smarter as an industry because we had to. There was an evolution of how this industry has shifted its orientation toward the employee,” Skinner said. “Efficiency has to do with operators getting smarter by leveraging tech and tools to expand the reach of what we can do, but also recognizing we can’t continue to treat employees the way we have for so long.” In other words, the idea of efficiency has changed because there are more balls in the air and less people to juggle them. But it has also changed because it’s simply more expensive to run a business now. Inflation remains high, interest rates have ticked up, wages have reached a point of no return. Corners may be trimmed, but it is critical that consumers’ and, now more than ever, employees’ experiences aren’t compromised in the endeavor. “Industrywide, margins are being squeezed because of food costs and the availability of labor. At the same time, good brands are always looking for ways to improve the guest or team member experience,” Kern said. “So, the conversations about efficiency are happening because people want to protect these experiences while making business-smart decisions.” Improving guest and team member experiences is the north star of Brinker’s efficiency efforts. In fact, Hochman said many of the ideas the company is executing, including the elimination of shrimp portioning, have come from team members. That said, with all these initiatives underway, Hochman notes it’s important to not cut so much as to compromise the brand’s culture.
How the idea of efficiency has evolved
With these challenges in mind, the definition of efficiency has effectively changed since the onset of the pandemic in 2020. For Portillo’s, that means a different approach to KPI measurement. “In this environment, it’s hard to judge efficiency based on the traditional metric of sales per labor hour. It often doesn’t give you an accurate measure, so brands have had to think about different ways to express productivity,” Kern said. “The definition of efficiency has expanded, in part because guests are more convenience-oriented than ever before. How do you make guests who have deliberately chosen to order ahead, skip a line, etc., feel rewarded for this choice? From the employer perspective, how do you create a
“Building and maintaining our culture is sacred,” he said. “And we will continue to invest in it.”
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