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Restaurants Doing Their Best to Make Delivery Work
The popularity of takeout and delivery grew incredibly fast across the restaurant industry during the coronavirus pandemic. The shutdown of dining rooms at brands like Buffalo Wild Wings® in the spring of 2020 meant that those services were the only business being done at the restaurants.
Since early this year, as vaccinations took hold and the public health threat from the pandemic receded, restrictions on capacity for dine-in service at restaurants have been rolling back in virtually every part of the nation. However, while dine-in service is ramping up, off-premise sales seem to be retaining a strong share of hospitality’s dining mix.
Across all restaurant industry segments, according to a report from the National Restaurant Association cited by QSR Magazine in February, off-premise sales make a larger proportion of the sales mix now than before the pandemic for more than 60% of operators. For the fast-casual and casual dining segments, the numbers are 70% and 74% respectively.
Forty-four percent of operators in both the fast-casual and casual dining segments added delivery services since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak. A third of those segments added third-party delivery, and it looks like those services are going to be needed permanently: 53% of adults say purchasing takeout or delivery food is essential to the way they live, according to QSR Magazine reporting, and the percentages are higher among members of younger generations – Generations X and Z and Millennials – who use third-party services far more than their older counterparts. Overall, a December National Restaurant Association survey found that 70% of adults had ordered delivery from a restaurant and 40% used a third-party delivery service to do it.
Those numbers agree with what some BWW® managers are seeing at ground level. “Our delivery and takeout orders have remained consistently at a high percentage rate [of overall sales], in between 42 and 46% the last few months,” said O’Neil Washington, a general manager for Four M Franchising LLC’s Valley Stream, New York, location. Four M Franchising operates 11 BWW restaurants total.
“Our delivery/takeout [percentage of sales] has been the same, which is a wonderful thing to see as we continue to open more dining inside,” added Jackie Torsiello, director of training and marketing for Antsul Group LLC. Antsul Group has seven Buffalo Wild Wings locations.
Meeting the demand for off-premise dining required restaurants to change their focus quickly in 2020. It was difficult, but the transition was direct – a complete shift away from on-premise to off-premise service models. In 2021, the challenge has been to add dine-in back to the mix without hurting the growth in the platforms that carried the day at the height of the pandemic shutdowns.
“We have seen a huge increase in our takeout and delivery sales and have managed to shift our business into a more friendly off-premise model,” Torsiello said. For Antsul Group, that has included working with third-party delivery platforms such as DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub, partnerships that have the potential to boost restaurant exposure to new customers but that have also been fraught with challenges. The troubles restaurants have had with the major third-party delivery services are well chronicled, with operators often unhappy with delivery fees and poor performance getting food to customers.
The difficulties led the National Restaurant Association to work with members and the third-party services to establish a set of guidelines to try to improve relations. The guidelines, established late last year, include seven principles, including: • Restaurants have a right to know and determine when and if their food is delivered. • Customers should expect the same degree of food safety from delivery as they do when dining in a restaurant.
– Jackie Torsiello,
Antsul Group LLC director of training and marketing
Continued on page 20
• Restaurants should be able to offer alcohol to customers through third-party delivery in a safe and legal manner. • Restaurants deserve transparency on fees (including commissions, delivery fees and promotional fees) charged by third-party companies. • Third-party food delivery contracts need contractual transparency, and issues surrounding fees, costs, terms, policies and marketing practices involving the restaurant or its likeness, and insurance/indemnity should be clear. • Sales tax collection responsibility must be clear in terms of which party is collecting and remitting the specific sales tax to the appropriate authority. • As a best practice, third-party delivery companies should offer restaurants access to anonymized information regarding orders from the restaurant that originate on third-party platforms.
Whether those principles are improving third-party delivery service remains to be seen. But the Buffalo Wild Wings franchise companies are working hard to overcome the unique challenges they are experiencing.
“In the beginning, it was interesting to navigate the usage of all our tablets. All units have a working tablet for orders for each of these third-party services and during high volume times, it could get chaotic, between the tablets, online orders, walk-in guests and call-in orders,” Torsiello said. “We have learned and trained how to properly manage this with proper staffing and an all-hands-on-deck approach. We are looking forward to the ItsaCheckmate to be incorporated in our system.”
ItsaCheckmate is a software system tested in some Buffalo Wild Wings restaurants early in the year. It offers third-party delivery platform integration through a single dashboard that automatically pulls orders from those platforms directly into the restaurant’s POS system, eliminating the need for team members to enter them. It also allows operators to notify the delivery services of important menu updates at once rather than logging into all of them separately. With the increased and sustained emphasis on off-premise, it’s an important timesaver that both streamlines operations and should boost the customer experience.
JK&T Wings, with 89 BWW restaurants across seven states, is another franchise company that has experienced growth in delivery and takeout sales. Many of its restaurants are in Michigan, which lagged other areas of the country in allowing restaurant dining rooms to open and increase capacity. That has allowed those locations to maintain a focus on off-premise, and the company works with all the major third-party delivery platforms.
“We have done an incredible job transitioning focus to all off-premise (third-party delivery, online ordering, direct delivery and takeout) orders,” said Dana Herman, a district manager. “Most locations have put a more senior manager in charge of that department to handle sales. You must have a manager inside the four walls who owns it in its entirety.”
Even with that focus, there can be problems with third-party services. “Just like the restaurant industry, the third-party delivery companies are short-staffed as well, causing issues with orders being delivered or even picked up,” Herman noted.
Four M Franchising also works with the major third-party delivery players, and like many others, has seen its share of difficulties. “The challenges we face on a day-to-day basis are that food is either too cold or orders are missing parts of the delivery, long wait times for deliveries and some not-so-friendly delivery drivers. We continue to do our diligence by executing at a high level and reaching out to our guests who give feedback,” Washington said.
In some cases, the problems are so bad that third-party delivery has been abandoned. “My stores don’t do delivery,” said Joshua Theiss of BWW Southern Management. “We had too many bad experiences when we initially rolled out delivery and ceased doing it. The third-party delivery services couldn’t get the food to customers in a timely manner, and we were fielding entirely too many guest complaints for something we couldn’t control.”
For those that elect to continue working with third-party delivery companies, industry observers suggest a few best practices for eliminating problems and providing the best customer service possible. According to Paul Tiedt, senior vice president, research for platform technology and professional services firm SMG: • Train teams to ensure there is a clear and precise order communication between the third-party app and the kitchen. • Assign a point person to check orders once filled. • Seal the bag in a clean, well-packed, closed container and stick the receipt to it after it’s checked. • Have a strategy to manage the restaurant’s reputation online and address complaints that may arise. Research shows consumers often blame the restaurant for a problem caused by the delivery service.
Statistics suggest that third-party delivery, as part of the larger trend toward off-premise restaurant food sales, is here to stay, and that delivery, in particular, is a service that consumers will expect and depend upon going forward. It will be up to operators to embrace the trend and make the best of it.
“I am excited to see how the company transitions into a more delivery-centric focus, including car-side service,” Torsiello said. “BWW works hard with great marketing techniques and continues to drive future business with better options for delivery and to-go.” S
– Dana Herman, district manager
Issue 2
