The restaurant industry is expanding at a strong pace again, but there's a difference to the growth and the strategies driving it. Chains are creating opportunities by peering further into the future and anticipating the trends in consumer preferences, restaurant recruitment, financing, politics and restaurant operations. They're hungering for ideas, innovation and insight.
Adapting to shifts in the marketplace is tough enough for the operator of a single restaurant. Imagine the challenge it poses for Indra Nooyi, chairman and CEO of Pepsico Inc., a diversified consumer-goods company with operations in almost every nook and cranny of the planet.
Restaurateurs who view the business as a battlefield might’ve uttered an “amen” at the end of the presentation from retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who wound up this year’s conference with an analysis of leadership during wartime.
It’s been done with hamburgers, with cocktails, with Mexican QSR. Take a familiar concept, one with a degree of built-in familiarity and consumer acceptance, and differentiate it—around the ingredients, the menu, the presentation, the service model. Make it unique and craveable, make it stand out from the competition; just don’t make it so strange that customers don’t know what to make of it.