With everything we have witnessed over the past year, restaurants took one of the hardest hits from the pandemic. From closing down locations for months, to limited capacities and lost revenues, you have had a tough year and it is not over yet. With fast casual chains filling every corner in the U.S. there is now an oversaturation in the market that is making it difficult to grow and increase unit sales.
A recent study found that appealing food choices only accounts for 45% of the reason customers return to a fast casual restaurant. It is not enough to just have tasty food, you need to be able to present it in the right way that highlights the food. All while creating an experience for your customers. This same study found that 48% of people plan to order online via a website or app in the future.
Online ordering and delivery adoption was already increasing before the pandemic, but now to-go dining has tripled and in some cases quadrupled according to a recent study from Morgan Stanley. This is a positive for the industry because now you can reach your customers from anywhere and retain more customer information than before.
Having appealing, responsive menus is not enough. Drive-thrus are now the future of fast casual. McDonalds second quarter sales for 2020 were 90% made through the drive thru. Many other chains such as Chipotle, Shake Shack and Pizza Hut are adding drive-thrus to their stores. Wendy’s is diving all in and moving to drive thru only and eliminating the traditional in-person ordering, while Taco Bell is splitting their drive thru, having lanes for both traditional ordering and mobile ordering.
Here at Reality Interactive we are pros at responsive menu templates that can highlight your food across all your menu boards, websites and apps. Our content management platform, bitShuttle® allows for instantaneous content updates to your menus across all your channels. You can even customize the content and day-parting based on each individual store location. Simply put our solutions allow your customer to order their food and take delivery of their order from wherever the feel the most comfortable
We can all agree that the world is always shifting and if you don’t keep up with the latest changes and adoptions you will be left behind. So, don’t wait too long on implementing responsive menu templates, drive thrus, online ordering and delivery to drive your sales forward. Now is the time to implement technology and solutions from Reality and alleviate the risk of your customers moving on to a different restaurant that better meets their needs. As we all know, 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers.
