Specialty Food Magazine

Summer 2020

Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.

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SUMMER 2020 31 C M Y CM MY CY CMY K LAP_SF Ad_05-2020_PRINT.pdf 1 4/21/20 9:00 AM delivery, adding grocery items to their offerings, and creating make-at-home meal kits. "Restaurants across the U.S. are modifying their menu offerings to ensure those specific items hold up well to sitting in a box on their way out to customers," says Bianca Esmond, senior manager of brand marketing at SevenRooms, which supplies restaurants with digital operations and marketing services and recently added a delivery ordering tool. "They are also simplifying their menus so they're executing on fewer items. This helps streamline the kitchen, allowing them to still stay open for delivery, while lowering overhead of ingredient costs." SevenRooms launched its Direct Delivery platform in mid-March as a free service for restaurant operators for 90 days. One of the company's clients, Marea, a Michelin-starred Italian restaurant in New York City, had never offered delivery before the crisis, but has pivoted to off-premises dining using the SevenRooms delivery platform. The restaurant was delivering "upwards of 24 orders a day, averaging $132 per order" through the service, Esmond says. fewer tables spaced further apart to accommodate social distancing among other changes. Operators will also be reluctant to incur the costs of bringing their restaurants back up to previous staffing levels, Allen says. "They'll be a bit hesitant, wanting to see several months of recovery themselves before they start to hire back to the levels that they were," he says. Strong, well-financed restaurant companies are likely to be able to weather the crisis better than weaker operators, Aaron notes, which opens the door for a lot of merger-and-acquisition activity involving distressed assets. "There will be trillions of dollars thrown at this, but it still won't be enough to save all the businesses that will end up getting into the hands of stronger ones that will consolidate the industry," he says. Switching to Off-Premises Dining In the meantime, operators that have chosen to remain open have turned to a range of different strategies to keep some revenues coming in, including revamping menus for takeout and

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