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.
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/654717
of having this food be approachable and accessible to a much broader swath of the community is why it's taken us five years to get to the point where we are now. Dig Inn has created a supply network from relationships with farmers. All of your meat and vegetables are stored and distributed to your outlets from your 12,000-square-foot refrigerated storage facility in Hunts Point, New York. How does controlling supply affect your ability to scale up? Our farming relationships enable us to source food directly, cutting out layers of cost in the supply chain and helping us keep costs down while supporting the local farming community. As we're opening our restaurant in Boston, we already have relationships with farmers in Massachusetts and Maine, and dairy relationships in Vermont and New Hampshire. We're adding relationships with another 15 or so partners that are built off a platform of 25 to 30 partners, giving us a head start. We're investing a lot of attention in technology. The first wave was on the consumer end—apps, being able to order on tablets—but the second wave is going to be on the back end. Technology is going to become critical. Fast-casual dining is the fastest-growing segment in the restaurant industry. What do you see for this segment in the next two to five years, and how does Dig Inn fit into this future? There is huge opportunity in this segment. A lot of brands of yes- teryear will have to make some changes, or rethink their businesses. People care about whether brands have actual purpose and meaning. If you don't stand for something, you're going to struggle. As this segment gets deeper, and more enter, there will be greater nuances in how we delineate among these restaurants. It's going to be less about developing a model and then duplicating it cookie-cutter or one-size-fits-all, than about expressing our mission with f lexibility. We will exercise some leeway in menu development, service model, in how a particular area will be receptive to what we're doing. Our new locations in the Upper West Side and Upper East Side will have more of a neighborhood-restaurant feel. We're looking at tweaking certain aspects of the dining experience like water service and a strong beer and wine program. We're designing the space to have more of a dining-in feel. As we continue to grow and add new restaurants they will be guided by our mission, culture, and values, and a focus on serving communities in the way they need to be served. Over a two-week period, I visited every restaurant and spent about 20 minutes talking to the crews pre-shift, talking about what we're trying to accomplish and how important it is, how things like the sales record is validation for the work we're doing. I talked about how their respective roles contributed to that achievement. I had a lot of crew members come up to me and thank me, when I had just been thanking them, saying I've worked for a number of food com- panies and I've never had the founder visit. That was rewarding. The ability to do that, to put a face to a name and to talk to the people who work in your restaurant and interact with your customers— that stuff moves the needle. We are deliberately allocating more time and bandwidth to that kind of thing, so we can keep intact the special sauce we have going. Many food producers or stakeholders have made a commitment to serving only local or organic food a central part of their identities. Why hasn't Dig Inn? People ask, "Are you 100-percent local, 100-percent organic, 100-percent anything?" The answer is always no. For us, we aren't thinking just about organic—we're looking holistically at the whole picture when it comes to sourcing. This means our team works on creating direct relationships with farmers who meet our mindful sourcing standards—quality, transparency, and sustainability— which helps us lower the cost from farm to counter. It's critical we own the relationships with our producers directly. We want to understand how our food is grown and to be a part of the conversa- tion each season to ensure that our standards are being met. Food safety has always been nonnegotiable for us. It's our goal at Dig Inn to provide high-quality, delicious food at affordable prices, and change our current food system for the better. Safe food requires transparency and sustainability from farm, to counter, to plate. Integrity is key to our model, which equates to freshly prepared and mindfully sourced ingredients: our meats are hormone- and antibiot- ic-free, our tofu is organic, and our salmon is wild-caught. Our food philosophy involves managing both sides of the equa- tion. The depths to which we go to serve food that is responsibly raised, responsibly sourced, and balancing this against our mission Robyn Pforr Ryan is an Albany, New York-based journalist and speechwriter with a background in newspapers and law. " … To put a face to a name and to talk to the people who work in your restaurant and interact with your customers— that stuf moves the needle." SPRING 2016 99