Conventional wisdom suggests the most successful way of operating a foodservice business is to have as many touchpoints with the customer as possible. Brands need to be able to serve their products down every route possible – encompassing dine-in, apps, kiosks, delivery, click-and-collect and drive-thrus – and the latest channel is smart vending machines.

 

But is it really sensible, or even possible, for any business beyond the mega-brands to operate across such a diversity of channels? McDonald’s has quoted the fact it today sells to its customers through more than ten channels versus only one not that long ago. Dine-in was the only game in town, and wasn’t life so much easier for operators back then in the good old days?

 

Customers clearly love the convenience and accessibility that multi-channel models provide, but it can be a nightmare for businesses that have to stitch all these disparate parts together. Integrating technologies together is often an exercise in pulling hair out. What if the widespread aspirations of being a jack-of-all-trades brand were simply dropped and there was instead a focus on being the master of one or two of the channels.

 

This has been the recent thinking of Mark Murphy, founder of Burgerism, who has come to question whether his attempts to satisfy demand down multiple channels has simply complicated things too much for foodservice businesses like his. Whereas he had a vision of kiosks, tills, a few seats and maybe adding a drive-thru as the ideal model for Burgerism, there has been a change of heart. 

 

Delivery, takeaway and click-and-collect have traditionally been the heart of the business, with one site offering dine-in too, but the next store will run with no tills or kiosks. It’s very much a refined, stripped back model involving only order ahead for collection on-site and home delivery. The idea is that it will strip out costs and complexity. There will be no kiosks, no counter tops and no toilets, and the sites will be on secondary locations as footfall is largely irrelevant. 

 

The model had already been taken some way down this route with the most recent Burgerism opening in Gatley, Greater Manchester, which sits on a suburban high street and brings in £40,000 per week (with an average spend of £23) on a rather modest rent of £900 per month. The unit was previously an Indian takeaway doing £3,000 per week. Murphy likes to point out that his metrics compare favourably with those of Apple, with revenues per square foot of $4,100 versus $4,550 for the tech company.  

 

The learnings from this latest site have informed his opinion of ditching the multi-channel strategy as he found only 3% of sales went through the kiosk and 20% via collection, whereas the bulk of revenue came through the delivery route. Although his new approach looks very much pared back, he has, in fact, rowed back on an earlier belief that dark kitchens could be the ultimate asset-lite uncomplicated model for the future, having concluded that Deliveroo Editions has not delivered a convincing argument for such an approach.

 

The simplicity of channels can also be complemented with the same thinking applied to product offerings. It is well documented that Starbucks has brought great complexity upon itself through its drinks list exploding to an unbelievable 380 billion possible combinations, and likewise, Subway is experiencing execution issues in its outlets as employees grapple with its 34 million sandwich varieties. At Burgerism, the product offering is a pared back proposition. It is not quite at the famed In-N-Out Burger levels in the US, where it’s basically burger and fries, but it predominantly revolves around a core five items. This sits comfortably with the business’ increasingly focused channel vision.

 

Whether Murphy’s view of the future will be embraced by other operators remains to be seen, but there is clearly some sense in nailing the customer experience across specific touchpoints as opposed to providing an average level of execution over an array of channels. Maybe it is time for companies to break with convention and consider rationalising their expanding multi-channel models.

When I eat out, it’s usually in a pub. One reason is the beer. The beer and the informality, the feeling that eating is incidental to your main purpose – being in a pub. But mostly, it’s the beer. It’s still difficult to find a decent range of beer in a restaurant. Something you want to drink rather than something that’s just to wash down the solids. When you don’t drink wine, that’s a problem.

 

I can’t dismiss a dazzling exception. Travelling to northern cities in recent months, I’ve been able to eat at Bundobust. It’s certainly casual dining, not a pub, serving wonderful Indian food, but crucially, there’s an amazing range of beer. It has its own brewery, you see, making craft beer in all the styles. This is a restaurant I can feel at home in. But mostly, it has to be the pub. It’s interesting the way pub food has evolved and is still evolving. Indeed, it feels like it’s at an uncertain point at the moment, not quite sure where it’s headed.

 

There used to be a thing called “pub grub”, a bluntly unpretentious term that set a low bar. It was functional food really, with its roots in community pubs that, going back into the first half of the 20th century, saw feeding people cheaply and nourishingly as part of their social role. Dining out wasn’t a special occasion, it was about staying alive.

 

During the pandemic, many local pubs realised they had to take on this role once more, making sure their community was well fed, and in these times of austerity, some continue to offer cheap mass catering for those who need it. This is what exactly what happens in Ken Loach’s film The Old Oak, which I reviewed here last year.

 

Pub food that tries to make a profit rather than supporting the community, though, seems to be in something of a quandary. For most, competing with restaurant food is no longer an option. The costs are too high, the staff and the skills too scarce. Simple, wholesome dishes that aren’t so aspirational remain an attractive possibility, but fewer pubs are attempting this. Again, there are compelling exceptions. 

 

The Sycamore Inn springs to mind. It’s a pubco tenancy in a residential part of Matlock, Derbyshire. I like to go there to eat when I’m up that way because it’s a bit of throwback, with its rustic “home-cooked” dishes. I usually go for the well-balanced chilli and a pint of Bass. It’s nothing fancy but it tastes good, and it still seems a treat. 

 

There’s less of that around, though, and even the Sycamore only serves food three nights a week. It reflects a big shift in pub-going behaviour. Not so long ago, part of the catering calculation was how you might encourage customers to eat at your pub more than once a week. You had to create a menu with enough diverse options to tempt them back for something different on a second or third day. But people go out less frequently, now, so that approach may not fit. Operators are increasingly concluding that their food offer needs a distinct focus to stand out and get diners in for just that type of food, typically something with an ethnic twist.

This trend is, I suspect, more pronounced in cities where there’s a lot of competition with casual dining as well as among pubs. The demographics will be more favourable too, with a younger population open to experiment. And it’s made easier to achieve with a turn to franchised kitchens which, if you get it right, not only take away a lot of the day-to-day worry but tend to specialise in trendy and distinctive street food-style menus that catch the imagination.

These can be amazing. My worry is, though, that it can all get a little too specialist. I was in a pub last week, needing to eat, and the menu was virtually all fried chicken in various guises. I didn’t fancy chicken, so I finished up with a serving of fries (in a basket, would you believe – pub grub lives!) Perhaps more thought needs to go into making sure there are enough different options on a specialist menu. Otherwise, you might be limiting your audience too drastically, especially when there’s a large group looking to eat. 

That brings me to another positive example. At the beginning of March, I was in Bristol for the Drinking Studies Network conference. On the final evening, about 40 of us went for a meal at a place called Canteen. I’m not sure it was a pub exactly – more a hybrid venue with live music. Anyway, it served us up a vegan feast, a wide variety of imaginative plant-based dishes zinging with different flavours. If vegan qualifies as a specialist menu, this did the job brilliantly. Oh, and the beer was good, too.

The franchising industry in the UK has grown exponentially over the last decade and continues to expand as more and more people take the opportunity to own their own business. The sector, which takes in sectors from fast food to healthcare, contributes more than £17bn to the economy. The UK is home to more than 900 franchise systems, with a total of 48,000 franchise outlets employing more than 700,000 people.

Suffice to say that the hospitality sector is making sure it plays a full part in helping continue to build the momentum the franchise industry is seeing. Many of these feature in The Propel Premium Club Multi-Site Database, which has now grown to include 3,061 companies, which operate 71,344 sites. An additional 14 companies, which operate 130 sites between them, were added during February 2024. 

 

One example of a popular concept is Bournemouth better chicken business Chicken & Blues, which has recently launched a franchise waiting list after fielding “hundreds of enquiries” over the last few years from potential partners across the UK. The quick-serve concept, which opened its third location in 2023, in Christchurch, alongside a food truck, has posted like-for-like site level revenue growth every year for the last ten years. Co-founder Joshua Simons said: “It’s been a positive start to 2024. We’ve been working closely with agents over the last six months to formalise the Chicken & Blues system as a franchise opportunity and are now opening up a centralised waiting list for interested parties.” 

 

Another is Marlowe’s, a premium takeaway burger concept founded in 2017 by Sean Marlowe. It currently operates sites in Sevenoaks, Tunbridge Wells, Bromley, Worthing and Clapham. In January, Carl Traill, who stepped down from leading Miss Millie’s Fried Chicken last November, joined Marlowe’s as its new managing director, with a stated aim of taking the firm into a franchise business. He said: “The plan now is to continue expansion through the franchise model. We are hoping to have our first franchise partner in the next six months. We are looking for single site and multi-site franchisees, initially in England. We’re targeting ten new openings in 2024. The model has a low-cost entry point, with affordable capex and strong sales and margin opportunities.”

 

Meanwhile, Burger Drop, founded in 2020 by Hasan Hamid and Amer Qayyum, offering wings and shakes as well as burgers, currently has two branches in its home city Newcastle and is set to launch its first franchise store in the second quarter of 2024. It will be one of five new sites it aims to open this year as it expands to other parts of the UK. Hamid, through the vehicle of HQ Group, is a director of This Is Doner (opening spring 2024), Bubbl Tea Bar (one branch) and GYB – Grow Your Business (social media marketing agency).

 

Also early in its franchise journey is Lebanese street food concept Mayyil, which has secured its first domestic and international franchise partners. It is aiming to open both sites this year, ahead of a planned expansion to 20 UK sites in the next five years. Mayyil was founded in 2022 by Ayman Assi as a sister concept to Beit El Zaytoun, the Lebanese restaurant in Park Royal, west London, which opened in 2016. Having launched Mayyil near Harrods in Knightsbridge in September 2022, a second site opened in Notting Hill in January. A further company-owned site will open next year, but before that, Mayyil is aiming to launch and support franchise units in both London and the UAE before the end of the year.

 

Then there are those who are further down the franchise path, who are looking to enter new territories and take on new brands. Freshly Baked is the UK master franchisee for US pretzel brand Auntie Anne’s and has been since 2008. Freshly Baked signed a contract extension with Auntie Anne’s in November 2023. In January 2024, Freshly Baked announced a deal with Dutch better burger brand Fat Phill’s to secure its entry into the UK market, with plans for 100 sites over the next ten years.

 

Earlier this month, Canadian quick service restaurant brand Mary  Brown’s  Chicken, known as MB Chicken internationally, told Propel it is aiming to have its first UK mainland site open by the summer, with plans to have a ten-strong estate by the end of 2024. In the long term, the business also sees “no reason why it can’t be bigger here than in Canada,” where it currently has approximately 250 restaurants, with the potential to reach more than 500 locations. Founded in 1969, Mary Brown’s Chicken opened its first UK site – also its overseas debut – last month with the launch of a store in Lisburn Leisure Park in Northern Ireland. “We’re also working with a multi-unit partner that has 30 units with other brands to open our sites in London and the south,” Dylan Powell, MB Chicken’s vice-president of international development, told Propel.

While more traditional franchise brands are coming under pressure – Papa John’s has recently announced some store closures – it has not put off new entrants to a market that is evolving at pace. 

As a bit of a labour management nut, I often find myself frustrated by the people approach of many operators across our industry, bemoaning the fact that we are amateurs when we should be professionals. 

 

I worry that the constant increases to minimum wage will cripple our industry and force prices up to levels that make going out unrealistic for customers. I also worry that staff cuts to save money will, in the end, destroy service and have the opposite impact. 

 

So, you can imagine my joy recently when I was able to spend time in a restaurant that runs operations in the top 1%. Instinctively, it was filling quieter points in the shift with non-sales-driven tasks, which we refer to as “slack” tasks.

 

Kitchen prep was being done in the afternoon, and the staff already knew not to have a pot wash during these troughs in service. And the restaurant had minimised management tasks, doing so all in its stride. The restaurant’s labour percentage would be the envy of the rest of the industry, including me!

 

I really cannot tell you how impressed I was. When I started S4labour, I designed a postcard to send to people that said, “earn yourself a holiday”. I was trying to get people to realise that by managing staff cost well, it really was possible to earn enough to take an extra holiday. This was certainly true here. I was reminded that it can be done – excellence can be achieved. It just depends on how much effort and energy you want to put into getting there.

 

Of course, we are all going to have to put more energy in over the next year, that is no secret. In an ideal world, we want to grow profit and cut costs as much as we can without compromising our service or overstretching our teams. Saying as such may sound like a bit of a pipe dream to some, but it is entirely possible.

 

The next year will be hard, but it does not need to destroy our profits. Finding the areas in your business where you can improve operations and then constantly applying them will make you better, even if it is incrementally. 

 

This particular business had two massive advantages to drive its excellence. Firstly, the management team knew how to cook – no chef was going to tell it how to run a kitchen. Any new chef gets inducted by the management and then taught the right practices to adopt. This kind of positive habit is exactly what I talk about when I refer to operational excellence. Embedding effective behaviours into your business from the outset guarantees that specific ways of working stick. 

 

The second big advantage was the management of the business ran shifts everywhere. It did not tell others what to do, the team just did it and led by example. Telling people what to do only gets you so far – working with them, doing it yourself and showing them what “good” looks like always achieves better results. Setting your sights on excellence is what we have to do, and it can be done.