Digital Dining, The New Subway Menu & Virtual Brands

Are Dining Rooms on their way out?

How far can this new trend go? Henry Grabar writing over at Slate Magazine has an interesting take.

"Name a fast-food restaurant and the odds are the company has recently developed a branch without any restaurant at all.

Chipotle’s first “Digital Kitchen,” which opened in upstate New York in 2020, has?no dining room .

A branch that opened last year in the Cleveland suburbs?doesn’t even let customers inside the store .

This summer, Taco Bell opened something it calls Taco Bell Defy, which is not a restaurant at all but a purple taco tollbooth powered by QR code readers and dumbwaiters that bring the food down from a second-story kitchen.

The operation is, by most accounts,?astoundingly efficient . Wingstop’s “restaurant of the future ” doesn’t have seats or take cash."

Read more of the entire story.

Subways New Menu Philosophy

Subway has had a "bloated" menu for a long time, making their units not competitive for delivery, among other things.

But, Trevor Haynes tells us that is going to change. "About 12 months ago, we took the first step of what we call our big refresh 1.0.

We introduced a bread form, improved bread formula, proteins, cheese sauce, et cetera. We've been upgrading ingredients over the last 12 months, as well, following that launch date.

And we see this as a really great way to bring all of those ingredients together into chef-inspired builds so that the guests can have just a different way of experiencing their Subway restaurant.

As I said, you can choose-- just choose a number or choose a name, go through the line. And it'll be a very easy experience for you."

Does this make Subway the equivalent of the old style Chinese restaurant where you just ordered by item number?

Read more of the Subway story here.

Can a Menu or Food Brand Be Virtual?

Some of us get peeved when we hear people talk about virtual events, which are just remote events with real people and not some simulation of an event.

So it is with "virtual brands". This is real food, which you can only get by a digital order. It is not virtual food. (Don't ask about cakes and eating them either.)

How new or different is this? Michael “Schatzy” Schatzberg thinks that he detects the growth of "virtual brands" because of the affect of covid.

"Although ghost kitchens and virtual brands were growing in popularity as operators realized the opportunity to create brand-specific food delivery programs, once the pandemic hit in 2020, that opportunity became a necessity.

A nice to have had suddenly become a need to have.

Cue our tried-and-true sentiment:

At Branded we subscribe to the theory that the pandemic has changed nothing, but accelerated everything’ – and when it comes to ghost kitchens, they accelerated at a meteoric pace with an astounding growth rate of 5 years in just 3 months.?"

We are not sure this is entirely accurate. Ordering a meal from a location many miles away from the restaurant, for order or delivery, used to be limited to either pizza or Chinese food. Both had industrial forms which could be delivered.

Ordering an entire meal of branded foods from different brands but one locations seems different.

Read the entire Virtual Brands story here.