Efficiency is a targeted menu just for you

JULIE JARGON
NOVEMBER 13, 2018
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Sweetgreen wants to win its customers’ loyalty by getting to know a lot more about them.
The Culver City, California-based salad chain says using a mobile app to gather data on guests’ allergies and tastes will allow it to suggest dishes that regulars at its 88 restaurants are sure to love.
When guests place an order on the chain’s mobile app, they are prompted to select from a list of dietary restrictions that includes soy, nuts and gluten. Selections cause menu items containing those ingredients to be flagged with a red asterisk so the guests know to avoid them, and the selections are saved for future orders.
The company says that is just the first step in a long-term plan to collect more specific data about what customers like and why.
“We’re trying to understand what’s underneath food choices: Do you like beets because of their sweetness or crunchiness?” Sweetgreen co-founder and chief executive Jonathan Neman says. “We want to crack the code around food decisions.”
Data is emerging as a powerful weapon in the increasingly competitive battle for the restaurant consumer. An explosion of food vendors — and menu items — is giving diners more choices than ever. Some restaurants say using customer data to tailor menus to their tastes can give them a leg up.
“Total restaurant traffic is not growing, so anything restaurants can do to offer a better customer experience differentiates them from the competition,” says David Portalatin, a food industry adviser at market research firm NPD Group.
It wasn’t long ago that such careful attention to diners’ preferences was the province of mum-and-dad restaurants and some fine dining establishments.
But the mobile age has changed all that, ­allowing chains to develop that capability, using mobile apps and digital reservation systems to track customer preferences and spending habits and sharing it across their systems.
About 2.8 billion US restaurant orders were placed digitally in the past year, NPD says, or 5 per cent of orders. That is up from 2 per cent in 2015.
Many restaurants collect customer data through their loyalty programs, which diners can sign up for online or via an app. (After customers make a certain number of visits, they earn points that can be redeemed for discounted items or at no charge.)
But the data that companies collect through such programs offer a window into the habits of only their most loyal customers, who aren’t the ones they really need to convince to return.
And there are limitations to some online loyalty programs: Restaurants that collect email addresses without logging specific purchases can send out emails about promotions only to the whole customer base.
An email for half-priced Frappuccinos, for example, would be wasted on someone who only orders coffee.
By contrast, individuals’ purchases are easier to track on ­mobile order apps. Starbucks realised that its mobile app, which had been accessible to members only of its Starbucks Rewards loyalty program, could be more effective if it were open to everyone. Starbucks had 15 million active Rewards members, but it had another 60 million monthly customers it knew nothing about. In March Starbucks opened the app to everyone.
It also began requiring customers to provide their email addresses when signing up for in-store Wi-Fi; previously, customers could access the Wi-Fi without supplying any information. In addition, it started requiring customers who came in for afternoon happy hour promotions, such as free drinks, to register digitally.
Within 90 days of enacting those initiatives, Starbucks gained data on an additional five million customers. The company plans to use the data on purchasing behaviour to offer personalised deals to customers based on their buying habits.
Starbucks chief executive Kevin Johnson told investors in June that the number of customers with whom it formed “digital relationships” would “do nothing but grow. Over the next three to four years we’re going to consistently find ways to acquire new customers and now engage deeper” with them.
The next step in personalised service entails collecting even more information that can be shared across a chain or company.
Last year Altamarea Group, a company that operates 16 Italian restaurants around the world, began using SevenRooms, a cloud-based reservation system that enables restaurants to create detailed guest profiles with notes on everything from allergies to wine preferences and to share that data across the company.
A diner who ordered a particular wine at one Altamarea location may be offered that same wine when she visits another, says Jonna Gerlich, the company’s managing director of marketing and sales.
Restaurants are using the knowledge to improve service and target guests with promotional events such as wine tastings. Servers also are using the information to steer guests to try new dishes, Gerlich says. A server who sees, from notes saved in a guest’s profile by a previous server, that someone has quit a low-carb diet may suggest a new pasta dish, for example.
LDV Hospitality, which owns 10 restaurant and bar brands across the US, says the SevenRooms reservation system has led to higher guest satisfaction and more repeat visits at its locations.
Restaurant managers use the system to review a diner’s past choices before they arrive on a given night. If the diner prefers a certain drink, sometimes they are greeted with that cocktail. “It’s those little touches,” says Bryan Siegel, LDV’s hospitality director. “It changes the whole experience.”
In some cases, when the managers notice that a guest always orders the same thing, they send the guest a new dish on the house. “It’s the gesture more than anything else,” Siegel says. But expanding diners’ horizons also may encourage them to return.
Sweetgreen also wants diners to try new things so they develop more favourites and return more often.
In a few years, Sweetgreen expects to have an upgraded app that provides more personalised ­nutrition information, making menu recommendations based on how food makes people feel. If, for example, someone indicates that kale makes them feel bloated or that quinoa leaves them feeling full and energised for hours, the app will be able to tailor menu choices around that.
“The challenge for any personalised experience is how you create a sense of discovery,” Neman says. “There’s a huge opportunity to do that in food.”