The big picture nationally may still be a mixed bag of slow economic growth, high unemployment and persistent budget deficits, but for four days at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center, the focus among restaurant industry leaders wasn’t on what’s wrong, but what’s going right and what’s next.
The 92nd annual National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show brought together tens of thousands of restaurateurs, suppliers and industry advocates to network and share best practices for building upon the modest recovery foodservice has shown in the past year. Keynote speaker Gen. Colin Powell, no stranger to conflict and difficulty in his career as both chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state, said restaurant operators’ entrepreneurial spirit and flair for problem solving make them crucial for getting the country back on track.
“When I see an audience like the one we have gathered here today — you all know we have enough problems, but at the same time we have a room full of confidence,” Powell said. “The degree of optimism we see out in restaurants, I only wish I could bottle that up and take it to Washington and pour it over the heads of our politicians and say, ‘You guys need to get going.’”
Powell reminded attendees that current challenges must not obscure operators’ vision for long-term success, equating the journey to sustained profitability to his own path from decent student to the No. 1 soldier and No. 1 diplomat of the United States.
“It isn’t where you start in life that counts,” he said. “It’s where you end up and what you did along the way.”
If attendance at the NRA Show is any gauge of operator optimism, the industry could be looking at continued recovery in 2011. According to the NRA, among registrants to the show, there was a 4-percent increase in the restaurant and foodservice category from 2010 to 2011. Suppliers increased their attendance by 6 percent compared with last year, and press registration jumped 8 percent.
Preliminary traffic data showed nearly 58,000 registrants. The NRA also reported that more than 1,900 exhibitors covered more than 515,000 square feet of the show floor, a 9-percent increase in exhibition space.
For restaurant executives making the rounds on the show floor with their team members, the NRA Show served as another opportunity to find the next big or small thing to gain a competitive advantage, and many were encouraged by what they saw and heard.
“There was a lot of optimism at the show this year,” said David Rutkauskas, founder and chief executive of Tulsa, Okla.-based Beautiful Brands International. “We always work the floor and look for smaller vendors with products we usually don’t see. We found four or five of those this year.”
Educational panel sessions focused on the best ways to access financing, the basics of running a food truck and the ways to leverage new technologies like social media for marketing or human resources advantages.
Some restaurant leaders haven’t gone all-in on the newest marketing technologies such as location-based social media or group-buying websites, but they nonetheless are using tools to make them more responsive to guest needs.
“I get a direct e-mail on every single complaint,” Al Bhakta, chief executive of Dallas-based Genghis Grill, told attendees of the panel “CEO Perspective: What Makes an Intelligent Enterprise?” “It’s not high tech, but it’s an effective way of getting guest feedback.”
Bhakta and his co-presenters added during the panel that their brands had not had a favorable experience with group-buying platform Groupon, which seemed at times to be the only organization with more T-shirted representatives on the show floor than Genghis Grill.
Operator opinion on group-buying websites — with Groupon often getting name-checked in place of all its other competitors in the segment — was mixed.
Geoff Alexander of Chicago-based Wow Bao and Jonathan Fornaci of San Ramon, Calif.-based Straw Hat Pizza both said in separate panels that their brands tried a daily deal through Groupon and found it reasonably successful. Meanwhile, fellow marketing executives from Fornaci’s session, Lowell Petrie of Cypress, Calif.-based Real Mex Restaurants and Jeff Carl of Emeryville, Calif.-based Tavistock Restaurants, said their chains would not use group-buying sites, leaving the websites’ status as fad or proper trend open to interpretation.
The search for lasting trends also applied to food and beverage, as attendees tried the latest dishes at exhibitor booths and visited the International Wine, Spirits & Beer Event and the World Culinary Showcase for cooking demonstrations by chefs Wylie Dufresne, Marcus Samuelsson, Rick Bayless and others.
Culinary innovation remained as important as ever, both on the show floor and at special events like the MenuMasters gala at the Drake Hotel, honoring the year’s most successful new products, as well as Innovator Award winner Scott Davis of Panera Bread and Tom Colicchio, the MenuMasters Hall of Fame inductee.
Panera was one of the first chains to pioneer fast casual with upscale sandwiches and salads in a higher-end setting, and Colicchio has earned fame and culinary awards with his Craft family of restaurants, but both individual MenuMasters winners said their success is not about them, but about the guest.
“We organized around the philosophy of putting the customer first,” Davis told the MenuMasters gala crowd.
Colicchio added that whether the guest is visiting an award- winning venue like the University of Massachusetts Amherst dining hall or sitting down at his Craft restaurant in New York, or whether the dish being served costs $8 or $80, “it’s all about making people happy.”
Contact Mark Brandau at mark.brandau@penton.com.
