Tom Ryan, the industry veteran who founded Smashburger with Rick Schaden in 2007, has recently taken a more hands-on role at the 375-unit better burger chain, with a title change from chief concept officer to chief brand officer.
Ryan, who has held product development positions at Procter & Gamble, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Quiznos, has spent the past several years developing Tom’s Urban, a polished-casual restaurant that was founded in 2012 and now has three locations.
He discussed his new role at Smashburger, as well as plans for the chain — including introducing smaller burgers and opening full-service Smashburger locations — with Nation’s Restaurant News.
Tell me about your new job.
The first book of Smashburger has been written. It got us from 0 to 300 [restaurants], and now we’re at an inflection point, and we have a little bit different focus: Going from a small-cap to mid-cap company requires a better balance of perspective between focusing on operations and placement and development and financials and marketing, and we find ourselves in the need to become an even stronger consumer brand with better communication and more focus and more attention to those kinds of details.
[CHARTBEAT:3]
How is chief brand officer different from chief concept officer?
Chief brand officer oversees almost all of our consumer-facing stuff — PR, marketing, concept work and product. Chief concept officer was more providing input and guidance, [but not being as hands-on]. So now I’m taking a more cohesive, strategic and creative focus.
What kind of new messaging are you trying to convey?
With 375 stores in the ground, we’re still relatively small, and there are many, many more people who don’t know of us than people who do. So job [No. 1] is to use all of our combined assets —our store design, external communications, PR and social media vehicles — to get our primary awareness up and let people know that we’re here, and then underneath that start to build in the layers of motivating content that get people in. People want to know your product story — I want food with a story that makes me feel good about what I’m eating — and to hear about the energy of new product news.
Part of our next-generation messaging of our brand is that a better burger doesn’t necessarily mean breaking the bank.
How are you conveying that?
Around the system we’re testing a couple of different things. In Minneapolis and Dallas we’ve launched a smaller burger for about $1 less, with an entry-level price of $3.69. That’s for people who are looking either for value or portion relevance. It’s a 3-ounce burger compared to our regular 4.5 ounces.
And in other markets we’ve brought back the All American, which has the simple build of pickle, onion, ketchup and mustard. It had kind of gotten managed off the menu, but we’ve brought it back for around $4.39. And other corporate stores are testing portion and value tiers, such as combos at fixed prices, which we introduced in mid-April, and we’re already seeing pretty nice increases in both side and drink incidences.
You used to pair burgers and chicken sandwiches with local craft beers in certain markets. Are you still doing that?
We haven’t recently. That’s a strategy we deploy when we have five or more stores in the market — when we’ve gotten over the surge of multiple store openings and nobody wants to come to another one. It’s predicated on bringing new news to an existing market in a novel way. We did that in 15 markets, and now we’re doing backfill in those existing markets and haven’t hit the next set of markets with enough critical mass to make it worth doing, for us or the craft brewers.
How are beer sales at Smashburger?
It’s kind of occasion driven. If we’re in warm-weather climates with great patios, beer revenue can be as much as 10 percent of sales. If we’re in icy, cold places where people shudder to think about going outside, it can be 1.5 percent to 2 percent.
But it’s not all about mix; it’s also about how mix influences overall revenue. So even though our average mix is between 3 percent and 5 percent of revenue, it accounts for about 16 percent to 18 percent of all our checks — that 3 to 5 percent of beer sales plus all the food that goes with it — and I happen to believe that if we didn’t have beer we wouldn’t have the occasion [because the few people in a party who wanted beer would end up eating somewhere else].
We also got a ton of press for our beer pairings.
Now you’re opening some restaurants at Denver International Airport.
We teamed up with MCE [Midfield Concession Enterprises, an onsite operator with expertise in airports] to do a new Tom’s Urban at the Westin at DIA, and two full-service Smashburgers at the B and C terminals, with full bars, a little broader menu and more local flair. They’ll be opening late this year or early next year.
Will the Smashburgers look similar to the fast-casual version, or will there be more casual-dining elements?
I think we’ll be upgrading some of the brand elements and some of the finishes, but the iconography and color palette will be the same. I think we’re probably going to try to do a little more storytelling, and probably a little more graphic energy.
Part of the RFP [request for proposal] was to do more Colorado local, and we have a bevy of ingredients and builds that we’ve looked at for local burgers in Colorado. Obviously, Tom’s Urban has a pretty big array of knowledge around local products.
What sorts of local products are you planning on using?
We haven’t made a final decision yet, but we’ve got a pretty big arsenal of stuff sourced and grown and near and dear to Coloradans’ hearts.
Will training for full-service restaurants be a challenge?
If we weren’t up and running with three Tom’s Urbans, and two in the making, it would be, but because we’ll have both Tom’s Urban and these full-service Smashburgers on the same campus, we’re going to be able to deploy a lot of trade-based learning between the two concepts.
What else are you working on?
We’ve been quietly doing the foodservice for the reopening of Tivoli Brewery on the Auraria campus downtown [where Metropolitan State University, the University of Colorado at Denver Community College of Denver operate]. We were buying their beer for Tom’s Urban and they were looking for food. And now we’re partnering with them to have a brewpub at the Tom’s at DIA.
Tivoli teaches an accredited beer brewing program at Metro State, so this is all going to be student-run and student-driven.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]
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