NASHVILLE Tenn. Captain D's Seafood is giving its operations an extreme makeover.
The effort is being led by Alan Caldwell, a restaurant industry veteran who joined the quick-service seafood chain in 2005 as senior vice president of operations to help its new owners, Sagittarius Brands, bring it out of the doldrums.
Captain D's has 600 units in 26 states, the Caribbean and international military bases; half are franchised.
"We quickly assessed that there were a lot of systems and processes that have evolved over time that weren't very functional anymore," Caldwell said. "The new D's way is to take care of operations."
The company has been adding chainwide systems that replace a piecemeal approach to everything from measuring guest satisfaction and store performance to training employees about food safety and hospitality.
The initiatives are being carried out with a new four-person operations team that reports to Caldwell, and via input from a recently-formed advisory council of franchisees and company-owned restaurant operators.
When it comes to food, the company wants to make it fresher, hotter, and more varied. A new production guide helps determine exactly how much product to cook when. It is based on a six-week average of each restaurant's production, and provides a recommended amount of food to cook in 15-minute increments.
Captain's D's core product is batter-fried fish. To beef up the quality, the hand-mixed batter is made more often and in smaller batches. "It is a simple change," Caldwell said. "By making half as much more often, it is easier to mix, and at lower volume times we are not holding batter too long." The change was recommended by the advisory council (it's called the SOP Council, for Standard Operating Procedures).
The SOP, which meets quarterly, also came up with a new inventory management system for fish and other raw food products. Before, containers of fish would be marked with the date of when it was prepared and it was up to the crew to calculate whether the product had expired. Now, the containers are marked with a discard date so crew members "don't have to be walking around with all those figures in their head," Caldwell said.
For frying oil, Captain D's is using a new strip test that determines if the oil meets quality standards, which can be a tricky task, Caldwell said.
All these measures come as the company rolls out a menu revamp that aspires to take the quick-service chain up a notch to fast-casual. It includes a new platform of grilled fish and pasta dishes, as well as more than half a dozen new side dishes including garlic mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese. The menu was introduced last August and was honored by Nation's Restaurant News with a 2007 MenuMasters Award.
The revamped menu is being rolled out slowly - it is in about a dozen stores - and requires a new clamshell grill. There is also a new holding system for the expanded sides menu.
Even the drive-thru, which represents 50 percent of store sales, is getting tweaked. "We didn't even have timers so there was no set of metrics we could rally around," Caldwell said. Now, the drive-thrus have timers, and the company measures the percentage of cars it can service in less than 60 seconds. There's an incentive reward for general managers who improve their service times, including a free trip.
Caldwell said the changes are happening as quickly as possible, but admits that it takes time to change long-established practices. He said already there is a positive impact on the bottom line, but declined to share figures. "Sales are getting better and better every day," he said. "A lot of this change was overdue."
