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Brand eyes in-home bartender service as well
TGI Fridays is planning to introduce delivery of food and alcohol in mid- to late November and even is considering delivering bartenders to homes as well, the company announced Thursday.
The Dallas-based casual-dining brand said it has partnered with Lash, a startup food-and-alcohol delivery company also based in Dallas, to begin delivering beer and alcohol along with food orders placed via its mobile smartphone app, the company said.
The company will test the delivery in the Dallas and Houston markets around the winter holidays, with a systemwide rollout expected in 2018, a spokeswoman said.
Fridays is still working out the details of how to offer the in-home bartender experience, but the planning has begun, executives said. Prototypes call for the bartenders to be pictured with ratings and comments on the company’s app.
“We think it’s important to be able to offer the complete Fridays experience,” said Caroline Masullo, Fridays vice president of digital and e-commerce, in an interview at the company’s headquarters late last month. “We have a lot of equity in our bartenders. They are something of celebrities. People know us for them.”
For the upcoming Fridays delivery test, Masullo said the orders would be processed through the app or the brand’s website.
After location and age verification, she said, the food and alcohol ordering experience would be much the same as for food alone now.
“They add it to the cart, and the driver with the third-party delivery company will go to the closest liquor store, pick up the alcohol (beer or wine or hard alcohol) and then they will go to Friday’s to pick up the food,” Masullo said. “Then it will be one delivery to the customer within the hour.”
Fridays and Lash have partnered with the Specs and Goody Goody liquor store chains for the alcohol portion of the platform, the company said.
Masullo said online ordering has driven sales for TGI Fridays, with take-out sales growing 30 percent since it was introduced last summer. The average online order ticket average is 7.2 percent higher than a ticket for in-restaurant sales.
Other casual-dining brands are looking at adult beverage delivery as well.
Hunting Beach, Calif.-based BJ’s Restaurants Inc. in August launched alcohol delivery and an online ordering platform in a pilot program in select California markets. Customers aged 21 or older could add six-packs of the chain’s craft beer to orders through BJ’s or the DoorDash app.
In July, Minneapolis-based Buffalo Wild Wings Inc. said that it was in the “early exploration stages” of planning a beer delivery program in states where such a program could be legal.
TGI Fridays has more than 900 restaurants in 60 countries.
Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected]
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