CEC Entertainment Inc. on Wednesday officially pulled the wraps off a new design at the first of four remodeled San Antonio, Texas units, highlighting Chuck E. Cheese’s food and restaurant atmosphere.
The grand opening at a remodeled location in Stone Oak, Texas, just north of San Antonio, features major changes in the concept, including a new exterior, an open kitchen, a more restaurant-like décor and — for first time in the chain’s 40-year history — the removal of the Chuck E. Cheese and friends robot band in favor of a lighted dance floor.
“We are extremely proud of the new food at Chuck E.,” said Tom Leverton, CEC CEO, in an interview Monday. “We wanted to highlight that with the new open kitchen.
“Moms and dads who have high food standards can see that the food is made fresh,” Leverton said. “There are windows into the dough room, so you can see pizzas made fresh to order. Kids even line up and watch the pizzas being made. The open kitchen is great for food credibility.”
The Chuck E. Cheese’s remodels are being rolled out in the San Antonio market through early September, and three units in the Kansas City, Mo., area will debut in late August and through September, Leverton said.
Over the past year, Leverton said the Chuck E. Cheese’s team had relaunched the menu, improved ingredients and processes, upgraded cleanliness and invested in new technology.
“We wanted to highlight all these improvements,” Leverton said, in explaining the remodeling program that is debuting with the grand opening at that 10,000-square-foot location.
“We wanted to create a restaurant feel for moms and dads,” he said, adding that 85 percent of Chuck E. Cheese’s visits are regular occasions and not birthdays or other special events.
Chuck E. Cheese’s tapped the San Francisco-based Tesser design firm to create and implement the remodels.
Tre Musco, Tesser’s CEO and chief creative officer, said, “The redesign, first and foremost, was to keep the kid-friendly nature of it but to make it more appealing to adults.”
Musco said the boldest changes were the Chuck E. Cheese’s exterior, which offers an abstract Swiss-cheese pattern in wood as well as a new logo and word mark, which was redesigned to look “a little more hand-done.”
After consumer testing, Musco said, the new green tower entrance was found to help lure customers into the location for a second look at the brand.
The design firm also worked with CEC’s operations team to open the kitchen, Musco said.
“We did a test store mock-up to create the theater kitchen and rework the salad bar area,” he said. “We wanted to let consumers see these aren’t pre-made pizzas and the dough is made there.”
Chuck E. Cheese’s has been elevating its food offerings. In January, the brand introduced stuffed-crust pizza (which Leverton said has seen double-digit growth in sales), promoted a Philly cheesesteak pizza, offered pretzel-dipper bites with cheese as parent snacks and expanded Dippin’ Dots to all company-owned locations.
Chuck E. Cheese’s interiors were re-crafted to feature warm woods and neutral tones. Signage illustrates the educational steps in making pizza, and graphics throughout the dining room feature such key ingredients as vegetables, wheat and cheese.
Bots no more
Leverton said the animatronic Chuck E. Cheese band, which had been a fixture in units since the concept opened in 1977, was jettisoned.
“We have no more of the Chuck E. robots,” he said. “We have the live Chuck E. come out once an hour at the bottom of the hour. For kids these days, the live Chuck E. coming out has trumped the animatronic show.”
The company has added a lighted dance floor where Chuck E. can perform and children can dance. “We’ve upgraded our music to more contemporary tunes,” Leverton added.
Other features of the remodeled Chuck E. Cheese’s include the full use of the PlayPass card system, which replaced tokens with radio-frequency identification, or RFID, cards. PlayPass RFID systems are in 95 percent of the 525 company-operated Chuck E. Cheese’s units.
Order kiosks are in test in 35 locations for food and PlayPass cards, Leverton said. All seven remodeled locations remained open during the construction, he said.
“I’m really excited about highlighting all the changes. You’d be surprised how many people think Chuck E. Cheese still has the ball pits, which we haven’t had since the 1990s,” Leverton said.
“New stores will open with elements of this redesign,” Leverton said. “We are looking at doing open kitchens at an absolute minimum.”
The company will value-engineer the changes going forward, he said, adding that “we were conscious of our pocketbook.”
For the second quarter ended July 2, CEC narrowed its net loss to $5.9 million from $9.1 million in the same period last year. Revenues fell 2.2 percent to $211.8 million from $216.6 million in the prior-year quarter. Same-store sales declined 3.8 percent.
As of July 2, CEC Entertainment had 757 locations, including 610 Chuck E. Cheese’s and 147 Peter Piper Pizza units.
Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected]
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