Ovation Brands sees sales lift at 'reinvented' buffet concepts

Officials for Greer, S.C.-based Ovation Brands Inc. are so confident they can sustain the momentum from their test of “reinvented” buffet restaurants — Old Country Buffet, HomeTown Buffet, Ryan’s and Fire Mountain — that they are guaranteeing on TV that guests will love their experience.

Beginning with a nine-location restaging in Denver last October, Ovation Brands, formerly known as Buffets Inc., started the reimaging effort to enhance the hospitality at its 328 restaurants. It includes 85 new recipes for the menu items offered on its buffet lines, as well as a move toward more individual portions of food.

The new format produced a same-store sales increase in Denver slightly higher than 50 percent for the four-week period that carried new commercials to promote the reinvention, said Anthony Wedo, Ovation Brands’ chief executive who joined the company in December 2012, months after it emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The new ad campaign features Wedo on camera giving a “Make it Right Promise,” guaranteeing that if customers are not completely satisfied at new restaurants operated by Buffets Inc., the staff would do everything to make it right.

“I’ve never felt so uplifted by the reaction I get from my guests,” Wedo said. “You don’t chase these kinds of results, otherwise you’d never get them. Fundamentally, you have to do the right thing. … We’re building it, and they’re coming.”

Even in marketing periods where Ovation’s commercials were off air, same-store sales were still increasing in the 20-percent range through late April, Wedo said.

The new format, known internally as “Main Street,” expanded from Denver to Fresno, Calif., a few months later, and to Minneapolis in April, with each market airing the “Make it Right” ad campaign for weeks at a time.

The company has been working on rolling out Main Street to the Los Angeles market since January, Wedo said. Once the division of 38 HomeTown Buffets is converted by this fall, he will be back on TV in those commercials as well.

He added that the hospitality upgrades supporting the new menu and marketing were crucial to the program’s success. One of the restaurants’ management positions was moved from the back of the house to the dining room to focus solely on visiting tables and supporting servers, who were given more guest-facing responsibility.

“We’ve put every one of these markets through new training, from the ground level up to the managers,” Wedo said. “Without the hospitality change and the retraining we would’ve struggled. But it has been a very sustainable reinvention. Most LTOs last for 90 days at most, but this has been going on in Denver since October, and we’re still seeing it sustain well into our seventh month.”

Remodeled restaurants in Denver and Minneapolis have a brighter, more contemporary look, with 11 food stations that were renamed as more upscale, such as the Maple Street Bakery and Creamery for desserts.

“If you think about a high-end food court, everybody presents their brands in a vertical way, and we have a miniature version of that,” Wedo said.

Facing the crowd

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Wedo noted that the hospitality training “has taken the service to better than a casual-dining level” — which has made him confident enough to give Ovation’s satisfaction guarantee on camera, he said.

“The CEO has to put his credibility out there,” Wedo said. “It’s paying huge dividends already. … There’s been a complete sea change in our users. We’re getting a lot more young families now, and there has been an enormous burst in interest.”

The feedback from guests in reimaged markets reflected what Wedo had heard shortly after his appearance on the reality show “Undercover Boss,” which was that people had remembered the company’s buffet brands fondly for a long time and appreciated the attempt to reinvigorate them.

“You don’t get up 50 percent in sales or up 30 percent without marketing unless people believe in what you’re doing,” he noted.

The reimaging effort has become a sustainable, self-funding initiative, as Ovation will expand the program through cash flow from increased sales and none of the credit facility from its 2012 exit from bankruptcy. Yet the company is mindful of some restraints to rolling out Main Street too fast, Wedo said.

“One is the ability for our supply chain to keep up, because we’ve changed 85 recipes,” he said. “The second is training, where you don’t want to get ahead of yourself, and the third is capital, because nobody has an unlimited supply.”

The ongoing success of the rebranding effort “is the catalyst I need to build new units” eventually, Wedo said. Ovation would explore the possibility of new restaurant growth 12 to 24 months down the line, he added.

Ovation Brands also operates nine locations in California of the Tahoe Joe’s polished-casual concept. The company’s 337 restaurants operate in 35 states.

Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].
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