Restaurants of all sizes do well to adhere to the necessary due diligence. This includes obtaining the relevant permits, hiring the best of chefs, and more. Certain partners can help your restaurant a great deal before and even after you have successfully launched. Here are three services to procure before your restaurant’s grand opening.
1. Food and Beverage Wholesalers
Before your restaurant goes live, you need to ensure you’re in good standing with your food and drink partners.
As a restaurant owner, you may not want to run out of vodka on a Friday night. It pays to have an alcoholic beverage distributor on speed dial, so your customers’ party can flow. On the food front, generally buying in bulk is convenient and saves money. Food wholesalers purchase items in bulk quantities from a distributor, mark them up and sell them to retailers. To a restaurant, a food wholesaler can be a bulk supplier of the food items you need whenever you need them.
Aside from costs and convenience, other benefits your restaurant can enjoy in dealing with a food wholesaler include the following:
- Guaranteed quality for your food items
Restaurants that don’t deal with food wholesalers are likely to shoulder the shopping function themselves. What happens if you realize that the same alcoholic beverage in your store, bought from more than one distributor, has quality differences?
Who are you firing, and who are you keeping? You’re in a better position to efficiently manage quality issues if you’re dealing with a trusted distributor of alcoholic beverages.
- Opportunity to be part of a food network
Suppose your restaurant is part of a recognized food network. In that case, you get to enjoy the efficiency benefits of your network’s players. In times of price hikes, it pays to have like-minded partners looking out for each other’s interests.
2. Online Food Ordering
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the traditional way of doing things. In the heat of the global pandemic, customers in lockdown areas could still patronize their favorite food services via a mobile app. Restauranteurs aren’t left out of the internet benefits. With a top restaurant online ordering system, a small restaurant can host their menu and process online orders all from one source.
The benefits of restaurants going online has endless benefits. Some include the following:
- An online order system helps you monitor your orders. You can leverage real-time analytics to improve your delivery service.
- Your online ordering platform can also be an integration of several functions and features. Some third-party delivery apps can be a one-stop shop for your point of sale system, inventory management, payment system, etc.
Restauranteurs can learn a great deal from the significant boom of online retail over the years. The advent of web 2.0 became a growth catalyst for the retail industry in the United States. Companies like Amazon, which started small in garages, leveraged the internet in building their fortunes.
Today, the online retail industry is worth trillions of dollars. Even though the space serves giants like Alibaba very well, it also shows great promise for small and thriving players. Now, there are countless bakeries, coffee shops, and diners with their own websites.
3. Social Media Influencers
Your new restaurant will need more than tasty dishes and beverages to set it up on a growth path. Just like every business, you’ll need to do certain things right (fielding a top-notch customer service, enlisting new customers on a loyalty program, waiving the monthly fee for a customer’s first time, to mention a few).
Perhaps more than anything, though, the word needs to go out that you’re walking the talk. In this age, one of the most helpful ways to expand your reach is by leveraging influencers. You can have the best online ordering system, and customers will still not patronize it. It takes consistent messaging for consumers to recognize you for what you claim to be. An influencer’s job is to keep you in the eyes of their audience and, for that matter, your prospective clients.
