Equipping Retail ‘Restaurants’

For a long time, most hospitality professionals considered retail food programs and commercial/noncommercial foodservices to be separate worlds. Supermarkets, grocery stores and gourmet shops inhabited a market sector defined by packaged products and foods to be prepared at home. Restaurants and foodservices worked raw and partially processed items into prepared meals for onside consumption and take-away. Food retailers and operators had their different equipment line-ups, based on their distinct service and display programs. Most equipment manufacturers who sold into one sector tended not to offer many products suitable for the other. The line was clear and never the twain would meet. Well, that’s not the case anymore.

Increasingly, consumers are showing support for food retailers’ prepared meals programs, which are growing rapidly in scope and value. This is due in large part, as recently released research from Technomic reports, because many shoppers now perceive grocers’ ready-to-eat meals as offering “restaurant quality” at better price points. This trend has been strongly augmented by the appearance of in-store cooking stations and dining areas at such high-end supermarkets as Whole Foods and Albertsons. Eataly, in New York City, presents an even more sophisticated example, combining as it does an entire marketplace of service points displaying raw, processed and partially prepared foods with four table-service, on-premise restaurants, as well as a take-away meals program.

In response, restaurateurs are opening chain restaurants inside such big-box retail outlets as Costco and Walmart, which, of course, have ever-expanding grocery operations. What’s more, a host of casual dining companies are now branding and packaging signature menu items for sale at a wide variety of retail food stores, further contributing to the blurring of market sector demarcation lines.

This cross-pollenization of concepts and products offers new and potentially profitable business opportunities for a large number of foodservice equipment makers, which can now sell both “retail” and “restaurant” products to the hybrid food providers. Some manufacturers of equipment like combi ovens, display cases and serving counters have already grown sales by placing their products in the large production kitchens and commissaries operated by national chain retailers. With consumers still keeping a lid on their traditional dining-out expenditures, serving the cross-over retail food market sector is increasingly becoming a powerful strategy for revenue growth.