From healthier options to gourmet burgers, fast casual is changing the way we eat and think of food and is taking business from well-known fast food chains.
The restaurant business is responding to some consumer trends better than others. One key trend is healthy eating. A good example is the whole category of fast-casual, which is eating business away from traditional fast food.
Why? Because consumers want healthier options.
They want more choices. They also don’t want to go to a traditional restaurant during lunchtime, sit down for an hour and a half and wait for someone to serve them.
When walking down Broadway from 42nd down to the 23rd, there are about 20 new restaurant concepts. Just by observing, many of them are based on salads. There’s a green wave and the consumer wants fresh, innovative salads. That’s a key growth segment.
You also have a gourmet burger. Shake Shack is a good example of that. It’s not necessarily a gourmet burger, but it’s a much better burger that you can get in McDonald’s. Then if you take bread-based companies, like Panera, which dominates the category, there are other players but they’re not even close to as big as Panera.
Panera understands that consumers want freshly baked bread with innovative combinations, not the traditional ham and cheese. They also make good salads and soups, and it’s pretty fast.
You can use technology, especially here in Manhattan. You can order, pay online, and then just go pick up, or they can do delivery.
Talking about trends in Mexican, Chipotle owns that category. If you consider the ingredients that they have, there are about a couple thousand options that the consumer can choose from through this combination of a dozen or so ingredients.
Again, it’s fresh. The ingredients are fresh. It’s prepared right there in front of your eyes. It is not something that happens in McDonald’s where it’s prepared behind the counter, and it’s always the same standardized. You have more flexibility and better ingredients.
Fast-casual is taking business from the casual family restaurants, the TGI Fridays of the world, and the fast-food players like McDonald’s, Burger King or Wendy’s.
