Tag Archives: restaurants

Food & Drink, News

British craft soda with an Americana twist wins listings in more than 300 new outlets, including Pizza Hut

An Americana-influenced soft drinks company set up in London five years ago has landed a major deal with Pizza Hut, that will see its craft sodas stocked in the retailer’s 130 UK restaurants, as well as in more than 170 of Dunelm’s in-store Pausa cafes.

Soda Folk was set up by American-in-London, Ken Graham, using recipes inspired by his childhood in Colorado and began selling their drink in bars and shops in London’s burgeoning craft food and drink scene. Ex-Tesco Head of Innovation, Simon Waterfall, took over the company’s leadership in 2019 to accelerate its growth, tripling it in the past three years and securing listings in Sainsburys and Ocado.

The brand is aimed at adults and its range, which includes the Great Taste Award-winning Cherry Soda, Cream Soda, Root Beer and Blueberry Muffin, are made with natural, premium ingredients and are 100% vegan.

Managing Director, Simon Waterfall, said: “The success of our brand follows a continued boom in trendy drinks, marking a taste change from boring mass market drinks to exciting fizzy pop like Soda Folk’s range. Our premium price point continues to do well even with the cost of living crisis, in part due to the sea change in consumer expectations of flavour, the switch to alcohol alternatives and even the ’Lipstick Effect’ where people reduce lifestyle spend but continue to buy affordable ‘treats’. So retailers and restaurants see Soda Folk as a brilliant opportunity to not only increase sales but also margins.”

 

News

Business failures can be predicted from online ratings

Whether or not a business is doomed to fail can now be predicted by a new model from academics at the University of Cologne, LMU Munich, and ETH Zurich.

The model, presented by Professor Markus Weinmann and his co-authors Christof Naumzik and Professor Stefan Feuerriegel, uses restaurants’ online ratings to detect business failures with an accuracy of over 78 percent.

Using over 64,000 ratings of restaurants, the model estimates their hidden states—‘well-running’, ‘bad ratings but running’, and ‘at risk’—and links it to their likelihood of failure.

Restaurants from the ‘well-running’ state display mostly positive experiences, whereas those from the ‘bad ratings but running’ state highlights consisted issues regarding customer satisfaction, yet remain in business due to certain factors such as long opening hours, location, and drive-through service. Examples of this include McDonalds and Burger King.

Those restaurants ending up in the ‘at risk’ state have highly dispersed ratings—ranging from very positive to negative—thus reveal that customer satisfaction is subject to considerable variance. These restaurants have a failure probability that is twice as high compared to other states.

“Using mere online ratings, we were able to detect 7 out of 10 failures, even several months ahead. This gives restaurant managers enough time to provide countermeasures in time,” says Professor Weinmann.

By categorising businesses, the model is able to predict which businesses are likely to fail months in advance, and could prevent such event happening.

Those businesses that transition into the ‘at risk’ category, are largely as a result of service performance issues that, if they persist in the long run, are likely to lead to business failure.

The researchers say that this model would assist marketers in monitoring customer satisfaction and offer a data-driven tool that provides early warnings of impending business failures.

The research was published in the journal Marketing Science.

Coronavirus, Hospitality, News

Stampede launches free managed gift card service to help hospitality businesses recover lost income

Stampede, a Leith-based start-up offering digital growth services for the hospitality sector, today launched a free managed gift-card service for businesses impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic to help them recover lost income quickly and create a continuous new revenue stream.

Stampede gift cards is a fully managed service, which means that a traditional pub or small local café with no ecommerce functionality can launch a website, create and issue gift cards to their customer database, and start accepting payments immediately through Stampede. The buy now/use later vouchers are designed to be a more sustainable alternative to crowdfunding options that have proved popular during the pandemic, giving business owners a new way to boost revenues and improve cash flow issues during this time of uncertainty. The service also helps businesses stay in contact with customers and provides them with more security for the future – guests are certain to redeem their vouchers after the shutdown ends and likely to spend even more money when they visit.

Crowdfunding campaigns have become a popular way for restaurants, pubs and bars to recover lost income while closed, in a bid to avoid job losses and bankruptcy. However, these kinds of campaigns are often a short-term solution and do not fix the longer-term cash flow issues created by COVID-19. Stampede gift cards allow businesses to compete in the market once again and tailor offers and services for their local customers. Stampede believes that this is a more dependable solution to cash flow issues in the long term, rather than being solely dependent on charitable donations via sites like GoFundMe.

Stampede gift cards are powered by fin tech services Stripe and Connect, meaning that Stampede clients need no technical expertise to launch their gift card campaign and start taking payments. The fully managed journey was an important consideration for Stampede, who understood that hospitality businesses do not have the time and resources required to build extra online/payments functionality during such a difficult time. The gift card service was created by the team in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, and follows discussions with hospitality customers about how best to recover their lost income.

“Businesses that make their money by bringing people together have been hit hardest by COVID-19 and social distancing policies,” said Stampede founder, Patrick Clover.

“Many businesses are struggling to survive, and while donations via sites like GoFundMe are a great quick fix, no business owner wants to be dependent on charitable donations as their main source of income. We know that the general public want to support their favourite local businesses during their hour of need, but they don’t want to get takeout every night, nor can they order a pint for delivery from their local pub. We wanted to create a solution that would let people give their financial support to struggling local businesses, while empowering those businesses to start taking money again on their own terms.”