Come Together

For the past decade, partnership has been the overriding objective of foodservice suppliers as they seek to lift themselves out of the category of mere purveyors of product and into the realm of valued collaborators with their operator customers. This commitment to partnership has been so single-mindedly pursued and so consistently bruited that it's disheartening to find that manufacturers apparently overlook the chance to take simple steps to cement relationships with restaurateurs and make themselves truly indispensable members of their customers' menu development teams.

The squandered opportunity came to light during a panel exploring the subject of change that was conducted by Peter Romeo, editor of Restaurant Business, as part of the annual Foodservice Innovation Network (FIN) conference in Chicago. The question under discussion had to do with the best sources of new products and menu ideas. One chain restaurant executive cited the critical role of franchisees, noting that they are fertile sources for food ideas, while store managers and team members provide invaluable insight on packaging and equipment. Another hailed the front line in the store as the best source of product innovation based on constant contact with patrons. Few plaudits were pitched to suppliers.

This isn't exactly news. Chicago-based Technomic regularly tracks chain menu development trends and discovered in a recent study that, while internal brainstorming, franchisee input, and competitive monitoring combine to represent 60% of chains' new menu items, manufacturer input is credited with a mere 13%, a figure that has not changed significantly in many years. What's wrong with this picture?

It's pretty easy to beat up manufacturers for less than stellar performance in one step of the product development process and overlook their extraordinary efforts further down the line. The creation of bench samples that must meet impossible specs and the rush to rollout under unreasonable time constraints are the true tests of supplier expertise, ingenuity, and responsiveness. It may be that their reliably strong performance here, where the rubber meets the road in new product development, simply serves to highlight perceived weakness earlier in the process.

Fortunately, the remedy is very simple and it's right at hand. Even the savviest R&D executives are open to new intelligence on food trends, competitive menu maneuvers, and creative menu execution. The stakes are just too high to overlook information that can give an operation a leading edge. Suppliers who study the trade press, track competitive menus and directions, and analyze the strategic implications to their accounts can become invaluable sources of ideas, and ideas are the currency of the menu development game.

Going forward, though, the game will become more complicated. Tulin Tuzel, senior VP of Burger King, provided the FIN confab with a new framework for chain restaurant research and development that requires the complete integration of people, processes, and technologies in order to achieve the greatest return on the R&D investment. This suggests partnership of a higher order, and it challenges manufacturers to think beyond the boundaries of their product to consider operational, packaging, handling, financial, and marketing implications of a finished menu item. And it will demand more of operators as well, challenging them to open up the menu development process to every participant. To be successful, all contributors will need to embrace open communication from start to finish—which, when you think about, is the basis of any winning partnership. E