News Briefs

Up and coming QSR  Salad and Go  is expanding in Texas with three new locations opening in February in the Houston markets of Katy, Richmond and League City.

The Katy store located opened February 1, the Richmond location at  is set to open February 17, and the League City store plans to open its doors on February 22. These new locations will mark the start of rapid brand expansion across the Greater Houston area.

These suburbs were strategically selected as ideal markets for Salad and Go as some of the fastest growing communities in the region. Conveniently located in some of Houston's most popular suburbs, the new locations will provide fresh, high-quality meals with quick and easy convenience at an affordable price.

As Salad and Go continues growing its national presence with a strong focus on Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and Nevada, the brand's expansive growth has it on a positive trajectory to provide fresh and affordable food to communities in more than 125 locations by the end of 2023. Houston is the next step in the brand's expansion across Texas with plans to open additional stores in the market throughout the new year.

Salad and Go's chef-curated menu provides guests with food for any time of the day by offering a variety of delicious and healthy items including salads, wraps, breakfast burritos and soup as well as beverages including hand-crafted lemonades, teas and cold brew coffees.

Salad and Go ensures each meal contains fresh, quality ingredients while keeping prices low by vertically integrating operations and distribution, and sourcing ingredients directly from high-quality local farmers and suppliers whenever possible. The brand's mission to make fresh, nutritious food convenient and affordable for ALL extends beyond its stores and is demonstrated in the work the brand does to donate 4,000 meals every week to those in need, as well as in partnerships with nonprofits to support and fundraise for various worthy causes.

Focus Brands says dual branding is the future of QSR, and the parent company of Auntie Anne’s®, Carvel, Cinnabon, Jamba, McAlister’s Deli, Moe’s Southwest Grill, and Schlotzsky’s, is leading the charge. Today, the Focus Brands portfolio boasts 175-plus open dual branded units with at least 65 more in various stages of development across the country. 

Drive-Thru Convenience

The Focus Brands portfolio brands have signed agreements to open more than 50 dual and tri-brand locations in the coming year, many of which include drive-thrus for added convenience as interest in dual branded franchise opportunities continues to surge.

Flexible Store Formats

Focus Brands is among the brands introducing new store formats, including Krystal, Jack-in-the-Box and Panera Bread, which opened its Panera To Go, solely offering Rapid Pick-Up and Delivery shelves where guests and delivery drivers can easily pick up orders.  

Focus Brands has long pioneered the concept of dual branding, predominately in malls and non-traditional locations with Auntie Anne’s and Cinnabon. Now, the company’s portfolio brands have found new opportunities with streetside dual branded units, which is paving the way for immense franchise growth. 

“Dual branding is the future of our brands, especially on the specialty side of the business,” said Brian Krause, Chief Development Officer at Focus Brands. “There will always be a place in malls, but there is an immense amount of growth opportunity in streetside venues, and, by dual branding, there is more opportunity for enhanced revenue.”

The company invested heavily in consumer research to identify how to create combinations of its iconic brands to resonate with consumers and meet them where they want to be met.

Focus Brands has identified four dual-brand concepts:

• Auntie Anne’s/Cinnabon
• Auntie Anne’s/Cinnabon/Carvel
• Auntie Anne’s/Jamba
• Cinnabon/Carvel – Cinnabon Swirl. 

While key consumer benefits vary by dual-brand combination, one consistent benefit has been convenience. Having these brands together in one location makes them far more accessible than they are individually. This convenience also creates opportunity for franchisees, as co-branding leads to an expansive menu that drives enhanced unit-level volume. 

 

Alliants, the customer experience specialists, has appointed Kashif Yamin as SVP of Data & Strategy.

As a commercially astute leader with a deep knowledge of data driven decision making, Kashif is devoted to helping hospitality and travel companies optimise their customer experience and make winning decisions.

He commented: “There has been a massive increase in the amount of data that companies are collecting, but there is still a big gap in terms of their ability to translate that into real insights and actions.”

“Alliants is at the vanguard of closing that gap by improving customer experience and creating better outcomes in terms of customer satisfaction, retention, upselling, and ultimately customer lifetime value through its Alliants Experience Platform and data-rich service capabilities.”

Kashif is returning to Alliants, having previously worked with the customer experience experts as Client Director from 2011 to 2017.

Tristan Gadsby, CEO and co-founder of Alliants, said: “We are thrilled to have Kashif back on board and, in some respects, he’s never been away. In the intervening years, we worked together on the machine learning platform Incisively, which has delivered great results for several hotel clients including Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts.”

Kashif was the CEO and founder of Incisively Limited and the eCommerce optimisation lead with Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, resulting in significant conversion and customer experience gains for the luxury brand.

His career spans marketing, product, operations and commercial functions across a host of travel and hospitality businesses, most recently as Commercial Director of Travel Republic, an Online Travel Agency.

Kashif said: “It’s fantastic to be back at Alliants. It is a business that has developed enormously since I left. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with professionals from hospitality and other sectors and helping them find those next levels of innovation to stand out from the crowd.”

Reserva Alecrim Eco Suites Resort has maximized revenue per guest and more quickly realized its growth strategy due to the implementation of an intuitive, integrated hotel management solution from SIHOT.

The eco resort accommodation provider not only increased guest ratings on Booking.com and Google, but also achieved a 60% increase in guest spend by offering more services and experiences, with it’s F&B business unit benefitting from a more than 70% uplift. The digitalization of its operations, financial, administrative and booking processes allowed it to significantly reduce pressure on staff by nearly eliminating the need for 44 hours overtime per month as a result of automating time-consuming tasks.

Reserva Alecrim has also seen massive improvements to team communication across the 24-hectare site, and now provides an enhanced guest experience for billing and check-out - securing 70% increase in upsells throughout the property. 

SIHOT was installed in January 2022, with the resort now using SIHOT.PMS, SIHOT.POS, Channel Manager and SIHOT.TRUST. Previously, the resort’s staff were challenged by manual systems where the PMS could not integrate with other systems. The technology lacked the ability to add experiences and services to a room bill, causing delays in compiling single guest payments. With SIHOT’s cloud-based solution, the team can access reports from anywhere and process invoices within a few minutes, resulting in a 75% time reduction.

“It’s about making processes simple and with SIHOT, that’s possible. Even training new staff is quick: they’re up and running within a week. We have taken steps to further improve our offering and guest experience while improving our communication and pulling all the teams together. With more information we can achieve what we want. We simply couldn’t have grown with our former PMS,” continued Alves.

Reserva Alecrim is able to better manage its daily operations. The improved visibility of reporting has helped revenue generation, with department heads able to incentivize their teams to upsell when needed. 

SIHOT’s solutions enable the resort to integrate with a range of technologies, including channel managers capable of selling to 35 OTAs today compared to none previously. Its integration with the resort’s billing system has helped it grow business, including partnerships with international travel agencies that required integrations for live availability. 

“Lurio and his team have demonstrated the value of turning around processes by using technology to their advantage to reduce pressures while improving the experience - not just for the guest, but also quite clearly for themselves. It’s fantastic to see a hospitality company make such significant gains in a short period of time where they have every confidence to continue their growth,” said Carsten Wernet, Chief Executive, SIHOT.

“A site of 24 hectares has become very close. With SIHOT, we feel that we are not that far from each other anymore. SIHOT has helped us grow, and is enabling us to plan an exciting future,” said Lurio Alves, Hotel Manager, Reserva Alecrim Eco Suites Resort.

Tattle, the hospitality industry’s go-to source for customer feedback management and data-focused operational insights, is exhibiting at MURTEC booth 118, at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, from March 6-8.

Attendees interested in unlocking proven ways of turning guest sentiment into actionable items that can drive sales at a more than 80% confidence, can visit Tattle leadership at Booth 118 for a demonstration. Tattle continues to be the provider of choice for both rapid-growth brands, like Dave’s Hot Chicken, recently named the fastest growing restaurant in the country, to established beloved concepts, like MOD Pizza, known for its amazing hospitality to go along with its equally fantastic pizza.

Tattle is an improvement-focused customer feedback technology platform built with an open API in order to collect guest feedback and measure satisfaction across all-digital ordering channels. With nearly 30 integration partners across POS, digital ordering and loyalty sectors, Tattle can dramatically boost the feedback volume and completion rate for restaurant locations through automation and data centralization. Using AI (Artificial Intelligence), Tattle recommends the most high-impact operational area for improvement across restaurant and ghost kitchen locations to drive the greatest increase in guest satisfaction.

71% say the ability to integrate with other systems is driving their POS purchase decisions, according to HT’s2 2023 POS Software Trends Report.

“2023 has been a year of momentum for Tattle, from partnering with both rapid-growth and established brands who are now using our category-leading technology, to adding new functionality like Menu Item Level Feedback,” said company founder and CEO, Alex Beltrani. “We’re looking forward to demonstrating at MURTEC how Tattle can add bottom-line value to brands of all sizes.”

Additional Tattle integration benefits include:

• Omni-channel guest satisfaction measurement across Dine-In, Takeout, Delivery, Drive-Thru, and Curbside
• 7% total guest feedback penetration and a 94.3% survey completion rate of a 50-60 question survey
• Causation-based survey format to identify factors, i.e. Topping Distribution, that negatively impact an operational category, i.e. Accuracy
• Leverages AI to identify and recommend high-impact operational categories for improvement across each location
• Automated location-level Monthly Objectives that results in 84% probability of guest satisfaction increase
• Incident Management System leading to a 70-percent-plus guest recovery rate.

 

QSR Automations and Curbit have teamed up to improve guest experience through optimized online ordering and pickup. Curbit coordinates between kitchen activity and online ordering systems to provide guests with a real-time order status and streamlined pickup process, while QSR Automations’ ConnectSmart platform maximizes kitchen efficiency by prioritizing orders based on order times and guests’ proximity. The result is happier customers and a more profitable business.

“Demand for digital ordering has resulted in a misalignment between order timing and kitchen activity,” said Scott Siegel of Curbit. “We use machine learning to synchronize arrivals with food production leveraged from QSR’s real-time data. "When we couple ConnectSmart’s order prioritization features, we’re able to make drastic improvements to the off-premise experience."

Curbit dynamically updates quote times in the digital channels based on kitchen capacity. Once an order is placed, Curbit’s technology provides the guest with an accurate ready-time using real-time data, which manages guest expectations. As the order progresses, guests receive updated pickup times, so they know exactly when to expect their meal, reducing the potential for quality items to go cold while sitting on a shelf. Meanwhile, ConnectSmart capabilities ensure order fulfillment is always based on priority, reducing kitchen waste and minimizing stress and strain on staff. 

Front-of-house staff is provided a clear view of when and where to deliver each order, while guests are queued in a virtual drive-thru to the desired handoff destination. This consistent process supports the demands of the modern pickup experience.  

Curbit is just one of several Solution Partnerships that QSR Automations has engaged with to improve guest experience. Click here to learn more.