From Fast Food to Fast Casual
Design
Menu development isn’t the only upgrade quick serves need when transitioning to a fast-casual concept. Store design is just as important in creating a premium experience.
Although Toppers was founded on the idea of offering distinctive, high-quality pizza, the chain developed a generic store design as it expanded. Stores had clichéd checkered floors and laminate tables.
In addition, customers weren’t spending time in the stores. Whereas takeout orders represented 95 percent of the chain’s sales about 15 years ago, they now make up about 65 percent.
“Customers know that Toppers is a higher quality pizza store than the fast-food pizza chains, and it’s important that our look reflect that,” says Scott Gittrich, CEO of Toppers. “I knew we had to get rid of the cheesy Formica tables.”
Toppers met with a design company to explain the brand and exactly what they wanted. But while the firm presented Toppers with a new store prototype built around a more inviting color scheme and a distinctive storefront that Gittrich loved, he was careful not to go overboard.
He negotiated with vendors to keep costs down and looked for changes that didn’t cost extra.
“They can spend as much of your money as you’re willing to spend,” he says. “Definitely operate with that in mind and be very careful about the costs.
Although the new Toppers prototype costs franchisees about 15 percent more to build than the old one did, the difference is night and day.
“Now when you walk up to a new Toppers pizza store, there’s kind of this warm glow,” Gittrich says.
A huge distressed crown sits atop the exterior of the building. Once inside, customers are greeted with warm earth tones. The new prototype has brick walls and open ceilings. Funky lamps hang above stained maple tables, and a seating area in the middle of the dining room offers up a couch and a couple of overstuffed arm chairs surrounding a coffee table.
“The customers just absolutely love it,” Gittrich says. “They’re wowed.”
But it took much longer than Gittrich expected to get to this point.
“I thought I’d be standing in one [of the new stores] within nine months,” Gittrich says. Instead, the design process alone took that long. “We tweaked the design slightly as we went along,” Gittrich says. “We didn’t want to move ahead until we knew that we had the prototype that we loved.”
It took three or four stores before Toppers perfected its prototype. And Gittrich is definitely pleased with the results.
“We don’t have to look like Domino’s to be successful,” he says. “We can be ourselves.”
Operations
During the transition to a fast-casual concept, unexpected operational challenges can arise. Take Best-O-Burger’s experience, for example.
When owner Steve Weber came up with the concept for Best-O-Burger, it was all about the menu.
“I always had this idea that it would be kind of cool to do a slider concept, only with really, really good ingredients,” he says.
But despite the quick success of the concept, its customers had a major qualm with the store: It didn’t have a seating area.
So Weber rented the space adjacent to Best-O-Burger and turned it into a seating area.
“Best-O-Burger was 100 percent to-go before adding our 50 seats,” Weber says. “The challenges were many—it was like reinventing the concept.”
Primary among the list of operational challenges Weber faced was how to get the food to customers who had always been at the counter to grab it.
“Ultimately, we decided that we wanted to showcase our burgers in a non-to-go, hot-off-the-grill format, which meant plating the food unwrapped instead of bagging it,” Weber says.
