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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Soggy Food Sucks Re-Brands as SavrPak, Starts Scaling Up

When Soggy Food Sucks won the Startup Showcase at our 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, you could kinda tell that its moniker wasn’t long for this world. Like the name of some local indie band, Soggy Food Sucks caught your attention and told you exactly what it does, but didn’t exactly scream big enterprise business.

Well today, the company announced a re-branding. Soggy Food Sucks is now the much more professional sounding SavrPak.

“I named the company myself, when it was just me,” Bill Birgen, Founder of Soggy Food Sucks SavrPak told me by phone this week. But the name became a potential issue when talking with prospective high-profile, family-friendly brands who were hesitant about partnering with anything that “sucks.”

For those unfamiliar with the company, SavrPak makes a patch that sticks to the inside of food containers and absorbs moisture. The result, the company promises is, well, no more soggy food when you order delivery.

Birgen said that the COVID-19 pandemic has been a bit of a double-edge sword for the company. On the one hand, delivery and off-premises eating is more important to restaurant business than ever. But on the other hand, restaurants, whose margins were already thin before the pandemic, are reluctant to add any new expenses like a patch for to-go containers.

“COVID was a curveball,” Birgen said. “Customers were ready to receive product, but it’s probably a good thing they didn’t. They may not have been around to pay us.”

According to Birgen, SavrPak is producing 1 million units per month and is scaling up to produce 15 million units per month by the end of the year. The company has a number of brands testing out its patch including Wahoo’s Fish Tacos and Kitchen United, with the latter offering SavrPak’s as a packaging add-on for brands housed in its ghost kitchens.

In addition to ramping up production, SavrPak is also developing a patch that can be dropped into products like bags of salad to help keep produce fresh. The company is also in the process of receiving compostability certification. This is a good thing, considering the incredible amount of single-use container waste being generated by the rise in take out and delivery.

SavrPak isn’t the only company tackling the issue of soggy food sucking. Packaging company Novolex makes the EcoCraft Fresh & Crispy clamshell containers that help keep food crisp through “micro-flute corrugation” built into its to-go containers.

With the pandemic still very much impacting our eating habits, off-premises isn’t going away anytime soon. That sucks for a lot of reasons, but when it comes to eating delivery at home, maybe SavrPak can make it suck less?

Buffalo Wild Wings Launches a To-Go-Only Concept Store

Buffalo Wild Wings is set to unveil a new model for its sports bar/restaurant this week. The chain announced today it will open its first GO model on May 13 in Atlanta, GA, and is designed specifically for takeout and delivery orders. Depending on its success, the new store format could serve as a blueprint for other casual dining restaurants looking to transition to more off-premises-focused formats for the future.

If you’ve been to a Buffalo Wild Wings in the past, you’ll know the restaurant specializes in big dining rooms where customers pack in to watch sports games on the massive television sets that hang on pretty much every available bit of wall space there is. But thanks to the pandemic, packed sports bars are decidedly a thing of the past. Buffalo Wild Wings clearly knows this, as the chain said in the announcement it has been converting its 1,250-plus locations into versions of this to-go-only format for the last six weeks.  

The new 1,800 sq. ft. GO store in Atlanta will still have some TVs as well as limited seating where guests can wait for their orders without missing any of the game. But, as mentioned above, the store is dedicated to off-premises orders. Customers that order ahead will be able to pick up their food from heated lockers. The store will also feature a walk-up counter for placing orders. 

In a statement, Buffalo Wild Wings’ Chief Operating Officer John Bowie said that the company’s takeout and delivery business has grown over 140 percent over the last six weeks — more or less since shelter-in-place orders hit the U.S. What’s worked so far has largely informed the new GO store format.

Other popular casual dining chains will also have to incorporate more to-go-friendly formats in the coming months to meet the requirements for social distancing. Some already are. At the end of March, Outback Steakhouse announced the first U.S. unit of its fast-casual standalone concept Aussie Grill, which is basically a food court version of Outback. Shake Shack announced its own off-premises-only Shack Track stores earlier this month. Some chains, like IHOP and The Cheesecake Factory, were unrolling to-go-focused standalone concepts long before the pandemic.  

Sports bar or no, the days of crowded dining rooms are gone — possibly forever, at least for a couple of years. Pivots to off-premises-focused concepts, as Buffalo Wild Wings and others have done, will soon enough become the norm for those chains with the money to overhaul their operations. While that’s bad news for sports fans who like watching the game out, it’s good news for businesses looking for clues as to how to reimagine their restaurants in a post-pandemic era. 

Despite a Pandemic, Chipotle’s Digital Business Keeps Growing

Chipotle just recorded its highest quarterly level ever for digital sales, according to the company’s Q1 2020 investor call yesterday. Company CEO Brian Niccol said digital sales grew 81 percent, to $372 million, representing 26.3 percent of sales during the first quarter.

Numbers include the month of March, when restaurants across the country started shutting down dining rooms in efforts to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus. The upheaval this has caused for the restaurant industry can’t be understated: everyone from small, independent restaurants to massive chains like The Cheesecake Factory have seen sales drop in some cases, and nosedive in others.

Why not Chipotle?

For one, the company has long been doubling down on its digital business, which powers off-premises orders for delivery, takeout, and drive-thru. Prior to the pandemic, Chipotle already operated a $1 billion-plus digital business. Over the last couple years, the company has forged partnerships with multiple delivery companies, revamped its rewards programs, introduced new store formats for to-go-friendly business models, and added more drive-thru lanes — “Chipotlanes” — to its locations. It helps that the chain has always offered the kinds of quick-service meals made with food that travels well.

On the call this week, Niccol suggested that in order to combat the sudden loss of dining room traffic, the company was able to accelerate its existing digital initiatives: “the majority of our restaurants are open for to-go orders, which is allowing us to successfully leverage the digital platform we put in place over the past two years.”  

He added that, “As people started to implement social distancing, we moved swiftly by driving further investments toward digital and delivery designed to reduce friction, while increasing convenient access.” 

Delivery remains the fastest-growing segment of Chipotle’s digital offerings. A partnership struck with Uber Eats in March no doubt helps, as it gives the chain access to even more potential diners. Niccol said digital order-ahead transactions were also up, “doubling from the levels seen prior to COVID.” Daily signups for the Chipotle rewards program have spiked “nearly fourfold.”

A recent consumer survey that Niccol referenced on the call said Chipotle customers would return “at a similar or higher rate than before” once the pandemic eases enough to let dining rooms reopen. Given that, Niccol said he expects the company to continue expanding unit volume, margins, and store base in the long term. 

If nothing else, Chipotle’s glowing reports of the last quarter illustrate why it’s so important now for restaurants to be running with a digital and off-premises strategy in place. For smaller businesses with shallower pockets, this of course throws a host of other issues on the table, paying third-party delivery commission fees being one of the ugliest. Smaller restaurants would also typically need to look to third-party platforms that can assist them with building and running the kind of mobile app that functions well, and also address the issue of customer data. 

Right now, most restaurants are just struggling to keep the lights on. For those that manage, pulling from Chipotle’s digital playbook is a move worth considering in the longer term.