Thinking outside the

Thinking outside of the PIZZA BOX

Michele Young - an industry professional with 20 plus years in the sector both nationally and internationally - is director of Foodservice Support Ltd (www.foodservicesupport.co.uk), an independent business which she set up in 2010 to off er creative and commercial solutions for growth to businesses in the food industry.

Michele Young, director of Foodservice Support Ltd, considers how the pizza sector has changed and reacted to the Covid situation in recent times.

INCREASING COMPETITION

Pizza has everything going for it - universal appeal, aff ordability, just enough for one or big enough to tear and share, and the ultimate Friday night takeaway and synonymous with delivery for decades. So, has the pandemic really changed anything about the way our pizza restaurants or businesses need to work going forward?

Consumers still expect their pizza to arrive fresh and hot, and with a smile, whether they are sitting comfortably at the table in your outlet or on the receiving end of a home delivery. So, attention to detail is paramount when it comes to quality, not just for the product but in every aspect of the customer journey, and this will continue to diff erentiate the winners from the losers.

The growth in demand for food delivery is advantageous on the one hand, since it means more people have turned to home delivery this year (some for the fi rst time), and therefore the weekly treat has certainly become ingrained in many households. However, there are numbers being quoted around the tens of thousands of new food concepts now listed on national delivery platforms since 2019, which means that the competition overall has intensifi ed, and the fi ght for share of ‘Friday night’ stomach on delivery platforms is real.

The need for delivery services is defi nitely here to stay, but the

convenience aspect of it has moved outside of the traditional four walls and typical household printed leaflet drops and has now moved online and become fully digital. Whether you run your own delivery service and/or app, or are reliant on one of the national aggregator platforms, there is a real need to get an understanding of how to increase your potential for online ordering and sales.

ONLINE EDGE

Mastering the ability of ensuring visibility, and serving messages at the right time, to the right audience, stimulating demand online and then optimising the spend and sales is vital. If you are not a digital expert it may mean you need to enlist some help or support from a digital guru to guide you through the process. There is a degree of intrigue amongst many about how the delivery platform algorithms can affect your ranking and visibility but ultimately a lot has to do with the operational KPI’s. So make sure you know what these are and are monitoring them daily. Building your brand online is the best way to ensure you can continue to have a direct dialogue with your loyal fans/followers and keep top of mind and the best medium right now to engage and entertain your audience is through social media. Especially at a time when dine-in has been subject to so many different restrictions across the country, social media has played a key role in helping to maintain a presence in people’s minds.

It’s been great to see how quickly some businesses have been able to pivot and adapt to new consumer habits and behaviours. Over the last weeks and months I’ve seen plenty of innovative ideas being played out on social media, which have created a bit of a buzz. Take Yardsale Pizza, for example, who have been running a postcode lottery initiative for their new opening in East Dulwich with a chance of winning pizza for every house in the street. I’m sure you’d be everyone’s favourite neighbour if you won that!

Where I live, in the Chilterns, some local businesses like Kneadwoodfired Pizzas, who have a mobile unit, have started doing pop-ups and weekly residences in different areas around the county. They’re mostly using community social media pages to announce the date and times when they’ll be parked up ready for you to collect your meal.

CREATIVE

And when I did manage a five day trip to Cornwall in October, I found some great examples of local community spirit with quite a few smaller pizza kiosks who had collaborated with their neighbours and partnered with local pubs to offer a pizza at table service – thus allowing the wet-led pubs to stay open.

Some great initiative has been shown also by some of the smaller groups like Pizza Pilgrims and Franco Manca who jumped on the idea of home meal kits or DIY boxes with their “pizza in the post” activity. That’s the beauty of being a smaller, more agile business, as when it comes to new ideas and innovation a small team can certainly take advantage and react much faster and is often willing to try new ideas faster than some of the bigger players or chains.

Being in a restaurant environment obviously gives us more opportunity to create a theme or consistent message at every touchpoint with different creative executions, but the contents of the takeout or delivery bag or box can also be enhanced to create an equally memorable at-home experience.

I recently saw a pizza box with music from ipizza ibiza – which effectively included a QR code to download a playlist so that people at home could enjoy a party atmosphere while they devour their pizza! The entertainment opportunities like this are endless – after a summer of Zoom meetings and Houseparty apps, it no longer sounds strange if you talk about creating virtual platforms where friends could join together online to break the (garlic) bread and share a slice.

Further afield in some international locations, I’ve seen group, party and corporate catering being advertised widely by pizza and Italian restaurant brands and locations like Eataly have been running kids’ birthday party programmes for some time with small groups of kids enjoying some pizza making alongside other activities. Any ideas like this or other entertainment or music can help to sweat the assets. I’m sure that activities like this will come back into play once we return to a near-normal lifestyle again, so creating events in your location or even a ‘home party package’ could be a new way forward for some.