Rouses Had No Reservations About Helping Restaurants Find a New Way to Serve James Breuhl was seated at the kitchen table with his wife and kids, scrolling idly through Facebook, when he noticed an alarming pattern in posts by friends in the restaurant business: Only a day or two into the
shelter-in-place order, they were already struggling.
Restaurants operate on notoriously thin margins.
With their doors closed, it was only a matter of
time before the best places to eat across Louisiana and the Gulf Coast — the local restaurants that
give our communities color and flair — would run out of money, and possibly close forever.
“I told my wife, there’s got to be something I can do,” he says. James, the vice president of fresh for Rouses Markets, had an idea: What if we found a way to let restaurants sell their dishes right there in our stores, and let them keep all the profit from it? The epiphany came around nine o’clock at night, but he immediately called Donny Rouse, the company CEO. “I said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?’ And he said, ‘I had the same thought — I was just about to call you. Let’s do it. Pull it together.’” Soon the entire company was mobilized on the project. “I’ll tell you the best thing about being here at Rouses,” says James. “I’ve been here for 13 years, and when we want to do something, we make it happen. There’s not a lot of red tape. You don’t have to run through a lot of processes or a lot of decision makers. And we’re usually on the same page — that phone call to Donny and his blessing made it easy to get everybody on board.” The company’s creative director soon joined the effort, as well as the food service director, accountants and the company’s chief financial officer — everyone, really, right down to the store level. The idea would be to reach out to as many restaurants as possible, and to make sure every penny of every item sold went back to those restaurants. “The most important thing for restaurants right now is cash flow,” says James. “There are not a lot of dollars coming into the restaurants, so we didn’t want to have our normal system, where you would typically pay someone within 30 days, or something like that. We wanted to be able to give them the money they earned so that they could pay their servers, their waiters, their kitchen staff. We are really trying to keep these people employed. Because it’s not just the restaurant you’re helping. It’s the people that you’re helping.” Within 48 hours of James and Donny’s phone call, the first restaurant, Big Mike’s BBQ Smokehouse, had some of its most famous dishes in the Rouses Thibodaux store. “Big Mike’s is a small barbecue joint here in town — literally less than a football field away from one of our stores — and it’s very popular,” says James. “I’d go to his restaurant during the week after work to eat something with the family, and he’d always be there working, so we had a relationship with him.” 2 2 J U N E 20 20
Big Mike's BBQ Smokehouse was the first of many partnerships between Rouses Markets and local restaurants.
Mike Lewis, the owner of Big Mike’s, jumped in with both feet, smoking the meats at his restaurants and prepping the products he normally serves. He portioned out his plates and brought them to the store to sell. Because Rouses had discontinued use of the warm deli shelves at its stores, those shelves were available to display the plated-up meals. So not only could you get a plate from Big Mike’s, but you could get it as it was meant to be eaten: hot off the grill.
Family Meals, Family Fun
Since setting the restaurant plan in motion, Rouses has expanded its partnerships with local dining establishments from Thibodaux to New Orleans, Baton Rouge to Lafayette. “We’re seeing more and more restaurants come on board with us,” says James. “And I can tell you, every day, through our info line, that we’re getting more and more requests from certain restaurants. And we’re trying to help as many as possible.” The way it works is this: Restaurants prepare their best dishes in their own kitchens. The food is transported to Rouses locations using refrigerated trucks when necessary. Stores have designated areas to display the restaurants’ offerings (locations vary depending on the layout of the local Rouses). With the temporary closure of Rouses salad bars, those units can be used to maintain cold temperatures for foods that require that. Big Mike’s, on the other hand, uses the available heated displays to keep their meals warm and ready to go. The needs of the restaurant determine where the food is positioned. “We designate certain stores for each restaurant we are working with — local places that they are comfortable delivering to,” says James. “So what would happen is that they would go to the store in the morning, they would make their deliveries, they would look at
