The Foodservice Worker Shortage Impact on the Industry
As a strategic marketing specialist in the food sector, I spend a lot of time speaking with foodservice, catering, and hospitality food and equipment suppliers. So naturally, the foodservice worker shortage is one of their top issues.
The foodservice business is an essential aspect of any community in today’s society, where convenience is in great demand. Restaurants, schools, caterers, hospital cafeterias, and enterprises that prepare meals outside of the house for these institutions to serve their consumers with ease are all included.
Foodservice workers are driving just one of the many issues plaguing the restaurant industry today. From the Covid-19 shutdowns wage hikes to labor shortages, supply chain stoppages, and inflation pressure, restaurants are squeezed on all sides.
Food processors and equipment manufacturers know that a lack of operational staffing hampers the foodservice industry’s sales. Therefore, the top suppliers will see the business’s current situation as a catalyst, a chance to innovate around the foodservice worker scarcity to boost sales and profits across the board.
In a recent Forbes article, I dial into the foodservice worker issue first by looking back at an industry shaped by entrepreneurial innovation and lay out an argument that although there may be some attrition suppliers and foodservice institutions—from restaurants to schools, or hospitals to prisons or cafeterias—innovation will lead to a new era of success.
Here are snippets of the article:
Foodservice Meal Innovation To Drive Consistency And Profit
…foodservice suppliers have developed pre-prepared meals that restaurants can resell to customers to heat and eat in their own homes. Convenience is a huge factor in the foodservice industry, and these types of advancements make it easier for customers to get what they are looking for more efficiently and quickly.
What’s Old Is New Again?
With common meal-prep practices already in place, the market ripe for innovation appears when the consumer orders and receives the meal. This may look like Automats — meal vending restaurants — that were very popular from the early 1900s to the 1950s.
Foodservice Equipment Development
…food equipment suppliers are developing automation for certain aspects of foodservice production by minimizing the staffing required to run conventional equipment or substituting manual labor with robotics.
The Role Of Marketing In Innovation
Research and development (R&D) efforts are shaped in large part by marketing. Foodservice meal innovation, for example, has been a study issue for numerous years, even though the labor scarcity trend is recent.
R&D is essential to success: a 3D printer company whose technology can print foods such as ham and quiche.
As a strategic marketing specialist in the food industry, I spend a lot of time speaking with foodservice, catering, and hospitality food and equipment providers. One of their main concerns—and I’m sure we’ve all seen the news—is a shortage of foodservice employees.
If you’d like to learn more about how NewPoint Marketing helps food and beverage brands succeed in the foodservice space, don’t hesitate to contact us via our contact page. Alternatively, if you’d prefer to choose a day and time that works best for you, please click here to schedule a call, Zoom, or Teams meeting with us.
To identify and isolate areas for improvement in shopper marketing program strategies and tactics to further your CPG brand growth against set KPIs:
Maximize the economic performance of your CPG brand shopper marketing investment
Increase velocity at retail and consumer brand affinity
This shopper marketing audit will detail and contrast your CPG brand shopper marketing and messaging versus that of industry standard competitive practices and will include, but not limited to:
Target market reach, integrated retail marketing support, promotional continuity & awareness, offers and incentives, and tactical execution timing
Go-to-market launch strategies, timing, and tactical execution
Deliverables
Marketing Communication Audit Report
The deliverable will be a white paper with NewPoint Marketing findings and recommendations related to marketing activities in one retail partnership or DMA/market as defined by the client.
Brant brings 20+ years of experience to NewPoint as chief brand communicator and marketing-plan contributor.
Brant’s specialty is bringing an outside, investigative perspective that can feel alternately “rigorous” or “exasperating” depending on your point of view. Yet, he never fails to uncover a business’s unique selling proposition—one which can serve as a brand foundation for marketing that is compelling, creative and “sticky.”
Throughout his career, Brant’s applied his skill set to a broad range of business applications along the food supply-and-service chain. His services have provided vital clarity for all types of operations, from the more conventional food and food equipment manufacturers to the adjacent enterprises that partner with them, such as the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
Stephanie Bossung
Food industry marketing expertise—from retail to food-service and food-service equipment— is a natural outcome of having deep knowledge in every facet of a business’ operation. With 10 years in branding and business development, preceded by 15 years in mass media and promotions, Stephanie is an FMI Emerge mentor, holds an executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, media, and production management.
This exceptionally diverse skill set adds value for NewPoint clients by providing a full complement of perspectives on food-industry brand management endeavors.
Wired for a hawkish attention to detail while also maintaining a high-resolution view of the big picture, Stephanie is uniquely able to provide astute branding direction and simultaneously apply the business principles necessary to squeeze more bang out of every marketing buck.
Patrick Nycz
A member of the Forbes Agency Council and quoted in the New York Times, USA Today and Adweek, Patrick Nycz is the author of Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain: Marketing Strategies to Grow Local and Regional Food Brands. He is an FMI Emerge mentor, an American Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award winner, and the Founding President of NewPoint Marketing, a full-service food industry marketing firm focused on food industry brands On a mission to grow.
Patrick’s vision for NewPoint emerged from his team’s success using this proven model for food industry clients and is fueled by NewPoint-funded food buyers and food manufacturers research around tracking consumer, industry, and ongoing food trends.
Kristy Blair
Since starting her 20-year career in commercial graphic design at one of the foremost catalog retailers in the world, Kristy’s visual branding skills have organically narrowed into the food-industry niche.
In that time, she’s directed graphic identities for snack food and restaurant startups, print materials for multiple agricultural seed companies, display graphics and merchandiser signage for major food-equipment manufacturers and everything in between.
Today, as one of the key brand architects for NewPoint clients, she continues to lead our visual research & development team, always working to find the innovative median between the best practices worth honoring and the accepted rules worth breaking.