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Below are selected excerpts written by our veteran Restaurants analyst Howard Penney for Ipsos: What The Future (WTF) editorial section. If you are an institutional investor interested in accessing our research email sales@hedgeye.com |
Postcards from the hopeful future
Experts across the food industry responded with their optimistic visions for the other side of the pandemic. Here's Penney's take.
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What the quick-service chains are realizing to a certain degree is how inefficient they were in their dining rooms and how expensive it was to run and that they really don’t need them, frankly. What they’re learning, because they’ve been forced to have no dining rooms, is to go back to their roots and just focus on their core menu. So, it’s going to force them to be even more efficient because these dining rooms could be closed for months now. Pickup will be a much bigger part of the industry than it was, because it has forced companies and concepts who weren’t online to go online. Then in the supermarket industry, they were slow for the adoption. The consumer wasn’t really asking for it in a lot of cases. Now it’s more than a convenience item, it’s a safety issue. |
Postcards from the mixed future
Infection spikes lead communities to slow or reverse reopening plans, further stressing restaurants and dining suppliers. Penney weighs in below.
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In the early stages of the pandemic and I’ll use my personal example, Chef’s Warehouse was a distributor that sold solely to high-end restaurants. And so, their business had been shut down, effectively. They had all this inventory, so they needed to come up with a new channel of distribution. They opened who they were selling to, so now, I can go [there] and buy at much better prices than I can get in a supermarket, or at least equally as good as the supermarket, and certainly much better than a restaurant. I can get it delivered to my house. There are channels of distribution that are being created by companies where I’m getting a better product delivered to my house than I could have probably through Amazon, or through some other delivery channel. So, there is some benefit to the consumer in this. |
Postcards from a woeful future
The third vignette outlines a revolution that could shake up the food industry. Here's Penney's take.
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The market did collapse once. But the Federal Reserve has already said that they’ll buy everything and anything. So they’re going to prop it up and the bigger question is when will that end or if it will end? I don’t know the answer to that question. But when I look at the restaurant industry, I don’t think that they can prop up consumer spending or consumer sentiment around safety and health. |
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About IPSOS
Ipsos is one of the fastest growing market research companies in the U.S., market leader in Canada, and among the most trusted research brands in North America. What the Future (WTF) is a quarterly deep dive into different aspects of consumer and social thought and behavior. Each edition features exclusive new data from world-leading research firm Ipsos. WTF explores how a single industry or behavior fits into the broader culture now and in the coming decades.
