Specialist
Former Senior Executive at McDonald’s Corp & Former Senior Executive, North America at Subway
Agenda
- Quick-service restaurant (QSR) competitive and customer experience trends
- Third-party delivery growth and integration 3. Outlook through 2020
Questions
1.
What trends are going on in the QSR space and are they headwinds or tailwinds? How we should think about the exposure of some players to these trends?
2.
What type of players do you see with the most or least exposure to some of the trends you’ve mentioned? I imagine that McDonald’s can afford some AI investment but how do the smaller players on the scale measure up to this and how is the impact?
3.
How should we think about the competitive landscape going on in the QSR space right now? Where’s the most competition coming from? How do the players handle it, are they nimble enough to change around? Who do you see winning the most market share?
4.
SP II, you mentioned the ghost kitchen aspect. Do you see it as really prominent today or is this a future implication of the competitive landscape? Is it actually something going on and how is it impacting the players? What’s your projection?
5.
SP I, how have you seen discounting used competitively throughout the space? What are the strategies and what are players discounting the hardest? What are the costs to really drive traffic by giving out margins?
6.
Is the bundling strategy bringing in more revenue than it’s turning away? How does it align with consumer preference and the price sensitivity at this QSR part of the market?
7.
Would you say that the more franchised a QSR is, the lower is the likelihood to use deep discounts going forward?
8.
Have you seen anything interesting happen with respect to the West Coast, East Coast, north, south, middle? Are you aware of any players making certain moves in certain geographies in the US?
9.
James, what are the general expectations for a new franchise, how does a new location for a QSR behave and what type of brands typically do well off the bat? Which new franchises in the QSR, achieve large growth year one and why?
10.
If we look at the different consumer generations, how are spending habits varying by age or demographics, boomers vs millennials? Which players are best positioned to deal with the generation gap and what would you expect to see going forward?
11.
SP II, how are players such as Starbucks doing with selling pre-packaged drinks and meals? How is this shifting with consumer preferences, what’s fuelling this? What are your thoughts on the impact going forward on QSRs, do you expect pre-packaged meals to be a driver or a headwind going forward?
12.
How are consumers’ food preferences behaving? How are all the different categories – burger joints, pizza, chicken – doing from a high point of view? How are these being impacted by the shift to healthier and what’s the overall impact on the average cheque?
13.
James, do you have any ballpark figures of what a premium customer is willing to pay for healthier food vs an average burger or pizza?
14.
How does the investment in technology look across the QSR space? Are any players overinvesting or underinvesting with respect to technology? What are the varying types of tech and the respective impact?
15.
SP I, if we look at the ability for some of the players to leverage customer data, how do they apply AI in machine learning to this type of data and what type of return on investment or what type of tangible difference would you expect to see? What might optimising the menu boards entail and what would be the implications?
16.
Looking at the use and growth of kiosk use in QSR locations, what are your thoughts on prevalency, use case and maybe the economics of how that fixed cost compares to labour cost? What do you expect to see investment wise, going forward?
17.
What’s the point of view for how prevalent third-party delivery is for QSRs right now? Does the food travel well, is this something that customers will be leveraging if they’re going to order food, why don’t they order something with a little bit of a higher calibre? What are your thoughts on this playing into the QSR space and if there’s a preferred third-party delivery system that you’ve seen the QSRs leverage?
18.
Pizza places generally have their own delivery system set up. What are your thoughts on QSR pizza being impacted by third-party delivery and maybe these QSRs’ ability to negotiate take rates based on size –if they are larger, are they going to get more favourable terms?
19.
Do you have any closing thoughts or maybe a contrarian point of view on the QSR space as a whole?
