Building a food-based business can be particularly difficult. Providing consistently fresh meals and creating an exceptional customer experience must always be balanced with often-complicated tasks, such as ordering materials, minimizing waste, and ensuring that your team is following best practices around food safety. By Tamara Rahoumi
Building a food-based business can be particularly difficult. Providing consistently fresh meals and creating an exceptional customer experience must always be balanced with often-complicated tasks, such as ordering materials, minimizing waste, and ensuring that your team is following best practices around food safety. Yet, while the industry can be tough to navigate, there’s also never been a better time to get in.
“More than ever, people aren’t cooking at home and are getting their food from restaurants,” said Alex Garmezy, director of franchise development at Taziki’s Mediterranean Cafe. This has created a stronger demand for high-quality, fast-casual food options. In fact, industry forecast data from Technavio suggests that fast-casual restaurants in the U.S. will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8% per year through 2025, which will contribute to a $28.8 billion increase in market share between 2020 and 2025.
Partnering with Taziki’s as a franchise owner is a great opportunity to double down on this accelerated growth of fast-casual dining. With its established framework, proprietary technology, and trend-based innovation, the thriving restaurant – which specializes in fresh and affordable Mediterranean-inspired fare with an American twist – has created a sustainable model for success that continues to evolve with consumer tastes and trends.
For one thing, Taziki’s has recently reimagined its physical locations in order to cater to a greater volume of takeout and delivery meals. “Right now, only 35% of our business is dining in,” said Garmezy. “That doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t continue to open restaurants; it just means we need to be smarter about the way that we serve our guests. At Taziki’s, we’ve spent the last 24 months building takeout shelving units and figuring out the placement, since the restaurants weren’t designed with that in mind. Now, we’re opening our first store with a fully pre-built, (rear-loading, guest-facing) shelving space that looks intentional. It’s not rocket science, but it’s also not always easy to make changes to your store layout. We figured out a way that we think is a win for everyone.”
This shift toward dining out has also created a need for Taziki’s to reimagine the customer experience so that the positive atmosphere and energy created for dine-in customers can be replicated for customers enjoying their meals at home.
“We’re not changing the look or vibe of Taziki’s,” said Garmezy, referencing the vibrant, neighborly spirit of the Mediterranean on which the business was built. “We still want to be able to deliver that overall experience and energy for guests who don’t dine in the restaurant.” To accomplish that, Garmezy notes that the team is not only thoughtful of how it communicates Taziki’s vibe through marketing and social media, but it’s also invested a lot in creating a unique experience through packaging that customers will feel excited about.
In addition to adapting the restaurant layout to better fit consumer behavior and dining trends, Garmezy is particularly confident in Taziki’s best-in-class tech stack. The proprietary restaurant management software easily sets franchisees up for success by simplifying raw-material ordering, food prep, and sales management.
For those with a passion for food or a dream of owning a restaurant, franchising offers an accessible, lower-risk way to have your cake and eat it or, feed it to the masses too. In the case of Taziki’s Mediterranean Cafe, you might be trading that cake in for a gyro, but the philosophy couldn’t be more accurate all the same.
Tamara Rahoumi