How can a business make the customer experience they offer more compelling?
One way is to stop thinking about the product being sold so literally and think about how it fits in the broader context of the customer.
Most grocery stores sell food products and they do so at very low margins in a highly competitive environment. The following excerpt from Karola Saeket’s article San Francisco Chronicle illustrated how a growing number of “growing” companies have put food products “in-context.”
“It’s 4:30 in the afternoon. do you know where your dinner is coming from?
Surveys claim that nearly half of working Americans don’t know and rely on last-minute stopgap solutions. That frequently means fast food or other high-fat takeout. All too often, members of a household end up “dining” in a solitary garb-and-run pattern.
A wide range of commercial products and services aim to keep the hallowed tradition of the family dinner from going the way of the butter churn and the wood-burning stove. The latest wrinkle: the meal assembly kitchen.
In a nutshell, it’s a place where customers can put together as many as a dozen family-size main courses-chicken crepes with cheese and bacon, maple-soy glazed salmon, vegetarian chili, summer ribs with chipotle barbecue sauce-and a few deserts, such as cinnamon peach crisp, strawberry cheesecake or bread pudding. Yet, it is not a cooking class.
When registering for a session, customers pick from a monthly changing menu, generally featuring 14 dishes. All ingredients are pre-prepared and lined up at individual workstations, along with the few needed utensils. Assembly instructions are clearly posted, step by step, so no cooking skills are required.
The staff takes care of all cleanup …the whole process takes about two hours.
…after each meal is assembled, it is packaged for the home freezer and labeled with instructions no more complicated than those on mass-produced frozen entries …a home-cooked family dinner for four to six people appears on the table.
The cost is usually between $2.75 and $4 per person.
Why are the numbers of these types of businesses growing and even being franchised? People want the experience they deliver. It is more than the prepared food and it is more than the price. People want to be engaged in producing “family meals”, meals that are nutrition and fit their busy lifestyle.
