Quick-service restaurant (QSR) salad chain Saladworks announced on Monday (March 29) that it is partnering with Ghost Kitchens Brands to grow its footprint to almost double the current store count in the U.S. and Canada, adding 90 new “non-traditional” locations before the end of the year. A large portion of these will be in-store kitchens housed in Walmart stores, as the salad chain takes advantage of today’s connected economy to create a place for itself in Walmart shoppers’ routines, integrating the restaurant experience into the traditional superstore consumer journey. By joining these formerly separate experiences, Saladworks has the opportunity to provide consumers with instant convenience while making its restaurants a key part of shoppers’ in-store habits.
The salad chain is a subsidiary of rapidly growing restaurant company WOWorks, a QSR restaurant company that formed in December as a holding company for Centre Lane Partners, LLC, which targets millennial and generation Z consumers with its health-centric branding. One of the four key trends guiding the chain’s approach to commerce is convenience, as it aims to respond to young consumers’ desire for options that “include but are not limited to dine-in, carryout, online ordering, curbside pick-up, delivery, ghost kitchens, food trucks, virtual brands and stores within grocery retailers, airports, hospitals and military bases.”
Sure enough, in addition to meeting young consumers’ desire for store-in-store experiences, all 90 of the new locations (60 in the U.S., 30 in Canada) will offer carryout and delivery options enabled by the Ghost Kitchen Brands partnership, and many will feature limited dine-in seating options. The partnership will also add a handful of new locations for WOWorks’ brands Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh and Frutta Bowls.
“We are very excited to have Saladworks included in this growth vertical to bring our healthy, fresh concept to millions of new guests across North America,” Eric Lavinder, chief development officer for WOWorks, said in a statement. “Ghost kitchens have already proven to be an economical and highly successful expansion tactic for us, and this new deal with Ghost Kitchen Brands will allow us to continue solidifying Saladworks as the leading fast-casual salad brand.”
The “store within a store” concept has boomed in the last year, as the acceleration of the digital shift has increased consumers’ expectations for immediate convenience. Target, for instance, has been growing its store-in-store partnership with Apple, and also recently announced similar a similar partnership with Ulta Beauty, among other store-in-store integrations. Kohl’s and Sephora have a similar partnership.
These kinds of ultra-convenient integrations can be a key way for brands, especially restaurant brands, to integrate themselves into consumers’ shifting routines, as many newly vaccinated people begin to find their new normal. PYMNTS’ new Digitizing Restaurant Payments report finds that 89 percent of top-performing restaurants offer the ability to pick up orders without standing in line compared to only 42 percent of bottom-performing restaurants, and that these top performers are more than three times more likely to offer curbside and drive-thru pickup options than their lower-performing counterparts. Additionally, research from this month’s Delivering on Restaurant Rewards report finds that the average U.S. household is spending 42 percent of their total food order spend online, which is significantly higher than the share spent on in-person orders, suggesting an across-the-board desire for remote convenience.
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