Restaurant Roundup: Restaurants Bend Over Backwards To Reach Gen Z

Beyond Meat is bringing plant-based chicken tenders to almost 400 restaurants. The company launched its Beyond Chicken Tenders on Thursday (July 8), noting the surging demand for fried chicken.

This widescale foodservice launch comes just weeks after it became clear that, for all the growing interest in plant-based meat substitutes, the company’s options do not always prove the most popular. Dunkin’ confirmed in late June that it had scaled way back on its partnership with the alternative protein company, limiting its Beyond Breakfast Sausage sandwich to just 10 states.

Still, plant-based options remain an important frontier for restaurants, with the global plant-based market projected to reach over $20 billion by 2030, up from $7 billion in 2020. This is an especially key category to reach Gen Z consumers. A 2019 report found that Gen Z-ers were more than twice as likely to report eating a flexitarian diet than older boomers, and a June report found that 71 percent of Gen Z-ers would be willing to switch to alternative proteins for the sake of the planet.

Beyond Meat stopped producing its original chicken substitute in 2019, a decision that the company attributes to capacity constraints.

“The demand for our beef products really started to pick up to the point where we really had to allocate all of production capacity to it,” the company’s CEO Ethan Brown told CNBC. “So we decided to discontinue, which was also motivated by the fact that we wanted to make it better.”

Chipotle Accepts Resumes via TikTok

In another move to get Gen Z onboard, Chipotle Mexican Grill is looking to find workers via the video social media platform TikTok, recruiting applicants through the TikTok Resumes feature, the restaurant brand announced on Thursday (July 8).

The feature, which launched Wednesday (July 7), is still in its pilot stage. It allows applicants to submit video resumes using the platform’s video creating and editing tools, and the launch comes with a series of application advice content including livestreams and links to popular career advice accounts.

Chipotle’s announcement comes in the midst of the industry-wide labor shortage. Entry-level employees at quick-service restaurants (QSRs) tend to be quite young, as do restaurant workers in general. Across the industry as a whole, the median employee age is 28.8, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, which is significantly lower than the overall median age of the United States labor force, 42.5.

So, if a restaurant wants to reach these young potential employees, TikTok may be a great place to start. According to one report, more than 60 per cent of TikTok users are Gen Z, while this age group is estimated to make up just about one fifth of the total U.S. population.

“Given the current hiring climate and our strong growth trajectory, it’s essential to find new platforms to directly engage in meaningful career conversations with Gen-Z,” said Marissa Andrada, the restaurant chain’s Chief Diversity, Inclusion and People Officer, said in a statement. “TikTok has been ingrained into Chipotle’s DNA for some time and now we’re evolving our presence to help bring in top talent to our restaurants.”

Deliveroo Adds 400 Tech Jobs as Sales Soar

It is a big week for London-based delivery service Deliveroo. While reporting an 88 percent increase in quarterly food orders and upping its projections for the future to predict that gross transaction value (GTV) will grow by 50 to 60 percent in 2021, the company is making a major investment in the tech side of its business. Reuters reported that, over the course of the next year, the company will bring on 400 more software engineers, data scientists, and designers. Excluding gig drivers, the company currently has just over 2,000 full-time employees.

The news comes shortly after the company made headlines for its employment structure in late June, when Britain’s Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal by a union seeking to represent the company’s drivers, ruling that these couriers are self-employed.

The company went public in April. On Thursday (July 8), the company revealed that it saw 76 percent year-over-year GTV growth for the quarter immediately following its initial public offering (IPO). Despite these soaring sales, the addition of hundreds of new employees suggests that the company is focused less on driving up margins in the immediate future and more on building towards long-term growth.

FAT Brands Goes All-In On Mexico

International franchising company FAT Brands announced Thursday (July 8) that it is bringing its Fatburger and Buffalo’s Express brands to Mexico with 50 co-branded stores right off the bat, marking the fourteenth global market for the brand pair.

“We’re excited to bring the popularity of Fatburger and Buffalo’s Express to Mexico, where the fast casual market is growing steadily year after year,” said FAT Brands CEO Andy Wiederhorn in a statement. “The Fatburger and Buffalo’s Express model has been well received on an international level with recent growth in Singapore and France. We are always looking to continue to expand our footprint throughout the world.”

In its most recent quarter, FAT Brands’ domestic locations underperformed, with the company seeing 28.1 percent year-over-year sales growth in the United States and 54.2 percent growth in non-U.S. markets. However, same-store sales were higher in the U.S. than abroad, 8.7 percent versus 4.9 percent, suggesting that the company’s strong international growth is due in large part to its growing store count.