Optimizing Throughput: Unlocking Restaurant Complexities and Innovations with Robin Robison at Modern Market Eatery

Ever wondered how restaurants manage the intricate dance of creating an exceptional dining experience while navigating the challenges of modern-day operations? This episode will be your backstage pass to that world, featuring Robin Robertson, the COO of Modern Market Eatery. Robin uncovers the sheer complexity of restaurant operations and enlightens us on how the guest experience has transformed due to new channels and a persisting labor crisis. Tune in to understand the importance of reducing team member anxiety, fostering a lively atmosphere, and using technology to simplify operations at Modern Market Eatery.

Buckle up as we take a deep dive into the realm of restaurant automation and efficiency as we learn how Modern Market Eatery has harnessed the power of technology to reduce anxiety and increase precision in its operations. Robin sheds light on their future-oriented drive-through designed by the kitchen-first approach and the role of digital tools ensuring accuracy in off-premise settings. He also emphasizes the importance of people retention and spreading joy within their teams. Get a front-row seat as we explore the early stages of a restaurant interview and understand the power of navigating operational complexities. Learn how Modern Market Eatery leverages social media, YouTube, and other digital channels to engage customers and provide a seamless, enjoyable dining experience. Don't miss out on this insightful journey into the heart of restaurant operations.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

We're here at Create this week and recording some very special podcasts for Nations Restaurant News. We're going to be interviewing eight different executives from restaurants and also from the Ambassador Community to explore different themes of each of the chapters of the path to digital maturity.

Speaker 2: 0:51

Hi everyone. Today we are joined by Robin Robertson, who is the COO of Modern Market Eaters, advisory member for Lunchbox and a restaurant leadership conference, and you've got a long operations history with Red Robin, bob Evans and, of course, brinker, and today we're here to talk to you about some of the concepts from our fourth chapter, optimizing Throughbook. And for all the new channels, all the new technology that's come into our restaurants, ops has never been as complex as it is today. So thanks for being here.

Speaker 3: 1:19

Thank you, thanks for having me.

Speaker 4: 1:21

Awesome. The first thing I noticed about Modern Market Eaters is that it is a beautiful, fast, casual experience. The front of house is gorgeous. You offer not only great food but also alcohol patio a lot of reasons to be in the restaurant and yet the majority of sales are off-premise, either takeout or delivery. So tell us a little bit about how operating a business with so many different channels is complex and different than how it used to be.

Speaker 3: 1:51

Our restaurants are so beautiful and so welcoming and yet we continue to drive off-premise, even though our on-prem is much greater than it was six months ago. So I think the complexity really is for our operators, quite honestly, and somewhat for our guests. Years ago you really just took care of dining guests and now you have to figure out what hospitality in a bag versus delivering it to a table. I think the guest is the same. The guest wants accuracy with their food, they want it to be timely. Of course they want it to be delicious, but it's a different component when you're putting it in boxes and bags versus taking it to a table. The complexity level has increased. With that, some of the anxiety has increased in restaurants and just figuring out how to decrease anxiety while delivering on those components for our guests has been the biggest challenge.

Speaker 2: 2:45

It's a good use of the word anxiety, because in many ways, we've had all of this happen at the same time as the labor crisis you know, the biggest labor crisis I think the industry has ever had and so the culture and the way in which you're helping your people be able to handle that anxiety must be particularly important.

Speaker 3: 3:00

It's really interesting to see how our people handle it, and what I've observed is, in a lot of restaurants but modern market obviously, in particular, I'm coming through the line to make sure they're right, because that's what we want. It used to be heads up, smiling, welcoming a guest, noticing people walking by or coming in the restaurant, and so I've really thought a lot about this and done a lot of research around the guest experience itself. How to reduce anxiety with our team is to spread joy within our team. The guest experience isn't going to be better than the team member experience, and so really trying to spread joy amongst our team first, so they can spread joy to our guests and that helps reduce the anxiety.

Speaker 2: 3:48

So, when we talk about the way in which complexity has changed it's always been complex when it comes to restaurants, for sure, but it must have changed quite considerably over the last 10 years Talk to us about what are the key threads of change that you see.

Speaker 3: 4:04

It's mostly around making sure that your use of technology is such that you can simplify operations as much as possible, and what I mean by that is knowing if the order is for off-prem or in the restaurant is important. It dictates whether you use dinin plateware or takeout items. Right? I have what I call my personal board of directors. That is on a text thread, and I'll ask people throughout the industry that are with other restaurant brands how are you guys doing this right and so? Early on during COVID, we didn't have bags that sealed and everybody was afraid, and so we took zip ties and zip tied bags. Now we've gone, to believe it or not, stapling bags on the front side of the expo just to make sure. Once that bag is stapled, it's our seal, it's our promise that everything in that bag is correct, right and delicious.

Speaker 2: 5:01

When you talk about hospitality, you answer your first question and then the simplicity aspect there and the way in which hospitality all the way gets through to the guest on their kitchen table. We were reported, I think one in three drivers were potentially taking a French fry or something for the bags and the worst times of it. So you can understand why restaurants have had to adapt to that.

Speaker 4: 5:24

Do you have a favorite piece of technology that you feel like really helps the team get out of the weeds and be able to pull up and, as you said, have their head up and looking out at the guest rather than down at the task that they're doing?

Speaker 3: 5:38

I want to know two things. Number one is in our newest restaurants we've gone away from big screens where team members have to look up at the screen, read what's on the screen and then look down. So we actually have printers that will print for each item a sticky sheet, piece of paper that allows the team member to be looking at the item and look at the sheet and see exactly what's supposed to be on that item. So it's really simplified for them. Does this match this? We know now this is the ticket that matches this bowl, whether it's takeout or dine-in. The other thing is getting somebody on the front side of our expo. So we prior we're behind the line, heads down, just making items as fast as we can. We're fast, casual. Now we've tried to position as frequently as possible somebody on the front side that can greet, from a hospitality perspective, the drivers that are coming in or guests as well, the guests that are coming in to pick food up or deliver food to the table in a very personable, hospitable, friendly way.

Speaker 4: 6:48

So, specifically in the back of house, we talk in chapter four of our second book a lot about determining group capacity. As you think about doing that inside of the modern market restaurant, how do you determine the group capacity Like, how many dishes can you put out in an hour? What makes that hard?

Speaker 3: 7:08

The interesting thing for us was during COVID. Right at the start of COVID we had decided to remodel a restaurant and part of that remodel was to put in a double-sided line. And the theory of this double-sided line was to have team members that could work both sides of the line at the same time. Now a lot of companies have gone to a secondary line somewhere else. I always felt that that was a lot to manage to stop somebody there and here, as well as product right, the first in, first out, and how do you do all that? And who knows? To somebody for thinking of it.

Speaker 3: 7:44

We just took a little different spin and said we're going to produce everything from the same line. It's just when we get busy we're going to turn on line B. So we have line A going, we'll turn on line B. All sales are going through that line. And ultimately, back to the question about throughput. We've been able to not precisely determine throughput but to be able to say in this particular restaurant, very high volume that we can do four to $4,500 in an hour of sales. And our metric of success is ticket times. So we've been able to keep the ticket time around that three minute or undermark, whereas the rest of our system, other than our brand new restaurant that also has a double-sided line, is around that six to seven minute mark. So we know that it's working. We know that it takes volume better than anything else, so much so that we are actually building a drive-through restaurant for the person.

Speaker 4: 8:46

And just to describe that for people who haven't not seen it and are listening, many restaurants, as you said, have two lines. So imagine a Chipotle with their front make line and then the back, what they call digital kitchen. Two separate lines, each of them fully staffed, each of them with their own set of ingredients that they're cooking down, and in your restaurant you've got a single set of ingredients that are shared by two make lines and so the staff is pulling from the same pool of ingredients to make things. So that's what you're describing, so you're able to get that almost 2x in output benefit without doubling the amount of ingredients on the line that they're pulling from and therefore, potentially, the prep hours, the waste, all of those that go with it One line where you have people working on both sides, as you described, meredith, you know by your hourly sales or half hour sales when to project, having that B side turned on and staffing it appropriately and you're able, with your technology, to toggle that B side on and off.

Speaker 4: 9:49

Exactly that's great.

Speaker 2: 9:52

So your newest process I think it's called Fit Simmons which you have to tell us the story behind the name Fit Simmons, but it takes a fundamentally different approach to driving through. But can you take us through the important innovations attributed to that model and what drove the brand's decisions to deploy them Fit?

Speaker 3: 10:07

Simmons. First I grew up in Colorado, so this is a Colorado restaurant and Fit Simmons used to be an army base and so at that time when I was growing up it was just it was just an army base and it's now shifted to basically a medical center. So it's training of medical professionals. It's four different hospital systems right across the street from us. They've kept the history of the word Fit Simmons, but complete shift in what the area represents. So lots of wonderful housing going up. We tend to boost our sales. We took the earnings from the first restaurant, that high volume restaurant with the double-sided line to Fit Simmons and said we can build this in a brand new restaurant, and so we did.

Speaker 3: 10:54

We don't have any hoods in the restaurant it's completely electrical, no gas, which a lot of cities are going to across the US. So we tried to stay a little bit ahead of that and test that out and we put in the double-sided line and we've seen just an amazing replication of the first restaurant, with ticket times being low, the line being able to turn on when we need it to, especially with the catering component in there. So it's been a huge win for us.

Speaker 4: 11:26

I love that. You know we say often that electrification is a precondition to automation. It's very difficult to automate gas and I think we see that with cars. Right, nobody went out and tried to make an automated combustion engine it would be way too hard. Instead, tesla created an electric car so that they could automate it. It was much easier and, yes, there are cities that, for environmental reasons, are dictating all electric kitchens, but I think that all electric kitchen is going to enable future automation that we haven't even thought of it right.

Speaker 4: 11:57

You know we're right now in this early stages of innovation, trying to create robots and all these things, but you're able to use something like a smart oven or sous vide cooking in order to replicate the food outcome, taste the fame. That can be at least semi automated in some of the steps along the way, right, yeah.

Speaker 3: 12:17

So what's interesting about our ovens, our combi ovens, icombies is that our culinary team can download recipes through the internet to the oven, and then every team has the exact same recipe at the exact same time.

Speaker 4: 12:34

So automation, having to be trained on through this step and then do these things, I could think say I'm in a cash button, especially with your full service background. That is so different from having to train a line cook, right?

Speaker 3: 12:45

So different, yeah, and the consistency of the product. I mean, let's be honest, there's the opportunity with the human element to not make it, and this helps eliminate at least one piece of that Amazing.

Speaker 2: 12:59

About three teams that are working in that concept. They must be enjoying that. It's been purpose built and so it's almost more seamless, more frictionless for them to be able to operate in. I was listening to Frances Allen, the CEO of the Checkers and Rallies, a few weeks back at a conference and she said their drive through of the future was designed by the kitchen first, and so it must be quite empowering for them just to feel how frictionless it feels.

Speaker 3: 13:22

No, it's empowering and right. You just you see people stand up a little straighter in that restaurant when we bring people through to show off the Simmons. You can just see the glow in people's face and I think it comes from reducing that anxiety. It's just easy for our teams on all kinds of levels. The other thing we did there was we put our prep area basically right behind the make line. So next to that oven and next to the walk in sits our prep area, so the prep person can be prepping something. But look up and see if I need to shift and go to the line to support. So that slide deployment becomes so much easier.

Speaker 4: 14:08

So for those people who have not had the pleasure of eating at Modern Market Eatery which I imagine is quite a few of our listeners, because most of the stores are in Colorado and Texas and Arizona nearby, but really in the center of the country the menu is, incredibly from a consumer standpoint complex, right. There are so many interesting varieties, really rich cultural infusion into the food. It is very different from standard fast food and yet you're talking about take a time of three minutes, right, and that that to me is incredible and I think that speaks to the value of this technology, that it isn't just take something fast to make it faster, take something cheap and make it cheaper. It's actually enabling us to unlock, take something elevated and make it faster and cheaper, right?

Speaker 3: 14:59

Yeah? And I would add to that that the technology isn't holding a bunch of holding units where it's pre-done to get to that three-minute tick of time. These items are being produced in the moment as they come in. So the real magic, I would say, is in the prep area, making sure that everything's ready for the line so that those items can be made quickly and efficiently. We were talking about the combi ovens. We take the approach to cook less more often in our combi ovens. So if it's 10 pieces of salmon to get us started for the day or the evening, then let's stay with 10, based on product mix, and then cook more frequently throughout the day, but not cook a bunch off and hold it, which is just an amazing product then. Yeah, that's fantastic.

Speaker 4: 15:49

So we talked a little bit in accuracy around the use of the sticky chips on the line to help ensure accuracy. What other tips do you have, particularly an off-premise setting where it's not easy to course correct when something goes wrong? What tips do you have for ensuring accuracy in that environment?

Speaker 3: 16:06

This one is really interesting because my first response is a human response versus a technology response. My human response is let's focus on retaining people, Because we know when we retain people in this industry at large, when we retain people, they get better at their jobs, they become more proficient at their jobs, they're able to know exactly what goes into what item, almost by second nature. So I would say, first and primarily is retention of our people, creating that joy that I talked about with your internal team, and shifting from finding people and interviewing people and hiring people to retaining people, I think has to be the primary shift. To be honest, we did ourselves a bit of a disservice, and rightly so. With COVID, we were one of the very first industries to shut it all down. Restaurants just shut down, as you guys know, and we pivoted really quickly and opened it up for off-prem, but we reduced to three, four or five people in every restaurant from the staff of 30 or 20. So people trusting us in this industry. We have an opportunity to rebuild that trust.

Speaker 3: 17:17

All of that said, from a technology perspective, I think again, those sticky chits help. By the time the items get to our expo station, the chit is on the item and the expo has the opportunity to look at that. But then look at their screen and say all of this goes together either in this bag or on this tray to be delivered to the guest. And so we've made it somewhat easier in that everything on the screen will tell the expo is it a dine-in guest? Is it a door dash the redasher that's coming in. Is it a pub hub? Is it a guest coming in picking up a web pickup? So all of that information is readily available at expo so that the mechanism by which the guest gets the food is really accurate?

Speaker 4: 18:05

Do you find that sharing that information and then also making it easier to execute for all of the other things that we just talked about actually help the side benefit of reducing turnover in the restaurant?

Speaker 3: 18:17

I would say yes, overall. That helps it to improve.

Speaker 2: 18:19

It's interesting for me because we know now, of course, at accuracy levels it's being monitored by each of the marketplaces. If you have a problem unit that has problem with accuracy, it's going to affect where your Store appears on on the listings, and so even that level of transparency must help you, from position of an executive Overlooking everything for all the operations, to be out of the pinpoint where particular problems are happening.

Speaker 3: 18:43

Yeah, we have a bi tool that we use that pulls in all the third party platforms For accuracy and missing items, so the teams can see in one place, which is really nice, whether or not they are being accurate by platform and whether they're missing items and if the guest houses with that is that's missing right there in one spot. So and we've been very, very low, with around 2% in accuracy and as much as that board ash says that that is in the upper quartile.

Speaker 2: 19:20

Haven't heard of any two percent up there. Let's finish up a question that we get to ask. A lot is all around Automation the the restaurant of the future. So I'm curious for your take how is automation going to help you and your business Find further efficiencies in the future?

Speaker 3: 19:36

I Think the interesting thing about automation for us is Kind of what's next? We've always been on the forefront of innovation and being small and willing. We want to Intertain things that will help us continue to be better. One of the things I've seen recently are Cameras that look down over the line. That will actually, you know, tell you whether an item or an ingredient is missing in an item, based on the way it was ordered. So we're really interested in that piece as well. So I'd say that's the big one we're looking at. Probably a few months down the road we have to get our drive-thru kickback properly burns. But we've also been working on how our menu boards are presented for our guests. And how does that look? In the restaurant it has to look beautiful and be easy for our guests to read, but online has to represent the same thing with beautiful visual views with our amazing food, and then apply that all to a drive-thru and what's correct to happen in a drive-thru as well. So it should be interesting the next few months.

Speaker 2: 20:46

Yes, we are certainly in the early innings of all of this still, aren't we but, robin, thank you so much for joining us today, looking forward to keeping in touch, and that we wish you all the very best of luck. We will. We've got the body. You should show everyone the yes.

Speaker 4: 21:01

Ambulatic of how beautiful the restaurant is. That one of the nicest water bottles I've ever seen, and that just tells everyone who can't see the restaurant what the restaurant looks like beautiful.

Speaker 3: 21:11

Thanks for having me.

Speaker 5: 21:11

Thanks. The digital restaurant podcast is available for you to follow and subscribe. Wherever you listen to your Podcasts, watch us, rate us and subscribe to the digital restaurant on YouTube, and follow along on all our social media Digital restaurant channels. Thanks for listening you.