Rebecca Kent (host): Welcome to this JLL podcast. I’m Rebecca Kent your host, conducting this podcast from the confines of my bedroom, where I am destined to remain I think for as long as Covid-19 continues to define how we work.
I’m joined by Abigail Campion who is the national placemaking and customer experience manager across APAC for JLL, and Suzee Brain, director of food retail consultancy Brain & Poulter.
Good morning. How are you doing?
Suzee Brain: Good morning, Bec. Welcome to the inside workings of the Brain & Poulter office.
Abigail Campion: Welcome to the inside of my kitchen!
RK: So we’re talking retail here. The coronavirus pandemic has had massive implications for food and beverage retailers of all types, all shapes and sizes and in all locations.
Suzee, can you give me an idea of what types of food retailers are being affected and how. Including the profile of the owners, for example mum and dad franchisees, or single chain owners. Just give us an idea of the scale of the people that have been impacted.
SB: It’s definitely a pandemic across the food service industry. To put it into context there’s about 60,000 cafes, restaurants and takeaways in Australia. Plus pubs and clubs on top of that. So we’re talking about a big business sector and source of employment.
Pretty much everyone has been affected. Based on announcements from the prime minister, all bars are now closed completely. Hotels - all their licensed areas, so their restaurants and bars - are all now closed. Clubs are now closed. Restaurants and cafes can only serve takeaway customers. For takeaway places, people cannot sit in the takeaway area to consume their food. That applies to food courts as well. Food courts can still serve takeaway food but no one can sit in the food court to consume that food.
So, it’s a whole new world. We can still get coffee. That’s the great news so far. We can all exist on coffee. But we must not all have a meeting together over coffee.
AC: That includes outdoor eating areas as well.
SB: That’s affecting everyone, Bec. So, we’ve got celebrity chefs like Matt Moran closing his businesses. The bar tsar Justin Hemmes is closing all his businesses, and attempting to come back with some takeaway strategies but nothing in place yet. And it goes all the way down to the mum-and pops that have been serving us lunches as the bottom of our office buildings for 40-years-plus, all being affected by the social distancing strategies.
RK: It’s a very worrying situation for many of these retailers. What are their options? What are the options for these people right now? How can they make the best out of this situation?
SB: The number one thing is they need to pivot to some sort of takeaway and delivery model. There’s obviously been a cohort of food and beverage operators who have been well on top of this for some time. But for many, it’s brand new territory they’re exploring and there’s a whole lot of confusion about where to start and how to get going on this type of strategy.
The other thing is communication. It’s about landlords and tenants really starting to work closely together to keep messaging up about what’s open, what’s available and how easily customers can still access the offerings that are there to be had.
We’re quite surprised by the number of centre, retail precincts and tenants who are not communicating at all through their customer connections channels as to what they’ve got available.
There’s a big opportunity now to reconnect and keep their customers informed.
RK: Abi, for those who are best placed to deal with this scenario, what are some of the strategies they have in place, as in those who already have click-and-collect in play along with being able to serve customers at their premises? Can you give us an idea of what those models look like, where you find them and where they work well?
AC: At the most basic level, at the moment, we’re doing digital health checks across our properties where we look at each individual food retailer. So when I Google ‘Asian food delivery near me’, what comes up?
There are some retailers that are very sophisticated in this space they know their products really well. They know what sells really well online and they know what food travels well. So they’re reducing their menus to just focus on stuff that they know they can deliver quickly and they know will still look great when it reaches your home. They’re ramping up their messages on social media, which we play a big role in too.
On all of our social media across our JLL centres, we’re really focusing on promoting who is open and still trading, and who is able to offer click-and-collect, and who can offer some sort of home delivery. We’re helping facilitate how they then get orders to people.
Also, support your locals. Support people in your neighbourhood. A lot of that messaging is going out. Let’s not see these guys fall over. Let’s keep supporting them.
RK: Presumably staff, as in waiters or waitresses, or food service e professionals, may become food delivery drivers?
SB: If not delivery drivers then certainly they are delivering to someone’s car to encourage click and collect. So, yes, some retailers are turning their staff into runners.
It’s important to point out this hyper localisation idea. It’s not just about Google. But there are tonnes of community Facebook pages and social groups that are more than willing to support small businesses at these times.
For example, at my little village in the Southern Highlands (NSW), our fruit and vegetable shop is on our local village page telling us what they’re doing, as well as our local café. And there are many examples of this happening.
There is an app now called Isolate that will list anyone willing to click and collect and deliver. If tenants are willing to pivot quickly and spend time making local connections and creating this lovely community of us all pulling together, this will be a way forward and a legacy for what Covid-19 does; it will be an opportunity for us all to reconnect again.
AC: We’re also seeing on top of that, suggestions to retailers to offer to add a bottle of wine with a home delivery - because obviously that’s going to be popular! Or maybe it’s ‘can you walk past the florist and grab a bunch of flowers as well?’. Because a bunch of flowers in your house at the moment can really cheer you up.
RK: This is really the time to be thinking out of the box a little bit, right? Necessity is the mother of invention. And there are presumably really great innovations and inventions coming out of this. What else are you seeing?
AC: It’s a no-brainer to add wine to food deliveries. I’ve seen a lot of catering companies doing deliveries of fruit and veggie boxes because they’ve still got all their supplies. Their shelves aren’t empty. Even pantry boxes being delivered.
I’ve heard of a restaurant in the United States that has closed down and instead of their full menus they’re doing only burgers for drive though – as in, staff are taking the burgers out to customers’ cars. They’re also selling bagels out of a shipping containers from a car park.
I’ve also seen some places delivering home cooked family meals - restaurant quality - with a bottle of wine, to peoples’ houses.
SB: I can add a couple of cool examples. Red hook which is a takeaway seafood shop in Brisbane has created the Tom Hanks stay-at-home dinner pack, where you can feed a family of four for $99. That was a clever halo-effect marketing strategy there.
Small bars have been hit extremely hard. But we’ve seen places like Dulcie’s in King’s Cross, put together a ‘Quarantini-hour’ pack. So they’ll deliver you cocktails, they’ll hire you the glasses, give you a link to the playlist that they would normally have going, so you can kind of replicate the Dulcie’s experience. That’s really thinking about pushing your brand into the homes of customers.
Kitchen by Mike is a pretty famous restaurant/café in the middle of Sydney city, doing bento boxes. This means you can still have the brand experience, but it’s helping putt the average transaction value up because you’re getting people to think in a whole meal strategy. We have also got – Café Paci, one of our top restaurant in Sydney, turning into a bakery to pivot onto the ‘essential items’ category. The owner can’t deliver his food to homes, so thought why not deliver to another essential food item. There’s plenty of innovation coming out of this so that’s motivating and exciting, right?
RK: Brain & Poulter have responded really quickly as well. You’ve identified some key needs among those shopping centre or retail precinct landlords as well as retailers themselves. Get us across those initiatives.
SB: Sure. The first we’ve got is a triage pack. It’s ready to go now. There are three main areas that any tenant needs to pivot to right now to enable home delivery: their communications and marketing; their delivery strategy (so, what’s on the menu, how are we going to on-board it and how do we deliver it), and how are we going to tidy up our back-of-house and cut costs.
There are about 32 activities in those three buckets; we’ve created a best practice manual, a checklist and an action sheet. Landlords can purchase that product and deliver it to their tenants to help them get on. We also have a subscription-based mentoring program with updates to share with the community all the successes and the innovations and the ideas we’ve just spoken about. That’s had a tremendous response from the property sector as a way to assist their tenants.
Tenants are falling into three buckets: 1.“Cool, this is a brilliant opportunity I’m really going to take advantage of it and act quickly; 2. “Holy hell, we’re not prepared for this. I’d like to have a crack at it but I don’t know how. What would my priorities be?” The package for those two buckets is absolutely fantastic. The third bucket is the head-in-the-sand, all too hard type.
Then there’s the bigger picture of, as the tenants move to understand the opportunities of going online, and as a nation we start to become habitual in using these services, how do landlords start to secure the data and insights of what home delivery means, who their customers are, and how do they control their brand for their precincts?
We have relationships with platform providers that can make a digitally native app for the centres, deployed within about two weeks. The platform can handle click-and-collect and delivery for all tenants. It’s under the landlord’s umbrella and they get full visibility over it all.
And of course, we’re here for all our clients to tweak their communications strategies, and any other ideas that landlords are coming up with to help their tenants – for example, with their lease negotiations.
RK: what is the dynamic you’re finding at the moment between landlords and retailer?
SB: Everyone needs to be working together. Like any competitive marketplace there are some getting on board with things much faster and asking good questions of their teams to give them the space to think innovatively. There are also some lagging behind. We’ll start to see that washing out pretty quickly. Cash flow for food and beverage is about two weeks so we haven’t got long til we’re really going to start to see some damaging effects.
AC: We can’t just look at the retailer, we can’t just look at the landlord, and we can’t just look at the property managers. We’ve all got to work together here to help. It will require a bit of investment to get these things up and running, and maybe there will be some rent relief that’s also viable and deserved.
Obviously some retailers have a very strong brand and voice on social media but some don’t. We can really help with the power of the centre behind them and I think that will be really important at this time.
As will doing a digital health check and really fixing and making your social media work harder for you. We can do digital advertising campaigns where we can geo-fence people you’re targeting within walking distance from the centre. For home deliveries as well. There’s some really clever things we can do in that space.
It’s not just about posting a ‘we are still open’ post and hoping for the best.
There’s a lot of strategy behind good social media, and some really techy stuff behind the scenes to make sure your post comes up. This is in both social as well as being found on Google and other platforms.
As everyone keeps saying, we’ve never been in this position before. And so it’s important to think that we need to try new things and we need to try new things quickly. Somethings may work and some may not but we’ve got to keep tyring and that’s really important.
SB: Rip the band-aid off and make the tough decisions quickly around staffing, costs and restructuring. Your big costs. Then invest in innovation. They’re the two best places to be spending your money.
RK: Was this always coming, this change? And has Covid-19 just accelerated it?
SB: From a food perspective there’s two ways we can consume food: we consume it pragmatically - we’re humans, we have to eat, have to consume a certain number of calories a day to actually keep on living. So that’s food for functioning. But there’s also food for socialising.
Did this need to happen? No. will it remind us we’re social creatures? Yes. I think it’s going to create a new boom for going out when we come back out of this because we’ve been reminded by being housebound how important actual physical human connection is. Food and human connection and the work being done by so many landlords to create spaces for that to happen in centres is going to be a pretty secure concept when we come out of this.
But the convenience of having food delivered for a nation that’s lazy by nature is going to be a counter-conflict that needs to be dealt with. We won’t stay like this forever but new habits will form that we need to make sure we can embrace within the centre so that doesn’t get lost a dark kitchen in the future.
RK: Suzie and Abigail, thank you very much for your pointers. There have been some great practical tips. And some really great insights about the way food retail is changing now, the actions, the innovations and what’s to come. Hopefully we can catch up with you both as this thing moves on quickly - hopefully - and we can discuss the new norm for food retail. Thank you and all the best.
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