Article
Scaling recipes for expansion
What to consider when taking your brand, and your recipes, to the next level.
April 28, 2008
Small town restaurant owners may dream of becoming the next McDonald's, expanding their operations across the country so everyone can savor their unique culinary creations.
But when a business tries to take a recipe and mass produce it, flavors can get lost and the recipe, inevitably, never tastes the same.
Mom and pop-sized chains are able to exert careful control over the quality and consistency of a product, but the larger they grow the harder it becomes, said Aaron Allen, CEO of Orlando, Fla.-based Quantified Marketing Group. And as a chain expands, recipe consistency becomes a major concern.
"You may have a secret sauce that you put on a hamburger. It might be that they make it at the store level in five-gallon buckets and it's enough to get them through the week," Allen said. "But if (the owners) go to 50 units, it's harder to oversee what's being done in all of those stores and soon they find there's no recipe consistency."
At this point, chain owners and operators need to determine whether they will continue to allow each unit to make the sauce or outsource the job to a large manufacturer, one that can ensure the recipe's consistency every time it is sent to stores.
"It's very difficult to maintain the same exact product as when it was a small chain," Allen said. "It takes a lot of thought and consideration. When they first got started it was just a great product, but then they grow a little and it's like the layers of the onion. As you grow out into those larger and larger layers it doesn't necessarily get easier. It can get more complicated trying to ensure that the recipe stays the same."
Recipe, cost and labor
Patrick McDonnell, with McDonnell Kinder & Associates, points to a small restaurant chain that may be used to marinating a pork butt for 12 hours and slow roasting it at 250 degrees Fahrenheit in each of its units. But when it expands from 20 locations to 100, it may no longer be financially feasible to slow roast on-site.
"That would mean you would have to put a smoker worth thousands of dollars in each restaurant. Most places can't afford that so you go to an outside manufacturer," McDonnell said.
Restaurants typically bring in culinary development chefs to ensure that the taste of the original recipe is maintained during the expansion. But it is not always possible, said Thomas Miner, a principal at Chicago-based Technomic Information Services.
"You have the potential to maintain the exact flavor and all the characteristics of the original product," Miner said. "But what happens is that the individuals running these chains are faced with added costs. They have to turn to manufacturing plants to make the ingredients and that means you then have to deliver the product out to all of your units. When that happens, there are compromises made to change the quality of product."
One example is a small chain that features mashed potatoes on its menu. As the chain expands, it may decide to produce the mashed potatoes in bulk, at an off-site location, and substitute real potatoes with processed ones due to cost.
"The change is very discernible to the trained pallet," Miner said. "But sometimes it's necessary because the financial considerations and needs are different when you're a chain of 100 units compared to 12 units."
And sometimes changes made to recipes during large expansions have nothing to do with economics, McDonnell said. Sometimes certain ingredients that work on a smaller scale don't work in massive volumes.
"I remember someone trying to scale up tomato sauce and had two to three bay leaves per gallon of sauce," McDonnell said. "Once you start scaling up to that amount you may get into a situation where you put too many bay leaves in and make someone sick. A little goes a long way and if you put a lot in, it may ruin the flavor."
Recipes can also change due to labor issues.
When a chain is limited to 10 units, the owners have the luxury of hiring only the very best cooks. This way, they can ensure their recipes are made exactly as they were conceived. But when a small chain expands nationally, it is impossible to find enough top quality chefs to fill all of the open positions, said McDonnell.
The owners will have to rely on students and other workers who may be competent journeymen chefs, but don't have any official culinary training.
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"So at that point recipes and the terminology need to be simplified," McDonnell said. "When the top rate for this labor pool is $13.50 compared to at least five times that for your least expensive chef that gives you the equation of what skill set we have and who we have to adapt something to."
Quality assuredness
Restaurants may choose to have the major ingredients or parts to their recipes pre-prepared by an outside manufacturer. These are delivered to the individual locations where the employees put them together like pieces of a puzzle, heat and serve.
"Quality is what all of these restaurants are after," McDonnell said. "They're trying to get the best quality they can, but they have to deal with the labor they can get in the market they're in. So sometimes they may have to make changes they don't necessarily want to make."
When restaurants expand outside of their traditional region they have to consider what distributors are available, if they carry the same ingredients needed to make their product and, if not, will they stock the item and keep it available.
If distributors in the expansion regions can't provide them with a specific ingredient restaurants may have to make changes or use substitutes that could affect the signature taste of their dish.
"When it's a 10-store chain they can make changes and implement them quickly and easily with little disruption to the supply chain," Allen said. "But as it starts to grow it can be considerably more complicated."
Recipes don't always have to change during expansion, said Rudy Speckamp, senior culinary consultant for the Culinary Institute of America.
"Most recipes are very easily scaled up and down. But people have to think about the equipment needed to mass produce and what other challenges come along with it," he said. "The only problem I can foresee, is you set your gold standard first and then once you have that, can you mass produce that product?
"It doesn't necessarily mean that the recipe needs to be changed, but it could because you need different stabilizers to hold the food together. And if you plan on storing it for awhile, it gets a little more tricky. Do you freeze it or keep it in pouches? But these are all challenges that can be overcome while keeping the integrity of the product."
