A new era of transparency has arrived, resulting in a fundamental shift in the way restaurants communicate with consumers and adopt strategies to meet their demands for more information.
Today’s customers, millennials in particular, want answers — not only about food quality and the supply chain, but also about how a company is run. While gen-xers and baby boomers are less interested in the origins of their food, recent research by Millennial Marketing shows that eight out of 10 millennials — the group constituting about one third of Canada’s population — like “behind-the-scenes” food commercials and feel brands don’t disclose enough about their food products.
So how are operators embracing the spirit of openness and accountability? In Canada, brands such as McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada and A&W Food Services of Canada are leaders in promoting greater transparency.
Offering quality food from verified sources isn’t enough anymore as consumers dig deeper into how the foodservice industry operates on every level. “Information is more broadly available through social media and there’s more conversation going on around food,” says Sherry MacLauchlan, director, Government Relations & Sustainability for McDonald’s Canada.
That includes how each company treats its employees, what it does in the community and how its operations impact the environment. “We need to do a better job of telling our story around sustainability — corporate social responsibility in the broadest sense — from how we treat our employees, are we a good neighbour in the community, what we are doing for [environmental] initiatives, the whole range,” she says.
Trish Sahlstrom, VP of Purchasing and Distribution for A&W in Canada, says understanding the new consumer and what they want is key to A&W’s transparency journey. “What we do has to be transparent, so in every aspect of [our business] we ask ourselves, ‘if the consumer was walking alongside us, would they feel confident about the decisions or the practices we choose and the environment that is created by our decisions?’”
The company is no stranger to transparency and has reinvented itself over the past three years to make itself more accountable to its customers. “We’ve seen that our guests are looking for more information about how the food is produced, what’s in it and most importantly what’s not in it,” adds Susan Senecal, president and COO, A&W. “We’ve been leaders in being able to get what guests are looking for into our restaurants.”
In 2013, A&W began sourcing beef raised without the use of hormones or steroids. “That got very positive feedback and encouraged us to keep looking at new ways to bring better ingredients to our guests,” says Senecal. The company followed up by revamping its supply chain to include chicken, eggs and even fair-trade coffee and launched awguarantee.ca to describe the changes in detail and feature profiles on some of its suppliers.
Customer feedback was at the heart of McDonald’s strategy to combat public misconceptions about its food. “Everything we do starts and ends with our guests and that includes listening to what they want,” says MacLauchlan. “They’ve always had a high interest in food quality and increasingly that desire to know more includes where we source our ingredients from.”
In 2012, McDonald’s launched “Our Food. Your Questions” — an online platform for promoting transparency around its food, company values, sourcing and nutrition. “We answered any questions that came our way from anyone who asked,” she says. To date, the Our Food. Your Questions site has had more than four million visitors and answered 29,764 questions ranging from ‘Is your coffee responsibly sourced?’ to ‘How do you care for the animals in your supply chain?’ “We’ve come to realize that this transparency is very important to our guests and to the Canadian public in general,” says MacLauchlan.
When it comes to making decisions about where to eat, openness and accountability are top of mind for today’s consumers. “As an industry, if we aren’t having an open, honest and transparent conversation about our business, it doesn’t serve us well since trust is fundamental to the relationships we have with our guests,” says MacLauchlan.
Sahlstrom says consumers are looking to the foodservice industry for integrity and transparency. “Research suggests consumers are feeling as if there’s too much that they don’t understand — that maybe things are being hidden. So we need to err on the side of being too transparent because [it’s necessary] to build trust.”
But where do restaurant operators draw the line? Can they ever offer too much information about their businesses? “We don’t think so,” says Senecal. “We always want to give [consumers] that back-stage pass so they are completely comfortable with the choices they are making. When you do the right thing and respond to consumer demand, that will appeal and connect to customers — [it results] in more business and greater consumer loyalty.”
