Web Exclusive: Meal Ticket Brands Generates New Revenue Streams for Restaurant Operators

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Meal Ticket

By Nicole Di Tomasso

Founded by the Joseph Richard Group (JRG), Meal Ticket Brands is a portfolio of virtual restaurant concepts that operate out of pre-existing restaurant kitchens as businesses continue to look for ways to recession-proof operations, introduce new revenue streams, generate additional orders and maintain staff hours.

Meal Ticket Brands uses its own JRG restaurants and third-party delivery apps, including DoorDash, SkipTheDishes and Uber Eats, to deliver orders to consumers. In total, Meal Ticket Brands offers 14 virtual restaurant concepts (with four more in development), which can be brought to any location, kitchen or venue, and are designed to use existing staff and kitchen equipment to reduce start-up costs. Virtual restaurant concepts include Obey Poke, Bun + Burger, Street Tenders, Punk Dog Hotdogs, Bird N’ Hand, Nonna Nina’s Baked Pasta and more.

“Our focus as we expand into other restaurants is to find kitchen partners that have the capacity to do more business, eager to generate incremental revenueand are focusing on staff retention. The ability to have delivery-only brands in place enables more value and avoids having to cut hours,” says Jason Apple, director of Growth & Brand Development, Meal Ticket Brands. “We’re also looking for restaurant owners and operators who are partnership minded and understand that adding a virtual brand isn’t simply a matter of taking a logo and putting it on DoorDash or Uber Eats. Our kitchen partners understand the nuances and challenges of marketing, promoting, training and quality control, and putting out a good product consistently is fairly complex to do.”

Meal Ticket Brands is actively looking to partner with operators to bring its concepts to new communities. The team provides one-year contracts with a variety of services, including menu and recipe development, training, branding, marketing, promotions and technology. Additionally, operators who are interested in becoming a kitchen partner can use the Concept Matchmaker on Meal Ticket Brands’ website to uncover the restaurant concepts that are best suited for their establishment. Typically, Apple says it takes about three weeks until a kitchen partner is up and running with a new food concept.

“The process starts with a conversation or an email to get a sense of the restaurant owner and whether they have the capacity and interest to move forward,” says Apple. “We realize not every brand fits in every restaurant, so it’s important that we don’t create any friction with existing operations. Once the contract is in place, we have an extensive onboarding process. Then, training usually happens two weeks after onboarding. The goal is to take the fear away and take care of the heavy lifting ourselves to make sure our kitchen partners are successful.”

Apple continues, “Over the last year, there’s been a huge effort to provide better documentation, training videos, branding, marketing and so on to create some visibility in a fairly crowded space. It’s great to see that what we’ve done has resonated and translated into impactful and measurable results for our kitchen partners.”

Currently, there are three kitchen partners in Ontario with another three onboarding soon, six in Alberta and 20 in B.C. Each kitchen partner has anywhere from one to 12 brands based on their kitchen capacity and resources. Moreover, the average order ranges from $22 to $39, and the brands generate gross sales of $1 to as much as $10,000 or more per month per brand, according to Meal Ticket Brands’ website.

“We’ve had unbelievable traction outside of B.C., particularly in Ontario and Alberta,” says Apple. “Most operators are limited in what they can do to generate more revenue. They can change their menu or offer promotion but with Meal Ticket, the risk is minimized. There’s no franchise fee, we only make money once orders start coming in. We’re able to generate more top-line revenue for them at a much lower risk.”

Undoubtedly, Meal Ticket Brands has become a growth-hungry leader in the virtual restaurant space. Contactless ordering and delivery isn’t going anywhere, so Meal Ticket Brands is continually on the lookout for kitchen partners across Canada.

“It’s going to happen pretty quickly,” says Apple. “But, we’re ready for it.”

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