How events unlock restaurant-level demand insights

Valerie Williams
Content Marketing Manager

Events drive people movement

When attended events—such as concerts, conferences and sports games—ramp up, so do the number of hungry people walking or driving past quick serve restaurants. Not only that, but there are also events that aren’t attendance-based, but still significantly impact demand for restaurants. 

Think school holidays, public holidays, and unscheduled events like a flood or a pandemic. There are thousands of events happening across the globe every month that drive demand up and down for fast casual restaurants. It’s an external insight these businesses need to properly understand and prepare for.

alt

Intelligent event data tells QSRs exactly when there will be sudden influx— or drop— in the amount of people within a given radius of their restaurant locations. This powers their ability to:

Labor forecasting errors are expensive, which is why fast casual restaurants use event data to be better prepared for peaks and troughs in demand. This enables them to avoid losing staff due to being overworked, minimizes losing money from over-rostering workers when they’re not needed, and ensures there is enough staff on hand to service customers well. We’ve all been to a Starbucks around the corner from a conference that wasn’t properly prepped for a surge in foot traffic coming from the event. 

A lackluster customer experience can be a blow to your reputation. Avoid losing customers due to long wait times and out-of-stocks in an notoriously competitive market with lower levels of customer loyalty than ever. Customers are expecting a certain level of service and will change preferences based on a poor customer experience. This is exactly why QSRs want to avoid scenarios like our example– the overwhelmed Starbucks location just after a conference.

Prevent waste by ensuring perishable inventory accurately matches demand. Tighter management of your restaurant inventory keeps food and waste costs under control. By incorporating external factors like events, your team can more accurately forecast demand and order just the amount of inventory needed.

Many leading QSRs and restaurants are turning towards external third-party data sets, including event data, to get a more complete picture of upcoming demand. Although not an actual QSR, Lineup is an AI-powered restaurant prediction platform that saw a need to more accurately predict demand for the QSR space. 

Specifically, they are focused on solving uncertainty for small to medium-sized businesses, which is why they’ve incorporated event data into their labor scheduling platform for QSRs. Not only does the event data API from PredictHQ help Lineup improve prediction through accurate restaurant demand forecasting, they also leverage the data to present the most impactful events to their customers through their UI. 

This is just one of many examples of QSRs discovering the benefits of this demand intelligence. Dive deeper into how leading QSRs and fast casual restaurants are using event data to accurately predict demand.