Quality as a Commodity

The New Battlegrounds of Brand Identity and Access

In today's restaurant industry, "bowl companies" like Chipotle, Cava, Sweetgreen, and DIG are at the forefront of a significant shift from depending on food quality to emphasizing marketing and brand power. These brands have gained immense popularity among urban millennials and Gen Z in America by moving up the value chain. Their growth can be analyzed on three dimensions - quality, ease of access, and marketing.

Item one: quality. If the food doesn’t taste good, a restaurant won’t be successful. Bottom line. However, in 2024, taste is a commodity. Wheat, sugar, even milk: those are traditional commodities. The quality of these raw ingredients plays a big part in differentiating outcomes. Bread using better wheat and better sugar is going to taste preferable to an alternative with inferior composition. What happens, then, when two products use identical high-quality ingredients? This is where "food intelligence" comes into play, encompassing everything from a chef's choice of recipes to their expertise in determining when the bread is baked, so to speak.

Traditionally, culinary expertise, or “intelligence alpha,” was highly valued. This expertise, however, is no longer exclusive to experienced chefs. For instance, many prefer a Sweetgreen bowl to a meal prepared by an experienced chef at the same price point. That Sweetgreen bowl may very well have been assembled by an automated robotic arm. Non-experiential dining has reached a scale where the art of producing sufficiently “tasty” food is largely demystified. Marginal gain in taste for a consumer from experimenting with lunch options is narrowing to zero. Cooking intelligence, once a prized attribute, is accessible. This shift indicates that the nuances of taste and food preparation are no longer as significant as they used to be.

Speed, like quality, has transitioned from being a distinctive advantage to a baseline expectation. Initially, the allure of these “bowl restaurants” was their ability to deliver high-quality meals swiftly. The promise was a good meal served fast. However, this speed advantage is diminishing in value. The growing prevalence of fast-casual dining options, coupled with the ubiquity of delivery services, has reduced the significance of time as a demarcator. Ordering Chipotle via DoorDash may save about ten minutes compared to other options, but the delivery for most restaurants takes between thirty to forty minutes anyway. Consequently, the aspect of immediate access has become a standard in the industry.

This leaves the brand. In a market saturated with options that offer tasty, fast, and reasonably priced meals, the decision-making process for daily dining has shifted towards perception and marketing. Bowl restaurants cultivate trust with their audience, encouraging repeat visits for familiar favorites. To stand out in this crowded market, restaurants must engage in effective marketing. This includes appealing design, strong visuals of their dishes, and an active social media presence. Building a strong brand identity is now crucial. With numerous establishments offering the same chicken and grain bowls, the challenge for each is to answer: Why should consumers choose yours?