If there was a restaurant innovation awards ceremony, there’s a good chance “virtual brands” would be the closing category in 2022. From Future Foods, C3, Nextbite, Doordash virtual brands, and Virtual Dining Concepts: Virtual restaurants have become the talk of the industry over the past year. If you’re feeling like your restaurant is a bit behind the curve, don’t fret. The team at Future Foods has been working hard to create the best virtual brands for restaurants like yours for years.
Let’s talk virtual branding basics
Let’s start with the basics. The brand? Virtual. The food? Real. The hands that prepare it? Human. The best virtual brands simply help your (delicious, beloved) restaurant reach new audiences and get more orders. A metaphor feels appropriate here. So think of it like this – you own a taco shop, Sabroso’s Tacos. Your taco shop is recognized as the original in your LA neighborhood. You see a steady stream of delivery orders, particularly on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and your dine-in business is always booming.
Every real Angeleno loves a good taco, but the fact of the matter is, there are eaters & orders your restaurant is missing out on. If you’re thinking impossible consider this: your most loyal diners aren’t always in the mood for tacos. What if they want a burger or sandwich today? While Sabroso’s makes a killer taco, you can’t compete with a burger or sandwich joint when one of your customers craves a burger or a sandwich. That is, unless you also owned Sabroso’s Sandwiches and Sabroso’s Burgers storefronts. With virtual branding, it’s possible to run all 3 of those storefronts and then some.
The best virtual brands take advantage of your existing inventory, kitchen, and staff to fulfill more orders under multiple names. So you run a taco joint: that means you have ground beef, chicken, pork, cheese, veggies, and rolls on hand. You get where we’re going – with those ingredients, you could also make burgers and sandwiches. And those customers who are craving something non-taco could order it from, yep you guessed it, you. The TL;DR is this: you get more orders from customers new and old by making food for multiple menus with virtual brands. We’re going to guess that you’re warming up to the concept and wondering how you could make it happen.
How Future Foods could be your secret ingredient
In 2022, there are quite a few virtual branding companies including Doordash virtual brands, C3, Virtual Dining Concepts, and Nextbite. We’re not going to dig into the other guys, instead we’ll just tell you why we (the team at Future Foods) think the best virtual brands are created by Future Foods. You’re reading this on our website, so we’re allowed to be a little biased right?
There are endless ways to create a brand. You can begin ideating based on cultural shifts, customer truths, “trends,” great aesthetics, celebrities, quantitative data and more. Ideas really can come from anywhere, as cheesy as that phrase may sound, and the team at Future Foods takes advantage of that. Our team of data scientists, creatives and restaurateurs is constantly nerding out on design sites like Behance. Staying up late reading editorials like The Cut & Thrillist. Keeping up with the Kardashians (we don’t literally mean the Kardashians, just the concept of them). Downloading reports from Mintel. And sifting through our endless delivery app & eater data to make sure that our brand catalogue is as well rounded and diverse as your customer base is.
Future Foods can make running virtual brands your restaurants reality in as long as it takes you to say virtual
All that to say, Future Foods offers hundreds of data-backed, eater approved brands custom-built for restaurants like yours. The cherry on top? Getting started with virtual brands is ridiculously easy with Future Foods.
- You pick a brand. We already mentioned this, but we have a lot of killer brands you can choose from. Pick what works for you and head to step 2.
- Get to cookin’! We’ll set your new storefronts up on all your delivery apps, and send your new orders straight to your kitchen via our partner Otter. All you have to do is prepare the food, we’ll handle the rest.
- Couriers pick-up & deliver the food. Couriers from the apps will pick up and deliver your Future Foods orders just like they would your regular orders.
- We pay you. Yep, you heard that right. Each week, you’ll receive a check or direct deposit from Future Foods in your preferred bank account. You never pay us a cent.
Restaurants like yours love us (ahem, yes, we already admitted we’re biased)
A couple of weeks ago, we were chatting with one of our restaurant partners Joseph from ChipMonks in Chicago. He took over the eatery mid-pandemic and was, understandably, stressed as f*ck. He partnered with Future Foods in 2020 to increase sales and orders, and today he runs 12 of our virtual brands. Joseph mentioned that Future Foods helped him keep ChipMonks running, and restaurants like ChipMonks help keep us running too.
Long story short, Chipmonks has seen a whopping 281.48% increase in monthly gross sales, a 186.6% increase in monthly orders, and a 21% increase in average order value since partnering with Future Foods. According to Joseph, “If you’re looking to earn some extra income, it’s worth a try. Chances are Future Foods will have something that works for your menu. And it’s definitely worth it.” Joseph’s a smart guy, so we say you listen to him, and start running the best virtual brands for your restaurant with Future Foods.
