Boston Pizza wants slice of urban market
Boston Pizza is banking on a tech-forward urban restaurant concept as casual dining chains across the country are struggling to hold on to customer traffic.
While the Richmond, B.C.-based company is the largest casual dining banner in Canada, with 383 restaurants, just a handful of them are located in downtown centres.
“We wanted to create an urban showpiece,” said Alan Howie, the company’s executive vice-president of operations and development. Boston Pizza offered a preview on Tuesday of its 11,000 square foot flagship outlet opening later this week in downtown Toronto, within walking distance of audience-drawing attractions including Rogers Centre, the CN Tower, and Ripley’s Aquarium.
“The reality is tons of families are living downtown,” Howie said. “There is a trend toward urbanization in Canada. Condos all around us are full of our typical guests.”
While Boston Pizza typically caters to families and sports watchers, Howie says executives see a gap in “approachable,” family friendly sports bars in urban areas of the country.
The chain plans to add another 25 urban locations in the next few years across Canada, part of Boston Pizza’s aim to expand to 500 locations.
There’s a good reason why many large restaurant chains avoid urban centres, according to experts: real estate and leases are prohibitively expensive, and it’s a gamble for players in the full-service dining sector, which has been losing market share to its fast-food coun- terpart for almost a decade.
Per capita consumer visits to full-service restaurants in Canada will fall to an estimated 36 visits per annum in 2017 from 42 in 2013, according to market research firm NPD Group. Traffic in the full-service sector is expected to fall two per cent this year, NPD predicts.
“The dynamics of restaurant usage have changed,” said Robert Carter, executive director of food service at NPD.
As grocery stores and quick-service restaurants continue to make gains in take-home family meals, full-service restaurants have been catering more to groups of people celebrating an occasion, such as a birthday.
To that end, Boston Pizza’s newest urban prototype has a room for large groups and expects to draw crowds to watch sports events, with almost 50 per cent more screens than its classic format.
The format also uses brighter colours, brighter lighting and more technological bells and whistles to appeal to young families and sports fans along with oversized screens for game viewing, said Helen Langford, Boston Pizza’s senior vice-president of food services.
Customers will be able to scroll through a wall-mounted digital menu in the restaurant’s waiting area or takeout food zone while other screens display a rolling feed of sports news and statistics, and you can charge cellphones or plug in laptops at its booths or in the bar area. The format will be used as a template and test lab for other locations, Langford said.
Boston Pizza’s system-wide sales rose to $1.08 billion in 2016, up from $1.06 billion in 2015, as it added new restaurants to its network. But the company continued to face challenges in western Canadian markets hit by an oil downturn, and overall sales at locations open for more than a year fell 0.3 per cent in 2016.
There is a trend toward urbanization in Canada. Condos all around us are full of our typical guests.