Challenges, future of food industry
McDonald’s franchisee details challenges and innovations within restaurant
NEW BREMEN — Learning to adapt and roll with change has been a mantra for many businesses since the pandemic began last year.
Jason Monfort, owner of several McDonald’s in the area, said the biggest challenges he has faced is learning to not be as proactive as he has in the past.
“As a leader in business, you’re always trying to plan and be proactive but it feels like things now are so reactionary, and there’s so much change all the time, it’s very difficult to continue to move, weave and change all the different times,” Monfort told members of the New Bremen New Knoxville Rotary Club Tuesday during their weekly meeting. “For me personally, I think that’s been one of the harder pieces within all of this. Now, it seems like the whole world is sped up even more than it was before and now the planning and all those types of things are monthly and quarterly now, versus a couple times a year and annually.”
Monfort called the first six months following the orders mandated by the Ohio Department of Health “brutal,” saying that it wasn’t until around September when things started to turn around.
“They were really tough. Trying to understand what the aftermath of that was going to be,” he said. “It’s been a weird adjustment, just changing and evolving. Whether it’s the government giving demands down or McDonald’s giving demands down.”
He said staffing has been a struggle as well, adding that it’s forcing businesses to get innovative with its operations.
“We’re going to start hearing the word “artificial intelligence” a lot more. Those types of things are going to become a lot more mainstream than we want them to be,” he said.
Monfort said McDonald’s in Chicago has been testing order taking using artificial intelligence.
“The human contact order taking would cease,” he said. ”The AI would start to do more in some of these businesses and is the result of the situation we’re in. As we keep moving forward, the automation and the AI will be a big part of how businesses will survive. I think they’re going to have to if we stay in this current situation we’re in.”
Innovations like mobile apps and delivery have also been lifesavers, especially in bigger cities.
Monfort said, for a lot of bigger Ohio city locations, that 40% of its sales are coming from delivery.
“That’s a huge portion of the business now,” he said. “We haven’t even scratched the surface of what that could be locally. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. It is a neat concept and it is something that over time, it will eventually grow.”
Monfort said three of his restaurants do offer delivery through DoorDash: St. Marys, Celina and Wapakoneta. He said they’re averaging 20 deliveries a day, adding that the figure would be even higher if there were more DoorDash drivers locally.
As far as mobile ordering and the phone app experience, Monfort said there will be an update to the McDonald’s phone app in July.
“It’s going to move our app forward,” he said. “Our app’s kind of stone age, truthfully.”
He said the app will allow customers to choose what time to pick food up and it will be ready, rather than ordering ahead of time and sometimes having to wait for them to bring it out.
Monfort provided an update to the Minster location which is slated for a remodel and said that he’s hopeful they will break ground on it in May.
“They’re saying four to six weeks, I think they’re crazy,” Monfort said of the estimated time it will take for the remodel to be complete. “This is the biggest remodel they said they’ve ever done. The construction company they’re working with, they specialize only in McDonald’s remodels, so that’s all they do. They come in and work seven days a week and 24 hours as teams that do what they do. If everything goes well it could be four weeks if the weather is good.”
Monfort said the new restaurant will resemble the Coldwater location, adding that the current restaurant will be expanded on three sides: the front, the drive-thru side will be extended and the back will be extended. A patio will also be put in and there will also be a conveyor belt that runs through the restaurant which will increase the efficiency.
“The way they’ve designed the new McDonald’s is you save 10 to 12 miles of steps per day, the restaurant staff as a whole, on increased productivity with how they designed and laid them out,” he said. “Those are the type of things I think we’re going to continue to see. It’s pretty neat with what you can do.”
For those wondering when dine-in options will return, he said three of his locations’ dining rooms are open, with St. Marys and Celina scheduled to return within a month.