“What can you expect from your favourite restaurant in the future?”

Food is a human requirement and restaurants have been fulfilling this need over hundreds of years and generations. While restaurants, food trends, and service formats have changed, customers' preferences and taste palates have also evolved over the years. To understand the food establishment of the future, it is first important to understand changing consumer behaviors. For this, we need to look into the different tiers of the F&B industry and their target customer bases. Broadly, one can classify the sector into the following segments :

• The high-end, fine-dine experience
• The high-end, lounge & bar experience
• The mid to high-end, casual-dine & lounge experience
• The mid-level, bar & pub experience
• The mid-level, gourmet & artisanal cuisine experience
• The mid-level, cuisine dine-in/take-away/delivery experience
• The mid-level, café experience
• The lower mid-level, cuisine dine-in/take-away/delivery experience

Each of these segments caters to a different set of customers but also sees a shifting in consumer behavior amongst the categories within the tiers. The same customer is likely to dine-in / order from a mid-level cuisine restaurant during the working week and indulges in dining at a high-end lounge restaurant over the weekend or while entertaining, thus seeing a transition in preferences within the same consumer set. Today’s consumers are well-traveled, well-educated, and exposed to the nuances of different world cuisines, thus expecting superior cuisine quality coupled with great service. With this being established as the baseline, F&B operators & venues vie and compete to offer their best at valued prices thereby hoping to attract the customer pool to their restaurants, ahead of competitors. Customers, while being not so loyal, do however yet tend to frequent certain establishments owing to location and convenience, such as in the case of visiting a neighborhood café to grab their morning fix of coffee or to visit a restaurant at the office complex for lunch. The clear preference in these cases is pricing, convenience, familiarity, and cuisine acceptability. Restaurants of the Future will need to be Disrupters and Create change To keep pace and stay ahead of the competition, restaurants must innovate and disrupt by deploying a few tactics & strategies, as below:

• Disruption by Need
  • This can be clearly identified by the need for a particular cuisine or venue format and experience. It is a must for F&B operators to cater to the different taste palates thereby satisfying the cuisine needs of customers and adding to the existing variety within the existing F&B landscape