Take out Food Becomes Exotic and Gets a Better Address

Take out has often (and often exclusively) been about eating with chopsticks out of paper containers. What do you do when you are not willing to lower your standards to that extent, and you still want a quick bite to go? As guests at the Grand Hyatt in New York have found, take-out food doesn’t have to be something that is prepared to less exacting standards. The Grand Hyatt recently debuted its Market chain of high quality takeout food stores on the ground floors of many of its hotels. They have no seating, and cater to business customers in a hurry.

To business customers who count every minute they are in a city on business, a grab and run sandwich at a reasonable price can be a godsend. It’s much quicker and less costly than ordering room service or sitting down to a full-service restaurant. All that came out of a little keen observation at the Hyatt. They found that their guests were going elsewhere, to Starbucks, among other places, for quick bite to eat in the morning or at night, rather than stop by at the restaurant in the lobby. They wondered why they shouldn’t keep the business for themselves by offering the kind of quick grab-and-go take-out food they seemed to crave. It’s all friendly to the budget and there are all kinds of possibilities. Fancy take-out food can involve great cuisine from around the world, gourmet food, and health food. It’s vending machine meets meets gourmet menu, and it’s very successful.

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Business travelers used to be all about having things done for them, having waiters wait on them. That’s changed now. Travelers come in, and the check themselves in, they get their own coffee. It’s kind of satisfying to the traveler now to retain control over their own lives when they travel. Letting them have it not only saves a lot of money at a time when businesses are cutting back on their travel budgets, it creates a whole new market segment. The Trump in Chicago sells dozens of exotic lunches in bags out of the room service take-out food menus. With menu items like lobster and chicken sandwiches, their guests heading to the airport never need to go hungry.

The best part is, that hotels find that putting out inexpensive takeout food like a Caesar’s salad or chicken wrap or granola right there has inexplicably raised turnover noticeably intheir catering departments. People just don’t want to go to the hassle of paying $30 for a breakfast. It’s too much fuss. Other hotels are catching on to the idea fast. Marriott is closing down its coffee shops and opening high-class take-out food centers with pastries, salads and sandwiches to go. People just walk in, grab an eastern, western or continental breakfast in a bag and run. The whole transaction doesn’t take more than five minutes.

Hotels tried it once five years ago; but people didn’t care that much about cost savings back then. The idea was not successful. In today’s environment, it is.

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Tags: Food

This entry was posted on Friday, January 27th, 2012 at 7:10 am and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.