Feeling dissatisfied from years of working at five-star Michelin-rated restaurants around the world, French-trained Chef Grégoire Jacquet left that life behind in 2002 to open Grégoire, a high-end takeout restaurant in the heart of Berkeley, California’s Gourmet Ghetto. Twenty-two years later, Grégoire is ready to franchise and has developed a hub-to-store kitchen model requiring locations to be built within two hours of a Gregoire kitchen hub. The strategy is designed to help grow all parts of the business, including catering, which accounts for nearly one-fourth of all revenue across the company.
| French-trained Chef Grégoire Jacquet opened Grégoire in 2002. |
“I originally envisioned the culinary hub-to-store kitchen model as a way to ensure we could offer the fresh, house-made ingredients that make Grégoire stand out, every time, the chef and founder said in an email interview with FastCasual. “To do that, you need to leverage preparation and distribution centers to source the product. A central hub makes it much easier to ensure consistency across a nationwide brand. If I open a Grégoire store in the Bay Area, for example, I can leverage that culinary hub to offer the same local, high-quality product that any other location would. No other franchises offer that — I didn’t want to sacrifice the original brand vision when I started to grow through franchising.”
Although he’s yet to sign his first franchisee, Gregoire recently partnered with franchising consultancy 1851 Growth Club and is looking to open his first franchised unit in San Francisco. He said the hub model will help him prepare partners and employees for success.
“Since the Grégoire menu changes seasonally, it can be challenging to train franchisees on the preparation of new recipes,” he said. “With the hub-to-store model, franchisees don’t have to worry about preparing these recipes — we do it all for them in one central place. That makes the training process much easier, both for us and for the franchisees.”
This is important considering that the level of training Grégoire chefs require is more intense than other fast casual brands.
“They have all had classical French training in cuisine,” Grégoire said. “I didn’t want franchisees to have to worry about finding and training those high-level chefs. Franchisees also don’t have to worry about staffing the back kitchen with more people to handle the recipe preparations. Instead, they can succeed with a team of a few entry-level cooks.”
Franchise location staff simply build the dishes the culinary hub has prepared, utilizing the system to guide essential functions such as production, availability, delivery, invoicing and more. This streamlined process makes franchisees’ jobs easier, giving them the freedom to completely focus on the customer and engage with the community.”
Providing menu consistency and better training practices aren’t the only benefits of the hub-to-store kitchen model, according to Grégoire, who recently chatted with FastCasual. See below for the rest of the interview.
Q. What kind of cost savings have you seen?
A. It all comes down to saving on labor costs, which has never been more important. By handling all the preparation in one place, it cuts down on those costs tremendously. Franchisees don’t have to worry about the high costs of paying an expertly trained chef, for example. The cost of labor at the central kitchen will be much higher on our end, but the buying power that we have is greater as well. We can make deals with local vendors and pass those cost savings along to our franchise owners.
Another aspect of the culinary hub that is beneficial is the lack of food waste. We prepare, portion and organize everything at the hub. As a franchisee, you just have to tell us how many sandwiches you need or how many salads, and the exact amount of product will be delivered the next day. Franchisees don’t ever have to throw anything out and the food will be delivered fresh every single day.
The culinary hub also saves franchisees money on delivery. Instead of two to four deliveries coming to the restaurant every day — bread, produce, meat, fish, beverages, dry storage, etc. — Grégoire locations only receive one delivery a day. That means franchisees save a lot of time throughout the day, further reducing costs. Fewer deliveries also mean a decrease in CO2 emissions since there are fewer trucks on the road.
Q. What percentage of your business comes from catering?
A. About 25% to 30% of Grégoire’s business currently comes from catering. For franchisees, catering requires a lot of training. That is why we start them off with smaller parties and then gradually transition them into serving bigger parties. The day-to-day running of a restaurant is one thing, but handling a large catering program is a whole different process. It doesn’t have to be difficult, in fact, it can be very easy once you have the system in place. At the Grégoire location in Berkeley, for example, we can offer catering to parties of up to 600 people and it only requires two or three staff members.
Our catering program is very well organized thanks to the culinary hub, and that is key. You don’t have to worry about how much chicken you need to serve 200 people. We will take care of that for you. The more we can train our franchisees to offer catering, the better, as it is always preferred to have a local business handling the catering.
Q. Do you use different packaging for catering than you do for other to-go orders?
A. No, our packing is the same as it is at the restaurant. Right now, we use aluminum platters for larger orders, but the actual packaging and boxes are the same. We’ve made sure our packaging is environmentally friendly as well — we try not to use plastics.
Q. How do you ensure hot food stays hot and cold food stays cold?
A.Most of our catering is individual orders, and our typical boxes are made of cardboard, which keeps the hot items hot and the cold items cold. Most of our sandwiches are room temperature anyway. When it comes to packaging for the larger trays, the key is ensuring it is delivered as fast as possible. We are in constant communication with our delivery drivers. But it all depends on the specific customer. Most catering customers use Grégoire for shorter, faster events such as corporate meetings. That is why our model lends itself so well to catering — our menu is already geared towards grab-and-go options.
Q. What software platform do you use to run catering operations?
A. The catering platform we currently use is Toast, which is very strong. It allows us to streamline much of the process. Customers can go on our website, and we will receive the lead through email. They can also create the order within the system. From there, it is easy to create the invoice, communicate with the customer and follow up with payments. Everything is handled on one central platform.
Cherryh Cansler is VP of Events for Networld Media Group and senior editor of FastCasual.com. She has been covering the restaurant industry since 2012. Her byline has appeared in Forbes, The Kansas City Star and American Fitness magazine, among many others.
