What operators can learn from Disney concepts
By Dana Moran on Jul. 14, 2016Grinning families, Mickey Mouse-shape balloons and Disneyland’s signature soft-serve whipped dessert flashed on the screen as Gary Maggetti, Disney’s director of food and beverage, and Michele Gendreau, general manager of Disney California Adventure food and beverage and store operations, began their NACUFS presentation last Thursday. “Did that make you feel anything? I saw a lot of smiles out there,” Maggetti said. That smile is the core of the Disney experience. “We will know we succeeded when our guests feel like nowhere else on Earth,” he added.
With 150 food and beverage locations at Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure, and more than 8,500 individual items on the menu, that’s a massive feat. But Maggetti and Gendreau recognize that plenty of analogies can be drawn between Disney and college and university operations. “There’s always a first-time freshman, there’s always a first-time park-goer,” Gendreau said.
Start with a story
What’s the purpose of this space, and what experience should diners come away with? These questions affect every square inch of Disney foodservice, from the space to the decor to the menu. Disney’s California parks sell 860,000 Mickey-shape soft pretzels and 1.3 million Mickey waffles annually, Maggetti says. “The Mickey shape is the uniqueness, right?” he says. “The waffle isn’t unique; the Mickey shape tells the story. This isn’t like we’re building a cookie cutter; [our operations are] unique sizes and spaces, although the items or base ingredients might be the same.”
Understanding diner patterns is critical
Knowing where diners will be and when they’ll be there is one of the most important factors in managing resources, both while planning a foodservice location and once it’s in operation. At Disney properties, those diner patterns shift as new parades and attractions are added, Maggetti says. But when California Adventure first opened in 2001, planners made a critical mistake, placing the highest-capacity QSR—a restaurant with the capacity to serve 1,200 hourly meals—in the furthest corner of the park. “Never do that,” Gendreau says. “Make sure you put a restaurant with such high capacity next to something big.”
That QSR was one of the first places shuttered during the park’s revamp, and Disney planners have learned from the mistake, conducting capacity and demand surveys to determine just how many breakfast, lunch and dinner meals will be needed each day. When the House of Blues inside Downtown Disney closed, officials knew they’d need to add capacity elsewhere.
Treat employees as guests—and valuable resources
Diner feedback from intercept surveys, email blasts and metric scores is a critical market for Disney. But, as Gendreau says, “With 29,000 cast members, they’re all guests too. Their feedback also comes from a guest perspective.”
Yet those employees also recognize problems that no one else, from visitors to planners, can identify. As Flo’s V8 Cafe, a rotisserie restaurant in California Adventure, was preparing to open, dishwashers discovered that the rotisserie spits were twice as long as the dish sinks—a detail that had been completely overlooked in the design process. That dish room took 60 days to redo.
Use employees’ creativity, too
Disney’s culture is so immersive that employees, known as cast members, undergo three levels of training: “Traditions,” which teaches them what it means to be a Disney employee; “Welcome To,” which teaches them what it means to be a Disneyland employee; and a training for what it means to work at their specific foodservice location.
Part of getting that buy-in, Gendreau says, includes finding ways to make employees feel valuable on multiple levels. When a new foodservice location opens, the planning team writes an abstract and story for the space. Cast members then sit down and write their own themed phrasing for the story—“Enjoy the drive!” at Flo’s, for example—to use when engaging with customers. “It’s really engaging, and it’s much more fun,” she says. “When cast is involved in development, the efficiency and safety of themed phrasing increases, and it’s much more likely to be used.”
Strive to marry form and function
Planners had a brilliant idea when creating a restaurant concept at Disney’s new Shanghai location: a high-volume QSR on the second floor of a treehouse, with the kitchen on the first floor. But after an 18-month negotiation process, they finally conceded it was a logistical nightmare and moved everything to the ground level. “That is the sweet spot,” Gendreau says. “When you can find the form that is the highest efficiency for the function, you’ve got gold.”
Developing space standards per seat for both front and back of house is a big part of finding this sweet spot, Maggetti says—and those standards need to be constantly re-evaluated and tweaked. “We may say that for every QSR, we need 17 square feet per seat,” Gendreau adds. “But if we get into a highly themed concept with a bigger footprint, we negotiate that square footage up.”
Test success against your original goals
Eighteen months after Cars Land opened at California Adventure, lunch traffic was significantly down at Flo’s V8 Cafe—but dinner remained solid. Operators took guest feedback, and discovered that the restaurant’s large blue-plate special dishes were more food than people wanted midday. Even though smaller meals, like those above, meant a lower price point, the revamped menu attracted many more lunch diners.
“It all goes back to your original goals,” Gendreau says. “If you wanted higher capacity, are you meeting that? If you wanted more penetration at certain times of day, are you getting it? If you’re not meeting it, you need to go back and measure why so that you can fix it.” Disney properties even measure success metrics on repeat projects, like Halloween, and compare year-over-year results.