Have a Friend for Dinner

Friends of Branded!

Happy Saturday and I hope you had a great week.

On Wednesday afternoon this week, a group of industry professionals were invited down to the St. John’s Terminal in lower Manhattan for the Google Restaurant Influencer Summit to share insights and learn about best practices for maximizing the Google Business Profile for restaurants.

Before diving in, I want to thank our friends Lisa Landsman, Michael Gnagy, and the Google Team for organizing this content-driven event and for the tasty bites & libations that followed. I’d also like to thank the security guard (whose name is being intentionally withheld to avoid causing this person any issues), for allowing me to gain access to the event despite the issues I had with my ID or lack of one that afternoon (I appreciate you).

A lot of ground was covered at the event as the Google Team shared its playbook and best practices for leveraging Google’s suite of services & tools. In an effort to provide some perspective on the importance of Google for restaurants, studies show that 62% of consumers use Google to discover restaurants, making it the top platform for discovery and nearly 90% research restaurant online before visiting.

Let there be no misunderstanding, Google is central to the restaurant decision-making process, with most guests relying on it for essential information before they even step in the door.

Fun fact, when it comes to local activity, 46% of all Google searches include the words “near me” in the query.

At the event, a conversation took place about the need to cannibalize yourself or own the risk of someone else doing it for you.

This phrase (or philosophy) comes from Mr. Steve Jobs who believed something that most businesses are terrified of and that’s a willingness to cannibalize your own business and to put your own products out of business or risk your competitors doing it for you. Apple didn’t wait for competitors to kill the iPod, they did themselves with the iPhone. The iPhone ate the iPad Mini for breakfast. The iPhone didn’t protect the Mac, it redefined computing.

For Jobs, he wasn’t being reckless, and this philosophy wasn’t about destruction. He was being disciplined, and this strategy was about control.

Please understand, I love this industry, but when it comes to Steve Jobs’ cannibalization philosophy, we, as an industry, spent decades far too often doing the opposite. Hindsight, of course, has 20 / 20 vision, but the restaurant industry has been wired to protect the core, maintain the status quo, and do the things we’ve always done.

Owners & operators want to protect the dining room, the menu, the labor model, the margins, and the tradition. “They way we’ve always done it” instinct is understandable, but it’s also the core reason why so many operators lost leverage and specifically allowed others to cannibalize them.

The restaurant industry wasn’t disrupted; we got outflanked. As a result of restaurants choosing defensive and protective measures (and not willing to cannibalize themselves), others did it for us.

Think about the various parties / competitors that made positional maneuvers around our existing business model and exposed weaknesses. Third-party delivery platforms (“3PDs”) cannibalized margins. Marketplaces cannibalized our relationship with our guests. Ghost kitchens cannibalized brand equity. Tech vendors monetized restaurant data better than operators. CPG versions of restaurant brands cannibalized occasions. Fees, pricing layers, and algorithms eroded pricing power.

The industry didn’t lose demand, we lost control of the demand and that’s a most important difference.

This week’s Top of the Fold is NOT a pity party, or a woe is us rant. That’s not how we roll. This is a call to action! What would Steve Jobs tell restaurant operators today? Let me tell you what he wouldn’t ask, “will this hurt my existing business?” No, no, no, he’d ask, “what happens if I don’t do this and someone else does?”

Yes, we got outflanked, but this game is far from over.

Growing up, my mom kept a sticky note on the refrigerator in my parent’s home that said, “Life’s most meaningless statistic is the halftime score.” In researching that sentiment, I found the quote is attributed to the legendary Harlem Globetrotter, Meadowlark Lemon, which was fun to learn as it was my mom that took my brothers and me to see the Globetrotters at Madison Square Garden (the most famous arena in the world, according to my boy JB). 😊

I also drew some inspiration this week from our friend and partner, Gregg Majewski, and his LinkedIn post about Craveworthy Brands' goal of making 100,000 success stories.

Go ahead, checkout his post and tell me if it doesn’t fire you up as well!

No, we haven’t lost the game, but in order to win, we need some intentional self-cannibalization.

The hard truth for operators is that too many resists self-cannibalization and often say “That’s not who we are.” Steve Jobs would respond, “That’s who you used to be.” Cannibalization isn’t about abandoning hospitality, it’s about protecting it by evolving it. We need to control our channels and design our stores for real guest behavior. We need to build leverage before margins disappear, and we need to choose disruption over decay.

A few areas where we can cannibalize ourselves include the need to rethink the dining room before delivery does it for us. The dining room used to be our sole profit engine, but we know that’s no longer the case. The dining room is our brand engine, and we need to explore smaller and smarter footprints. We need flexible layouts, we need to promote experience over capacity and less static labor dependency. In essence, the dining room needs to justify itself as opposed to being protected by nostalgia.

Let’s attack our menus as we can’t have a single menu try to serve the many ways our guests want to dine. A single menu can’t meet the needs of dine-in, takeout, delivery, and catering. A single menu for all these potential points of engagement with our guests translates into a bad menu for all of them. Different channels require different products and designs. Operators who refuse to address the uniqueness of these different channels risk quality issues, margin pressure, and operational drag.

We need to address our labor and replace it with leverage. This is NOT anti-hospitality, it’s pro-survival. Before anyone throws a stone at me for my enthusiasm for the need to leverage tech, automation and AI, I need you to abandon your use of travel and hotel apps for your bookings, wait on the tollbooth line to pay a toll-collector with cash (if you can find one) and have an attendant pump your gas for you (other than in New Jersey where you still have to do that).

We can maintain our commitment to hospitality by automating where consistency matters. We can use AI where prediction matters. We should deploy humans where hospitality actually lives. If operators don’t redesign labor economics, labor shortages and labor costs, others will do for us!

We need to compete with marketplaces as opposed to our just renting the marketplaces of others. Apple never let retailers own its customer relationships and restaurants shouldn’t either. We need to embrace first-party delivery, and we need loyalty that offers real value. We need to own our guest data and personalize pricing and offers. Marketplaces can drive volume, but direct relationships drive enterprise value. If we don’t cannibalize marketplace traffic with our own channels, marketplaces will cannibalize our profits.

Steve Jobs didn’t protect Apple’s products, he protected Apple’s relevance. For restaurants, this might mean we need to test virtual brands that outgrow the original concept. Explore a consumer packaged good (“CPG”) that reaches more homes than seats (I see you Jeff Galletly and the team at Brooklyn Dumpling Shop). Let’s look at catering as not only becoming part of our revenue engine, but as having the potential to be a primary revenue generator (these parenthetical self-interested shoutouts are flowing this week, isn’t that right Peter Venti and FamilyMeal?). 😊

We need operator-centric tech-enabled platforms that can be shared across concepts (independents and SMB operators, have you seen what Sterling Douglass and the team at Chowly have advanced with its new platform?). 😊

The bottom line, the future of restaurants won’t be decided by who preserves the past best, but by who’s willing to redesign themselves BEFORE they’re forced to it.

I’ll close with a reference from my brother from another mother, Mr. Wolf, who always made sure to remind me that “if you’re standing still, you’re falling behind.” Thank you, Mr. Wolf, and love you forever.

It takes a village.

This week, we’re giving a big shoutout to our portfolio company Incentivio—including Rajat Bhakhri, Sash Dias, and Arun Kumar—for launching Loyalty Pulse, a next-generation reporting suite that’s setting a new standard for loyalty performance in the restaurant industry.

Loyalty has long been one of the most powerful (and often underused) drivers of restaurant success. The best programs don’t just reward behavior—they strengthen connections, deepen trust, and turn guests into true fans. And in an industry where margins are tight and competition is fierce, retention isn’t just a bonus… it’s revenue.

Until now, many operators struggled with fragmented data, surface-level insights, and unclear ROI. Loyalty Pulse changes that. With this new framework, restaurant teams get:

✨ A full, end-to-end view of the guest journey.
✨ Benchmarks that show where you’re winning and where you can improve.
✨ Clear visibility into which offers, campaigns, and incentives drive real visits and revenue.
✨ Actionable insights to strengthen retention and lifetime value.

Instead of guesswork, teams get clarity, leading to smarter decisions, more targeted engagement, and meaningful growth.

We’re proud to see Incentivio continuing to push the envelope in guest engagement technology by helping restaurants turn loyalty into long-term profitability.

👉 Read the full announcement here.

Global supply chains don’t speak the same language. Every company tracks products differently and none of that data connects.

Starfish is changing that.

The company has built the data infrastructure for the physical world, starting with the food industry, where safety, compliance, and real-time traceability have never mattered more. With products passing through dozens of hands from origin to shelf, siloed data has made contamination events slow, costly, and dangerous.

Starfish solves this with instant traceability, pinpointing the source of an issue in minutes, not weeks. Their secure network standardizes how information is shared across the supply chain, delivering verified data on where products come from and where they go.

Through these connections, Starfish has unlocked proprietary intelligence on global product flows, creating the foundation for transparency, trust, and compliance at scale.

And with FSMA 204 now mandating traceability for every major food company, the market is shifting toward infrastructure built for this moment. IFMA (International Foodservice Manufacturers Association) has called its partnership with Starfish “the fastest and most practical path to meeting FSMA 204 requirements—and a foundation for realizing real ROI from traceability initiatives.”

With a strong technical backbone, industry validation, and accelerating adoption, Starfish is rapidly becoming the data infrastructure of global food systems.

Interested in being part of it all? Fill out the form right here.