Ascentia Holdings Inc. (headquartered in Kobe; Akira Tsuchiya, President) supports service companies aiming to expand overseas, and in the wake of the corona disaster, the company has begun to support sales expansion at existing clients.
The company is not just providing corona countermeasures, but will continue to do so and offer its expertise in spreading its services as a way to create new added value.
One such service is the “Eat-in Car” and “Eat-in My Car” services, in which customers who come to the restaurant have their meals in their own cars.
Since the declaration of the state of emergency, restaurants around the country have taken measures against corona and have reopened for business. In many cases, however, they have reduced the number of seats in order to maintain a social distance between customers as a corona measure.
Sales at a restaurant are equal to the number of customers multiplied by the number of customers, so a decrease in the number of seats is directly linked to a decrease in sales. The “Eat-in Car” has been able to increase the number of such reduced seats.
TAKESAN, EATINCAR
Customers parked in the parking lot go to the restaurant to order and pay for their food, and then wait in their cars.
When the food is ready, the waitress carries the freshly prepared food to the car in the parking lot with the restaurant’s regular dishes.
Depending on the amount of dishes, customers can either carry the dishes to the restaurant by themselves or have a waiter bring them to the restaurant to finish their meal.
Many families these days are driving one-box cars, with ample eating space and, depending on the model of car, tables, so they are less inclined to eat in their cars.
One of the first to use the system, Takesan (head office: Nagano City, Nagano Prefecture; President Tetsuaki Takeda), has introduced it at its Nagano and Obuse branches.
It was common knowledge that the number of tables and seats in a restaurant would determine the maximum amount of sales, but with this service, we can increase the number of seats, so I’m looking forward to it,” says Taketa.
Customers actually open the rear door of the van and eat their meals as if they were camping, and because Obuse has a veranda, they want to eat on the veranda.
Enjoying a meal on the porch (at Takeshi’s Obuse restaurant)
In the case of Take-san, the mainstay of the restaurant was clay pot ramen, a dish originally served in a single dish, which made it easy to introduce eat-in cars, but other restaurants have devised single-plate menus for eat-in cars and other measures.
There is a lot of talk about take-out and delivery as a way to combat corona in restaurants, but each has its own challenges.
To begin with, restaurant menus are designed to be freshly prepared and served hot, so the menu is not designed to be good to eat 10-20 minutes later.
Take-out] requires special containers, which are costly, and many of them are made of petroleum-based materials and are disposable, which in many cases does not fit the restaurant’s policy. In addition, it is not possible to adequately “attract” the taste of the food in the delivery container.
In addition, if the food is to be efficiently prepared for takeout, it must be labeled with a “food label”. When I actually checked with the public health center, they said, “If the product is manufactured and packaged after receiving an order, there is no obligation to label it, but if it is manufactured and packaged in advance, it is all subject to the Food Labeling Law. However, if the food is manufactured and packaged in advance, it is subject to the Food Labeling Law.
takesan
When it comes to “delivery,” who is going to carry the bento? This is a difficult problem. In the case of in-house personnel, if it takes 20-40 minutes to make a round trip, even if they work at full capacity, they can only deliver a maximum of three locations per hour, so it is difficult to make a profit unless the unit price per delivery is 3,000 yen or more. This makes it difficult to make a profit if the unit price does not exceed ¥3,000 per delivery. The securing of delivery personnel and the method of delivery (e.g., special motorbikes with reduced turbulence, cars, bicycles in backpacks, etc.) must also be considered. There are companies that specialize in delivery services, and it is necessary to have a different management trick from that of restaurants.
EAT-IN-CAR flyer in Nagano
Ascentia Holdings provides the procedure and know-how for installing Eat-In Car and Eat-In My Car at no cost.
