Restaurant turned into Online Grocery Store
In the restaurant world, owners are living in a time where every single dollar counts. The days of walk-in traffic are out the door and in various areas of the country, patrons are restricted from simply sitting inside of our restaurants. At this point, many restaurateurs have accepted defeat with the knowledge that, based on their projected sales for the next year, there is no way they will be able to afford rent or cover their overhead. A select few, however, have found alternate means to earn revenue in the hopes of creating entirely new business models. In this article I’m going to highlight one of those businesses and what Table Talk has done to turn an idea into a sustainable online product.
You can read more about Gran Caffe L’Aquila in the client stories section of our website. This restaurant’s story begins in 2009 when L’Aquila Italy was destroyed by an earthquake. The town’s local café had been renowned for their nationally treasured coffee and world record-holding gelato master, Stefano Biasini. Without a home, Philadelphia restaurateur Riccardo Longo made the decision to pack all of the items that were not damaged in the earthquake and in 2015, he rebuilt the beloved café in the city of brotherly love. In 2016, we established our partnership with Gran Caffe.
After one year under our marketing contract with Gran Caffe, Riccardo and I devised a plan to launch an online store on Shopify. With patrons from all over the country visiting Riccardo’s restaurant location, I assured him that the upfront and monthly costs associated with running an online store would be recouped quickly by way of gift card sales. After diligently working together for several weeks, we launched the store on Shopify and began to sell gift cards. Our launch came right before the holidays, which consisted of heavy email marketing, social media campaigning, and pushing the gift card sales at a discounted rate. The resulting sales were enormous, eclipsing any preconceived outcomes that Riccardo or myself could fathom. As the holidays subsided and we were presented with a bit of downtime, we decided to add more products to the online store, with coffee sales as the main focus. Again, sales soared and surpassed our expectations. Over the next few years, we continued to grow the online selection by adding little pieces to the store, including monthly coffee and olive oil subscription boxes, national gelato shipping, apparel, and more.
March 2020
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit our shores, it was nothing short of devastating. We are all aware of the crushing impact that COVID-19 has had on restaurants. However, the folks at Gran Caffe are no strangers to devastation. When L’Aquila Italy was destroyed by the earthquake, hope was not lost. In an act of sheer resilience, they made their 4,300 mile trip across the world to plant new roots in America. In March of 2020, Gran Caffe was forced to stop all dining operations. Simultaneously, our work ceased, as 100% of our clients comprise of restaurants, bars, nightclubs, and additional hospitality-related businesses. In response, I rolled out “pandemic pricing” to clients in order to offer my assistance on side projects at a discounted rate. Riccardo, being the opportunist that he is, contacted me and we began discussing a grand vision for Gran Caffe’s website. He presented the idea of merging his existing website with the Shopify store. Additionally, he envisioned adding all of his online restaurant ordering platforms and building out an online Italian grocery store, incorporating over 600 products. After weeks of preparation, our work on the new store was underway. While one may think that this type of project is comparable to the simplicity of ordering blinds from Home Depot (“I like those, can you install Monday?”), it’s not quite so easy. The complexity of this project is more analogous to building a house with one contractor and ten sub-contractors. While Table Talk is equipped with all of these resources, we rarely activate them all simultaneously for one project. After a lengthy month, entailing intense back-and-forth and a long to-do list, we finally created our first working version. While you might think that the first version of a website will work perfectly without flaws, this is never the case when you’re customizing the backend code of a platform meant to be turn key. Confronted with errors and issues galore, we were onto the testing phase. This phase involved the process of Gran Caffe’s team teasing through the site and searching for something to break. Each time they detected a fault, our team jumped in to fix it. After a week of testing, we were ready to launch our site to the public. With only a few hiccups, the site began to function as intended. Almost instantaneously, we started producing exponential revenue. The Philadelphia Inquirer caught wind of the story and published an article comparing the online grocery store to Italian specialty giant Di Bruno Bros. You can read the story here. Only a few months after its launch, the store is breaking sale records day after day and it is on its way to becoming its own business entity, again ensuring a sustainable future for Gran Caffe L’Aquila.
Here’s some of the highlights that make this store so unique:
The store offers 5 different options for each product; walk in, curbside pick-up, nationwide delivery, local market delivery with Mercato.com, and local restaurant delivery through TryCaviar.com. Through this difficult process, we ensured that the coding was customized so that restaurant employees can easily tag new products without needing to bring in our developer.
Customized national shipping for perishable products. In order to effectively ship gelato, meats, and cheeses to California, they need to travel quickly and efficiently. We collaborated with the Gran Caffe team to devise custom shipping options that guaranteed your gelato wouldn’t melt into a cup of milk upon arrival.
The website architecture planning was perhaps the timeliest part of this project. We trialed nearly 20 different versions of presenting the layout in a way that makes sense for our customers. The process of merging a sit-down restaurant with an online grocery store is uncharted territory that we had to navigate and create our own template to implement. Additionally, we had to adhere to regulations around COVID-19.
Educating the consumer is an add-on to the site architecture. We needed to ensure that when people visit the website, they understand how it works. For this reason, the top section of our homepage includes our product categories and explanations of how they work. We were required to custom code this section of our website, as Shopify did not provide this option. Additionally, we included the FAQ page for further instruction.
Custom order options for protein add-ons were required for a few of the restaurant meals and catering trays. This process was challenging, as we needed to download a 3rd party app to differentiate the pricing. After installation, we were still faced with some issues. Eventually, we had to involve the application developer to create a customized solution. This is an example of a seemingly simply task that turned out to be challenging.
A photoshoot was necessary in order to obtain web-worthy images that would sell efficiently. In one day, I spent eight hours with a light-box and 667 products. After the photoshoot, I edited each photo to specified sizes, corrected the colors, and added the Gran Caffe logo. Here is an example of those photos.
We’ll continue to manage this website and consult with Gran Caffe as their new revenue model continues to flourish. We appreciate the challenge and love being a part of projects that have such a positive impact. And of course, working with great people doesn’t hurt!
If you or a friend are in a similar situation, please reach. I’m always happy to offer advice.
Article written by Rob Wright | Founder, Table Talk
Web savvy restaurant marketing pro with experience owning, running and marketing food and beverage businesses.
