How Your Shop Can Benefit From Restaurant Pricing Research

Foodservice is much bigger than floral, approximately 100 times bigger, and that gives them the money to do some outstanding research. Retail floral has a lot in common with the restaurant business, and can benefit from the research that they do.

It might seem strange but retail flower has more in common with foodservice than most other retail.

For example most retail details with mass produced products that are absolutely identical. The iPad that you handle in the Apple store is identical to the one that you can buy through dozens of other channels. Same thing with a gook that you hear about on TV.

Flowers and food are very different. In most cases they are purchased based on a description, and occasionally a photograph. That means that those descriptions have to be attractive enough that they generate a sale, but realistic enough that the customer doesn't feel disappointed with the real thing.

And in both cases the product (food or flowers) are made to order, and that requires excellent communication between the customer and the person that takes their order. If a person has a food allergy or gluten sensitivity the server has to get that information back to the kitchen. If the customer tells the florist that they don't want gyp in their order, or needs a special delivery, the order-taker needs to relay that to the designer and/or delivery driver.

But in both cases good communication starts long before that. In foodservice the kitchen makes sure the servers know what product they need to move, and the servers work had to make that happen. Tim Huckabee of FloralStrategies says florists need to work the same way – the designers need to keep the order-takers informed about what they should be promoting to the customers.

The parallels are there and this is good news. It means that florists can benefit from the great research that the foodservice industry funds.