Food & Beverage

Trends expert: 'Safety and affordability' will drive pizza traffic

Passage of the American Rescue Plan and more widespread vaccinations are providing hope to pizza restaurateurs, but a leading national food trends forecaster said the path ahead is still paved with caution.

Photo: iStock.

March 12, 2021

Predicting the future in any foodservice segment is always tricky, but particularly when just about all the extraordinary market forces imaginable are in play as has been the case this past year of pandemic-generated instability. But that didn't stop a foodservice forecaster, Suzy Badaracco, from making predictions about the "hot-and-not" of the pizza industry. As she will tell you, it's not guesswork, it's science based on an enormous amount of data.

Badarraco leads one of the nation's foodservice forecasting agencies, Oregon-based Culinary Tides, which recently released a state of the industry report based on a cross-analysis of 224 prediction lists from nearly 180 restaurant industry experts. But what Pizza Marketplace was most interested in was how all that information breaks down for the American pizza operator as she or he struggles to bulletproof their business from all the forces at play.

To start off, we wanted to establish a baseline of sorts by getting a clear picture of where U.S. restaurants were headed right before the pandemic lowered the boom on everybody. Interestingly, Badaracco said that it's worth noting that even at that stage, the economy was not promising anything too spectacular. We were headed for a recession and a presidential election year, both factors that send consumers into lock-the-pockets mode. And issues of racial inequity were starting to boil over nationally, as well.

Then the pandemic burst onto the American scene and everything was made many-fold worse.

Although many pizza brands had the ordering and delivery processes in place to pull them through those long days and nights without dine-in, many more did not. Sadly, some of the smallest mom-and-pop brands were among the first to get the knockout punch when COVID-19-era restrictions dealt death-blows to their paper-thin margins.

But the more hopeful truth around this culinary category is that if there has been any one restaurant cuisine best designed for both the operational upheaval of the pandemic and the ensuing effects of all those changes on our food cravings and restaurant preferences, it's pizza.

"For Americans, pizza is like a gateway drug to potentially other cuisines.," Badaracco said in an interview with Pizza Marketplace. "So you can have breakfast pizza or … a dessert pizza … or whatever, but the format is conducive to having a lot of fun. … What's beautiful about it is that it's approachable and you can experiment a little through things like dipping sauces or … you can stuff the crust with 10,000 different things. … So you can stretch away from traditional because the format of pizza is the gateway drug."

And pizza companies had certainly been stretching away from traditional already, with everything from Marco's crustless pies to Papa John's sandwich-ized versions of the immortal pizza pie in its Papadias.

Additionally, pizza capitalizes on the two key drivers Badaracco sees for all things restaurant sector right now: safety and affordability.

"So (pizza brands) are introducing new flavor profiles or whatever, but even though pizza is not super-cheap necessarily, it is formatted to feed an entire family," Badaracco explained. "Then you can have sliding scales of affordability with it too … and put whatever toppings you want on it and still know what the price will be at the end of it. That's really why they (pizza restaurants) have been in a better space than like fast casual."

As the pandemic has crawled on, consumers have increasingly grown bored, however, which operators must find ways to walk the fine line between keeping customers comfortable while also giving them something just slightly different.

"Stuffed crust is not threatening, square pizza is not threatening," she said, referring to some of the recent permutations of the pie across the nation. "They have just enough interest to add to feel experimental, yet still inviting."

It begs the question then: What would a trends forecaster like Badaracco do if she had to draw up the business plan for her own pizzeria? How would she make it something that will fare the best in the year ahead?

"If I was doing pizza in 2021 when budget and safety are my two drivers, I would want to ask, 'How can I make customers understand that's what I'm doing. … So telling them how you've made it budget-friendly and who is making it safe for them to eat would be key because of all the pizza restaurants in my city, that's where I'm going to go," she said.

"Then if there's a way to wrap up those elements of indulgence and comfort too, I'd do that. … So let's say I'm selling a pepperoni pizza, well is it a certain type of pepperoni? Is it from a particular part of Italy? These are things that cost you nothing to do, but raise the premium of what you're selling. So, is the spinach you're using locally grown? Then say that out-loud."

The bottom line was that while so many already fully stressed-out restaurateurs are trying to scrimp and save for things like the latest tech or new design elements, they might be overlooking some easy ways to get a far greater return on investment, telling customers how you're safeguarding their health or creating a value menu, for example. These approaches work because they connect with the two main drivers safety and affordability.

"So really, you can be making a ton more money, by doing things that cost you nothing to do and by allying with consumers and telling them what you're doing to help keep them safe and save them money," Badaracco said. "It's about empathy and what you're doing to be on their team."