by UFG | Mar 27, 2024 | News
Alex Springer joked his “international project” with wife Méline Enguent began well before the pair became master franchisees and brought charcuterie board concept Graze Craze to France.
“I’m German, Méline is French,” Springer explained, and they began looking for a new food business in 2020 after moving from Germany to the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region in southeastern France four years prior. Graze Craze, which they discovered after talking to United Franchise Group representatives at a trade show in Paris, seemed an ideal fit.
“We quickly saw the advantages of this concept. It’s fresh product and it’s in correlation with the French style of eating,” said Springer. “Here, we call it aperitif or apéro time, where people will eat and drink late into the night.”
Enguent noted Graze Craze likewise is in line with “new tendencies we saw after COVID, this want to gather again and also to have quick delivery.” In addition to its consumer appeal, Graze Craze is positioned as a fresh alternative for corporate catering, and “totally changes the perception of meetings” for French businesses,” she added.
Enguent and Springer opened their first Graze Craze in October in Ollioules, close to the French Riviera city of Toulon. “In a 20-minute drive we have around half a million people and about 50,000 businesses,” said Enguent. “We’re a coastal city, a harbor city, and a rather large tourist destination.”
As the master franchisees for the country, Enguent and Springer will sign on and support sub-franchisees and likely open more of their own locations. Graze Craze is their second franchise brand. The first, Flunch, is what brought them back to France in 2016.
“I got a call from my father on a Friday telling us his director, who’d been there for 19 years, was leaving,” said Enguent, whose background is in international business. “That Monday, we gave our notices to our employers and said, we’re going to embrace the entrepreneurship life.”
The couple took over the Flunch business in Ollioules that Enguent’s father had been running since 1995 as one of the early franchisees for the self-service, cafeteria-style restaurant concept. Owned by the Mulliez family, which Springer called “one of the most powerful families in France,” Flunch has more than 160 locations, including a handful in Italy.
“We serve 300 to 400 people a day,” said Enguent of their restaurant, and the more complex operations of Flunch played into their decision to find a simpler model, one that’s also less expensive to run than a traditional restaurant.
Like many countries in Europe, France has been hit with high energy prices due to lingering effects of the pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war and Israel-Hamas conflict. The Graze Craze model, with its charcuterie board menu of cured meats, cheeses, fruits, vegetables, dips, jams and crackers, doesn’t require the purchase of costly kitchen equipment. “We’re serving mainly products that don’t need to be cooked,” said Springer, and stores typically occupy just 800 to 1,200 square feet.
Since opening their store less than six months ago, Springer and Enguent have focused heavily on marketing and brand awareness efforts, tapping into their professional networks to push office orders and corporate gifting, which then serve to help create individual customers. “People see it in a corporate setting, then they are curious and will go online and order,” said Enguent as she emphasized the importance of getting outside the store to educate the market.
“The first learning is we thought people would go through the website to order. We are seeing traffic, but not conversion,” she said. “The conversion comes from the work we’ve been putting into networking. Meeting people and explaining what Graze Craze is all about.”
UFG leverages international footprint
Part of the Big Flavor Brands food division of Starpoint Brands, which itself includes multiple franchises within United Franchise Group, Graze Craze has 64 locations open in the United States. UFG bought a majority stake in Graze Craze’s franchising arm and began selling units in June 2021, folding the business into the newly created Big Flavor Brands in 2023.
Many of UFG’s brands, including Signarama, Transworld Business Advisors and Fully Promoted, have international locations, and UFG has a corporate office in Sydney, Australia. “International expansion is kind of ingrained in Starpoint and UFG from when we were just Signarama,” said Graze Craze President Cory Hibbard. “I don’t think we ever looked at Graze Craze and thought international wouldn’t be a big piece of expansion early on.”
The brand is opening a new store just about every week in the U.S., said Hibbard, and with no other franchise doing charcuterie boxes and boards at scale, Graze Craze wants to be first to market internationally as well. The company debuted its corporate store in Sydney last fall, with plans to sell it to a franchisee who would then oversee the concept’s growth in Australia, following the master franchise approach UFG takes with its other brands.
Graze Craze has master franchisees in Quebec, Dario Subotic and Tea Maric, who are preparing to open their first location, and the brand is also targeting London and other European markets. The “grazing” style of eating inherent in charcuterie has “been around for hundreds of years,” noted Hibbard, which indicates staying power for Graze Craze. “We’re not just trying to capitalize on a trend.”
Franchisees, whether they’re in the U.S. or another country, need to be comfortable persevering and pushing through the challenges of growing an upstart brand, said Hibbard, and be willing to get outside their stores to drive awareness.
“We almost look at this business as a marketing business, not a food business, because we really need to educate customers about who we are and the different applications for charcuterie,” he said. Franchisees “need that passion and enthusiasm to make a splash in the market.”
by UFG | Mar 27, 2024 | News
Bob Andersen, president of The Great Greek Mediterranean Grill, reveals how he uses dynamic data sets to uncover patterns, make better decisions and solve problems.
Data analytics may be the sharpest tool in your operations toolbox. It can help you understand your customers better, using feedback and other instruments that reveal their preferences and behavior. Accurate use of the data you collect will increase guest satisfaction and loyalty, ultimately bringing you more profitability. In addition, data allows you to optimize various aspects of restaurant operations, such as menu item prep, portion control, inventory management, and staffing levels.
By identifying inefficiencies and streamlining processes restaurant operators can reduce costs, minimize waste and enhance overall efficiency.
At The Great Greek Mediterranean Grill, we use dynamic data sets to uncover patterns, trends and other insights, make better decisions, and solve problems. Here are four restaurant operation areas that can benefit from collecting and leveraging data:
1. Labor costs and performance: Management teams have full visibility of sales and labor performance with analytic tools that enable real-time decision-making for truly strategic staffing. Data also can provide feedback on the staff’s goals vs. their actual performance.
2. Menu selection: Accurate information on what to serve doesn’t just reduce food waste but also impacts the speed of service and overall customer satisfaction. Having the proper amount of food on hand and ready to serve can be a game-changer.
3. Management of multiple locations: Whether your locations are across town or across the country, you can quickly review elements like staffing, menu, and guest traffic. Each restaurant can have its own performance metric and only adjust unit-level areas. For example, menu mix could be different and require different par levels, or peak hours on the weekend may require additional labor in one location but not another.
4. Effective marketing programs: Viewing a wide spectrum of data can help you spot trends and design marketing efforts that help drive additional traffic, increase check averages, and more return visits. Rewards, text, and email loyalty programs are a great way to reach segmented audiences with specific campaigns to drive sales cost-effectively and efficiently.
Crunching the numbers
The key to effective data management isn’t the information itself but what you do with it. We take ours and feed it into proprietary tools, dashboards, and reports customized for us. This allows us to deploy informed decision-making with the same eyes and enables our leadership team, restaurant operators, and managers to make better decisions, improve performance, enhance customer experience, and drive innovation, ultimately leading to growth and success.
We must take immediate action on some data, such as poor customer experience feedback and low labor efficiency rates, while other data sets are evaluated over a medium or long-term horizon. Menu items, for example, are evaluated cross-functionally over a long-term timeframe against various models like menu mix, price elasticity, and contribution margin. Operations, marketing, and training teams lead any additions or subtractions to our menu.
If you haven’t yet taken up this critical tool, I suggest starting with the basics, such as sales, menu items, and labor data. Get to know your restaurant business by studying the data by the hour, day part, day of the week, weekly, and period. If you have multiple units, put them side by side. You may be very surprised at how different they may be. In addition, opportunities for improvements in marketing efficiencies, sales, and customer preference will begin to become clear.
Today, small restaurant operators have access to the same abundance of data as large operators. Any restaurant brand can benefit greatly by understanding where they can collect data and how to organize it so that it is readily available, easy to use and relevant to their business objectives.
by UFG | Mar 26, 2024 | News
Kathy Evert is one of the winners in the $1 million to $2 million annual revenue category.
Signarama Ankeny (Ankeny, IA) announced on LinkedIn that Kathy Evert, owner of that Signarama franchise location, has been recognized as an Enterprising Woman of the Year by Enterprising Women magazine. This prestigious award celebrates the hard-working, talented women entrepreneurs who have significantly impacted their industries and communities, per the LinkedIn post. The Enterprising Women of the Year event is the magazine’s annual celebration of the world’s top women entrepreneurs, according to the magazine’s website.
“Kathy’s passion, innovation, and dedication to excellence have propelled Signarama Ankeny and set a shining example of leadership and entrepreneurship,” the post continues. “Her commitment to providing top-notch service and contributing positively to the community embodies the spirit of Signarama and the values we hold dear.” Evert is one of the winners in the $1 million to $2 million annual revenue category.
As Signs of the Times prepares to celebrate the 2024 Women in Signs Awards in April, we wish to congratulate Kathy on this achievement.
Click here for more on the Enterprising Women of the Year award winners.
by UFG | Mar 25, 2024 | News
For the 11th year in a row, Print & Promo Marketing is proud to present its annual “Women in Print and Promo” feature. In honor of Women’s History Month — and every month — we are sharing the transformative paths these women have taken to help drive the industry forward. Find out what motivates them, where they’ve succeeded, and how companies can advance female talent. Stay tuned throughout the month for more profiles, and check out the March issue of Print & Promo Marketing for the full feature.
Michelle Longueria, vice president of operations for Fully Promoted (an affiliated brand of United Franchise Group and part of the Starpoint Brands family of franchise concepts), West Palm Beach, Florida, discusses her journey from nonprofit to the promo space, and how adversity fueled her eventual success.
Is the glass ceiling — or even a concrete ceiling — an illusion? Michelle Longueira is too busy to find out. She doesn’t believe in failure, but she does believe in reevaluation. Her nominator describes her as a “steadfast advocate and business coach who [thinks] teamwork and communication skills are integral to effective leadership and enduring growth.” Here is her story.
It was 1991. Some of the ’80s fashion trends, including biker shorts and oversized sweatshirts, weren’t ready to leave closets. Soon a new style consisting of baggy, worn-out jeans, flannel shirts, and Doc Martens would effortlessly take over. For Longueira, embroidered apparel was everything.
At the time, her father-in-law owned a dry-cleaning business in Manhattan, with five locations, and he was outsourcing his clients’ garments for simple embroidery. He suggested Longueira and her sister-in-law — two people who had never even seen a machine — start their own business. And that’s exactly what they did.
They signed up for a one-week training course that taught them how to operate a single-head embroidery machine and hoop the garments for embroidery, Longueira says. The two sisters-in-law were ready to open the doors — of the family garage. But in a world where everyone is selling something, how could they get the word out and build a customer base? Think like a marketer.
They first turned to their local bowling leagues. Many of the members wore embroidered apparel. It worked. From there, they opened a small retail location, then contracted with the Staten Island Mall to launch a permanent kiosk.
“Once we moved to the small retail location, we purchased a book of designs to embellish clients’ apparel,” Longueira says. “Our first customer was the owner of the local taxi company next door. He purchased a jacket and had the name of his business embroidered on the back.”
What started as a two-person operation in a garage, eventually grew to two retail locations — one in Staten Island, and one in New Jersey. The sisters-in-law also added a warehouse with 16-plus heads of embroidery and on-site screen printing in Staten Island.
Unfortunately, due to rising costs, both mall locations closed in 2002. Between that and other personal changes, Longueira sought out different opportunities.
She accepted a director of operations role at a nonprofit, working with mentally disabled adults. She taught her students embroidery operations from the ground up to prepare them to enter the mainstream workforce. Longueira was passionate about advancing inclusion and promoting equal opportunity in the industry, which, according to her nominator, “serves as a testament to the servant leader she is.”
Longueira discovered another side of the business that she was excited to explore: digitizing logos. Having an art education background, she felt that digitizing fed her need for creativity. “In my quest
to possibly start my own digitizing company, an ad for operations advisor with United Franchise Group caught my eye and I decided to apply,” she says.
Since accepting that operations advisor role for Fully Promoted’s northeast region, Longueira climbed the ranks and currently holds the title of Fully Promoted’s vice president of operations. She is responsible for driving franchisee profitability and managing the daily aspects of operations, including training, support, business development, and marketing.
Her Proudest Career Achievements
“Building the team for our brand. There is no ‘I’ in team and so I embrace the fact that our achievements have not been attained by me alone, but with the skill set and loyalty of the team that is Fully Promoted. Our internal operations team at Fully Promoted is passionate about helping our franchise owners meet their goals and they work together every day to make that happen. I could not be prouder of my Fully Promoted team — our franchise owners deserve the best and that is what our team is.”
How Failure Taught Her Resiliency
“For me, failure is truly not an option, so I don’t see anything that has happened throughout my career or in my personal life as a failure. If I don’t succeed at reaching my goals, I reevaluate and utilize other resources to get back on track. I think having this mindset is resilient in and of itself because it doesn’t give space to accept or wallow in defeat. If something doesn’t work, I pivot and keep going.”
Her Most Significant Barrier as a Female Leader
“I’ve found that the only barriers I’ve faced are ones I imagined in my mind, which I quickly realized and let go. During my tenure with United Franchise Group (UFG), I can state with 100% certainty that no barriers have ever been placed in my path to stop my growth.
“Since joining UFG 16 years ago, I’ve advanced from a regional operations advisor to manager and director positions within support and training, all the way up to my current position which allows me to leverage my experience and strengths to make an impact on Fully Promoted franchise owners and our greater organization.”
How She Thinks Companies Can Attract and Retain Female Talent
“Incorporate a culture that allows, recognizes, and appreciates the growth of women who bring to the table the excitement and thirst for growing the industry. Within Fully Promoted, some of our very best team members and franchise owners are women, and we strive to empower them and recognize their success. Last year during our annual brand convention, we honored nine women franchise owners for their outstanding performance and contributions including Michelle Bottino, who owns two Fully Promoted franchises in Illinois; Tina Pouliot, who operates a Fully Promoted with her husband in New Jersey; Cristina Bertero, who won awards in two categories: Team Player and Mentor of the Year; Alice McCalla, who is the owner of one of our franchises in Houston; Jo-Anne Reeger, another franchise owner in Texas; Dina Slain, who runs our Fishers, Indiana franchise with her husband; Michelle Monhollen, one of our franchise owners in Ohio; Kathleen Mawanay in California; and then Maude Swearingen, who took home our Humanitarian of the Year Award alongside her husband.”
Her Job Advice to Women
“What an exciting and ever-changing career path! I am 32 years in and still learning. My advice [is] to fully embrace the opportunity and remember that the only limit is the one you place on yourself.”
Her Upcoming Goals
“Acknowledge our ever-changing industry, stay ahead of those changes, and continue to engage and encourage our team to utilize their skill sets (and mine) to always support our franchise owners on their business journey. Staying empathic to the different paths that life leads all of us on while maintaining the goals and growth of the brand and company.”
by UFG | Mar 22, 2024 | News
The very first Graze Craze franchise in the state of Alabama opened its doors this month. It’s in midtown Mobile, just across from Pop’s. I had the chance to go behind the scenes to see how the sausage (or cheese board) is made.
What is Graze Craze?
Simply put, Graze Craze is a charcuterie catering service. They build fantastic meat, cheese + fruit boards so you don’t have to. They offer a variety of sizes for every occasion from the Grab + Graze personal-sized snack box to the giant Game Day boards that can serve 6 people.
All boards are made-to-order, all the way down to slicing the meats for each board.
Graze Craze is not necessarily a restaurant, more so a catering place. You place your order online & specify if you want to pick up your order or have it delivered. From there, the team gets started hand-building your board with delicious cheeses + the freshest produce.
The folks at Graze Craze will also deliver your order for FREE.
About the Mobile, AL location
by UFG | Mar 18, 2024 | News
A charcuterie board franchise officially opened its doors in Rosslyn earlier this month.
The second Virginia location of Graze Craze is located within the Le Méridien Arlington hotel at 1121 19th Street N.
The business was two years in the making, according to franchisee Amaan Bhanji. He was in high school when he got started on this venture, making him the youngest Graze Craze franchisee, per a press release.
“I’m so excited to serve the community and create relationships with the many amazing people I meet on my entrepreneurial journey with Graze Craze,” Bhanji said.
Bhanji started working in food service when he in high school. While he originally planned to pursue college, those early work experiences, along with visits to several Graze Craze locations, led him down the path of entrepreneurship.
“I immediately fell in love with the concept, the fresh ingredients, and the creativity that goes into creating stunning charcuterie. I knew opening my own Graze Craze location would be the perfect venture to kick off my entrepreneurial journey,” Bhanji said.
The business offers a menu of different “grazing” boards and boxes curated to fit different flavor and dietary preferences. The boards can also be made for one person or as many as 10. Customers can meet with a “charcuterie expert” who will help customize boards for anything from small gatherings to large events.
Menu offerings are made fresh daily, with a variety of meats, cheeses, fruits and dips that are made in-house. The menu also offers occasional seasonal boards, such as a “Game Day Board,” as listed on the website.
Bhanji said the business will debut a new “Springtime Spread” board tomorrow (Tuesday), with watermelon radish, Italian prosciutto, dried apricots and merlot cheese.
The franchise, founded in 2018 by an Oklahoma Air Force veteran, was launched amid the rising popularity of charcuterie boards. Now with over 40 locations in 18 states, it is considered a top franchise in the “grazing food” category.
Bhanji said the first week of business has been a success and he looks forward to continuing to win new customers.
“It’s thrilling to be part of this young brand that will help bring joy to our community. I love the fact that I will be able to cater events and help relieve stress from our customers while doing something I truly enjoy,” he said.
