Looking for a healthy fast food choice to invest in? Check out how Healthy Habits is handling today’s competitive takeaway arena.
What's your core product?
Our core product remains the humble sandwich on our larger 'catering' loaf. We are increasingly seeing some demand for half baguettes and we have worked more of that type of product into our range.
The classic toppings like lettuce, tomato and cucumber remain very popular with little moderation. Schnitzel and chicken breast remain the most popular meat with customers, coupled with roast pork.
How do you differentiate your brand?
There is a level of commoditisation between all the sandwich offers. We differentiate ourselves from others like Subway through a combination of better quality ingredients – particularly on meats and cheeses.
We differentiate along two distinct dimensions: width of product range and electronic commerce. In terms of product range the fact that we provide salad, juices and smoothies means that we can offer a complete meal package.
Offering meal combinations that combine small bread products (something customers want more of) with salads and juices has proven quite popular. As far as we are aware we were the first sandwich chain to deploy electronic loyalty two years ago and since then we have continued to innovate.
We are looking at new solutions now that offer online ordering through multiple channels as well as sophisticated consumer marketing.
This will continue to be a differentiator of our brand. Most QSR, particularly small chains like ours, simply do not invest in reaching the customer outside of the purchase occasion.
How do you work with franchisees to ensure profitability?
We continue to invest in systems and processes to understand our franchisee's business. This includes even most recently providing tools to franchisees where they can input local fruit and vegetable supply to get cost of goods calculations specific to their store. This enables us to understand at a granular level what food costs are like and what parts of the menu to deploy for maximum profitability.
Coupled with this, we offer our franchisees access to online rostering and labour tools to enable us to obtain insight into their rosters. By controlling labour and food costs and maximising marketing to grow top line sales we tend to see significantly better performance than independents.
It probably shouldn't be overlooked either that we tend to get better lease deals than an independent.
How do you maintain food standards across the network?
All store owners are trained in food safety both by us and also by a third party as they obtain their food safety supervisor certificate. We then provide all franchisees with access to a food safety toolkit which helps them understand their obligations and provides tools to ensure they remain on top of the obligations.
Our audits then follow through on this to ensure full compliance.
How will you drive business growth?
Our focus is on doubling down on our core strength which was always made to order and this is really what is at the heart of the retail buzzwords like 'metailing' so we think we will be in a good position into the foreseeable future.
How is increased competition changing how you do business?
Striving to remain relevant in a hyper-competitive industry means that we have to be disciplined. That means focusing on what matters and for us that is good value and quality coupled with a focus on achieving exceptional customer service.
We believe, and our research proves, that if we do these things then we will satisfy a real customer need and remain relevant no matter what other players are out in the market.