Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) is ready to push the envelope when it comes to the development of Harvester, after Alistair Darby admitted that the company had moved too fast when it entered the leisure and retail park sector with the brand and not captured crucial learnings in the process.
Darby told M&C Report that the company made the mistake of assuming everyone knew the key strengths of the brand and hinted that the new look Harvester would include booth-style seating.
He said: “We made an assumption that people understood Harvester and its core offer, such as the salad bar and free refills. That was too big an assumption. You go into a lot of our leisure and retail park sites and the salad bar is at the back of the restaurant close to the kitchen for efficiency purposes. The key strengths of the brand were being hidden. The next one we open, wherever that is, it might be quite extreme, we are going to have a real go at how far we can push the envelope on Harvester.”
Darby said that to put into perspective how the fast the company had moved, in 2010 it opened only one unit, in 2011 it opened 60.
He said: “That presented a whole lot of issues, the availability of people capable of running those sites being one. When you are not going at that speed you are not capturing learnings. If you take Harvester we were moving too fast. They put a suburban Harvester design in to a leisure and retail park site, where space was more limited and although it is the same guest, a young family, their behaviour is different. It shouldn’t be a surprise but we didn’t really see it at the time.
“The challenge is how do you protect everything that is great about Harvester, the salad bar is key and the grill menu is very important, as is the sense that it is a great place to go with a young family, while also pushing the boundaries in terms of amenity and offer.
“The big battle in family restaurants is not just in design, you can get lost on design, it is important but service is critical. Here with my family, my young family, there is the potential for something to go wrong, I am here for a relaxed time, I am doing everything I can to ‘control’ my family, if you the waiter/waitress can do everything you can to help me manage the situation, then that makes a huge difference to my experience. So if you take for example TRG, they have a load of booth seating, because if anything is going wrong it is contained from the other guests, the kids are trapped in a nice way, the other thing that a booth does is give you is privacy.”
