Hop Vietnamese is ready to press the accelerator on store growth again following the successful implementation of a new operating model for the grab and go business, founder Paul Hopper told Hostech.
An increasing desire from guests for personalised dishes was a huge driver of the overhaul of its model, with the City based business working like “a Vietnamese Pret style operation” pre-pandemic, whereby all the food was pre-made and displayed on shelves for customers.
There were six tills for transactions then lots of other fragmented bits of tech, including back of house systems, stock management and order taking. The challenge was always to try and make those things speak each other and consistency, he explained.
While the business had been preparing to launch Hop 2.0 – a digitalised version of its store, just before the pandemic hit, it was also seeing a change in customer behaviour which it knew it had to address.
“More and more customers were coming in asking to remove coriander, add peanuts or double up on protein, for example, and we got to the point where 35-40% of transactions were actually wanting to personalise,” Hopper explained. “For an operator like us at the time it was an absolute nightmare, as the kitchens weren’t designed like that, they were designed for bulk prep.”
One of the big shifts for the business in terms of tech was how it could use it to embrace what its guests were looking for but could also continue with the throughput that it had been doing in its sites – around 300 transactions an hour at lunchtime.
In the periods of downtime during the pandemic, Hop weighed up the value of simply introducing things like kiosks but ultimately decided it needed to take a holistic approach. “We realised that we had to change everything.”
The business now runs a completely made to order model, with 95% of its in-store transactions coming from kiosks and 5% from click and collect.
Hopper admitted that the total time for a customer to come into the shop, queue, place and order and receive it had actually increase by about four times, to between four and five minutes, but the customer journey is so different, and in his view improved, that they are happy to wait in the knowledge they can order exactly what they want and have it made freshly for them.
“That was a huge learning for us […]. And the feedback we have been getting through multiple channels is that the perception and reality of quality goes up dramatically when you allow people to fully customise every part of the dish.
While the remodelling of its operation has enabled it to employee slightly less staff, in reality, the majority of their roles have simply been deployed in different areas. It had to put more people in the kitchen and some of the till staff have moved onto the shop floor as hosts – a role which he says is of critical importance when you are more reliant on tech for the ordering.
Future developments include the introduction of smart lockers in locations where it anticipates doing a lot of D2C delivery trade. For now, a huge part of its delivery business is with corporate orders, which have increased from around 5% to 25-30% of its weekly sales since the pandemic, as company have taken up corporate ordering as a way to incentivise staff to come into the office.
Having been forced to shutter several of its sites during the pandemic, will the business now be building back? Definitely, says Hopper. “It was important for us once we came out of the other side after so much change to know that it works – which it does,” he said.
“The P&Ls are significantly better than they were pre-Covid and now the future is looking like the growth accelerator is about to be hit again which is nice.
“Realistically if we can get to 10 locations by the end of next year we will be in a good place. The model definitely works for it and we have the backing to do it.”
