Food & Design: A Partnership For Success

Food & Design: A Partnership For Success

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Future Food, as specialist food advisors to architects and designers, have long promoted the idea that good food and good design are intertwined in a harmonious relationship that provides an essential platform for success in any food & hospitality business. Now more than ever as hospitality pivots due to unpredictable and pervasive external factors, design and food will need to evolve to create experiences that adapt to meet the ‘new’ needs of customers and ensure satisfaction is maintained in order to retain as many customers as possible in the coming months and years.

While it is too early to predict how and to what degree any future permanent design of hospitality venues and spaces will have been altered by current events, operators who are in the position to create a new concept and designed space will look to ensure their investment will have the physical ability to generate multiple streams of revenue for the foreseeable future. In addition to this ‘Business of Food’, the cuisine, positioning level, brand and size of the different food outlet, cafe or restaurant will continue to necessitate a diversified approach rather than adhering to a ‘one size fits all’ set of design considerations.  

There are a few recent openings in Melbourne that demonstrate how the design of the hospitality operation may provide intrinsic benefits to maximise the current and future opportunities. The ever-popular Axil Coffee Roasters has opened a café in the Ella Food precinct at Melbourne Central over three tiered levels fronting Elizabeth Street and includes a lobby seating area for the adjacent office tower, designed by St Style. This design allows access from multiple locations, decreasing customer congestion points and the levels of segregated seating can potentially meet customers ‘new’ needs with smaller, less high traffic areas without compromising on a quality coffee and food café experience. 

As part of the much anticipated 80 Collins Street redevelopment, the Speakeasy Group have opened Nick & Nora’s champagne and cocktail bar with five rooms and three balconies at a capacity of 240 (under normal operating conditions). Studio Y design was commissioned to create an ‘escapist’ 30’s speakeasy concept, which has an art deco theme. The concept with its smaller nooks will create a more intimate look and feel, offering a glamorous experience and a welcome respite on any given day. Again, the design works with, not against, the flexibility, privacy and safety that will satisfy all parts of the venue’s target market.

For the overwhelming majority of hospitality operators with existing premises, however, the challenge is to not only creatively reengineer the food side of the business but to support that through a spatial realignment of the operation which may also inform future redesign considerations. The realignment of space will be driven by the customer response and satisfaction to the new food offer, tempered by the profitability of each potential revenue stream such as dine in, takeaway, delivery, fresh food retailing, heat and eat products, masterclasses, etc.

The MASS Design Group have taken spatial redesign a step further. They released a research paper in May, “Spatial Strategies for Restaurants in Response to COVID-19” which has identified five key strategies to guide redesign: Update food safety and sanitation practices and materials; identify all points of exchange of food, supplies, and people to create control points; create a space for a variety of seating configurations; seek to amend current council regulations and guidelines to expand al fresco seating; and standardised, designed & legible signage to communicate safety and manage the flow of people.

Several case studies were detailed in the research. The case below is for Porto restaurant in Boston Massachusetts when the state ordered non-essential business closures in March. This operation closed the dining room to the general public and focused on meals for frontline workers in partnership with a local charity. The spatial allocation transition starts pre-covid, moves into the current set up and then details proposed changes into post-covid – which notably does not go back to the original allocation but still manages to maintain nearly the same amount of revenue generating dining space (with an extension of the external seating area), noting that prepared meals are retained as a revenue stream.

Porto Restaurant, Boston MA - Case study in operational change. Located on the second floor of the Prudential Centre, facing the Ring Road.

Porto Restaurant, Boston MA
- Case study in operational change. Located on the second floor of the Prudential Centre, facing the Ring Road.

While the current world wide operating conditions are challenging, the measures and philosophy in the MASS research paper is not dissimilar to how Future Food works collaboratively, as a specialist food advisor, with hospitality operators and designers across hotels, food courts, food halls, fresh food retail, restaurants, cafes, clubs, airports, function centres and commercial catering. The collective process has been to adapt and optimise designed spaces to create operationally efficient and practical spaces while ensuring the human interfacing factors create seamless customer-centric experiences that meet the needs of all user groups and drive return patronage through customer satisfaction.

One of Future Food’s current projects is transformational in the world of commercial catering, driven by the imperative of improving satisfaction and overall customer experience to meet the ‘new’ needs and wants of an existing and evolving customer demographic. The food and design project combines the development of a new multi-day part food offer, over a dozen remote locations, each with a redesign of all customer touch points to elevate the customer experience to a modern standard that communicates an everyday high street experience. Every food service area is designed to be highly functional with a ‘place for everything and everything in its place’ while communicating the visual statement of the food and beverage, enhancing the creative food offer with clean visual lines, lighting, modern equipment and design finishes with colour and texture that create depth and contrast. The seating zones will complement the food service areas allowing for a diverse range of seating options for groups of customers or solo diners who will choose quiet or private areas to enjoy their food with little distraction. The access and circulation paths through the serveries and seating zones will be highly permeable to reduce congestion and reduce a ‘cookie cutter’ look and feel.

Future Food has also worked successfully over many years with Westfield across Australia and New Zealand, recently working with individual designers at Westfield Newmarket in Auckland, reviewing and advising on tenancy designs in The Eatery food hall and with the restaurant precinct for The Rooftop on Broadway. Future Food provided feedback and recommendations on the designs and layouts in relation to: minimising customer sightlines into production areas; optimising purchase paths relative to maximising visual food and beverage displays; equipment placement and flow of production service relative to the approved menu concept; seating layout, diversity & optimisation; maximising al fresco dining opportunities; maximising human interfacing factors, practical dwell spaces and customer comfort; and creating memorable hospitality placemaking and welcome statements.

 

In the face of any challenge, typically resilient hospitality operators respond with good, creative food - rising to the challenge to exceed customer expectations, create a genuine and memorable experience. This experience has always been delivered on a backbone of clever design that ‘fits’ with the concept and enhances the appeal to create the right conditions for increasing repeat business – now more so than ever the physical ability of the space to adapt to ‘new’ customer needs and deliver multi-faceted food service for the foreseeable future is undeniable.

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Cover Image of Abacus Eastland via St Style