Merging Food and Data for Better Restaurants

When I began working on the concept for Rock City Eats around 5 years ago the goal was to get to a point where we give small and local restaurants (and other local businesses) a competitive advantage against chains. Large chains have always dominated the food scene when it comes to getting the word out thanks to bigger budgets and better resources. I felt leveling the playing field was always within our reach.
Our publication here was founded to give a voice to local restaurants. As many as we could. It came by building an audience, building relationships, and making decisions based on what is good for the collective whole of the local restaurant scene. In our time we have touched over 500 restaurants statewide and generated millions in projected impact.
There has always been a vision to provide restaurants with three key resources to help their business: Influence, Intelligence, and Analysis.
We launched a part of the influence component over 2 and a half years ago, giving restaurants an inexpensive way to enhance their interactions with our audience and reach external audiences in a mostly automated way.
We are now ready to take the next big step in our evolution of restaurant resources with our Intelligence program that is backed with analysis.
The goal here is to leverage restaurant sales data into actionable intelligence that will make restaurants more efficient, profitable, and enable calculated growth.
Here is how it works:
We pull your sales data from your point of sale system. Then we pull various reference points to show what is driving sales numbers. Want to see how one menu release performed against another? We got that. Considering enclosing a patio and want to see how much revenue you lose when the weather is bad? We can give you that number. Want to see if that promotion activity worked or what the impact on running a social media campaign was? Easy.
The idea is that we can pull together real intelligence using hard numbers to analyze almost anything within a restaurant. We also want to leverage that data to project upcoming periods, help you make business decisions, and identify opportunities.
Once we reach a critical mass of Restaurant Intelligence users, we can aggregate data in a way that protects individual restaurant information. We could use this to show how your space is doing compared to others in general in your area. We could also use this for someone looking to expand hours or locations as a way to see what areas of the city are doing better than others at various times. The possibilities are really limitless. It allows the level of decision-making that most local spots never have access to.
Even better when combined with our influence program, it allows us to make better decisions with promotions for restaurants. We can reach a point where we can show direct return on investment and make it overall more profitable.
We are slowly rolling the program out and accepting a small handful of pilot restaurants statewide to begin. In exchange for being our guinea pig we will offer the program at a highly reduced cost, plus the ability to help shape how we go forward. If you are interested in joining send me a message and we will visit more.
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