Which parts of your customers’ experiences do you spend the most time thinking about? The moment they step inside your dining location? The time they spend perusing your menu? The points at which they order and pay? These moments are all important, of course, but they’re a small piece of a much larger puzzle. Today, customers are being engaged much earlier than they once were, especially by newcomers on the food scene like delivery apps. In order to stay in front of your customers in the ways they’ve come to expect—and to stay ahead of the competition—foodservice operators must design strategies across the entirety of the Food Buyer’s Journey.
The Food Buyer’s Journey is the entire path your customers take before, during, and after they make a purchase from a foodservice operation. Customers embark on their journey the moment they get hungry and don’t conclude it until they decide, post-meal, whether they’d be willing to come back.
All told, there are five key stages of the Food Buyer’s Journey customers go through each time they interact with you:
Here’s the problem: Most foodservice operators spend a lot of time thinking about how they manage and market step four, when the customer is around or at their dining location, but miss opportunities when it comes to the rest of their customers’ journeys. That means that while food delivery apps and others are proactively influencing customers as early as the Awareness stage, foodservice operations can often only compete if they still happen to be in the running further on in the buyer’s journey. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
That’s why we at Nutrislice have developed a detailed guide to Influencing the Food Buyer’s Journey. This resource covers each of the five stages in depth, breaking down: