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I recently had the pleasure of attending the IHOP National Franchise Conference (considering it was in Hawaii, the pleasure was all mine) and sitting in on various sessions celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the brand and addressing concerns of IHOP Franchise owners.  No doubt these concerns are not exclusive to IHOP and are shared across many restaurant brands.  One particular session reminded me of a previous post by Jeff Gannon on portion consistency and trimming food costs.

In this breakout session titled Food for the Future, IHOP’s Jay Miller, Director – Research & Development, spoke to attending franchisees about upcoming changes to the menu, addressing franchisee concerns about food quality, cost, and vendor selection.  He also played a few news clips negatively highlighting IHOP among those restaurants busting belts with high fat and calorie count menu items.  He spoke of the growing interest from government entities in mandatory publishing of Nutritional Values on menus and the implied importance of portion control.  Here not only can portion consistency help manage food costs more precisely as prices continually creep up, but more importantly it can protect the image of the brand and its reputation.  Imagine what’s at risk if portions are exceeded, the media secretly tests that plate and nutritional values don’t match those published by corporate.

Once again MVaaS provides an opportunity to manage not only the hard costs, but also the soft costs associated with a household name being condemned by the media for false representation of nutritional information, or anything else for that matter.