TEMPORARY French Fry Weight Gain
What Happened?
Over the 2014 Holidays, our distributor accidently gave away our inventory of fries over to their other customers. They did not even realise it till they went to prepare our latest order and realised they were completely out. Giving us very little notice to prepare.
Since it takes over 6 weeks to get replacement stock, we were basically informed that the fries we spent 8 months developing would not be available till early April.
WHAT WERE YOUR OPTIONS?
Since we only offer a couple of menu items, we are very, very picky about goes on our menu. So finding a fry that meets out standard has made for a couple of trying days. We basically came up with three options:
EXACTLY SAME FRY, BUT BIGGER: It is a fatter version of the current fry we offer. You get more potato in each bite, but is still super crispy, nice & dense, and same killer flavor.
BISTRO SKIN-ON FRY: We have been calling this the "FANCY" option. It is a completely different experience, really thick and with the skin left on. We think it is like eating a super tasty baked potato.
OFFER NOTHING: Since we are so picky, we wondered if we could not offer what we think is the best, should we offer anything at all.
What did you DECIDE?
Go with the Best you can Get...the same slightly bigger fry
When confronted with what we think is our first entrepreneurial "crisis" we found ourselves looking to our principles for guidance. Our goal is to give South Africans the best burger experience possible. We think being able to have some fries with a burger is so important , that Option 3 just did not make sense. While many thought Option 2 was an interesting idea, most of the feedback was it just felt wrong for BGR. It seemed like something you would get with the fancier fork-n-knife burger places, not some great American burger joint. As a result we decided to go with Option 1.
what do you think? Did we choose wisely?
Drop us a line at rosebank@eatbgr.com and let us know if you think this was the right call or if we blew it.
Will this happen again?
We sure hope not!!! Two additional values we hold close to our heart is learning from our mistakes and fighting for each other, this includes our suppliers. We are working closely with our distributor to see what lead to this and putting systems in place to increase communication and ensure we identify errors like this well before it is too late. We feel blessed with the suppliers we have and know everyone will learn from this so that they can avoid it going forward.