The HNGRY Summit

Reframing Restaurants & Living Shy in LA

A couple weeks ago we attended the HNGRY Summit in Los Angeles. This was the second year of the summit and our second time going as well. We= me + Andrew Holden (Shy Bird business partner) and Mia Groves (Shy Bird Marketing Manager). This year I got to present in a breakout session in addition to attending. My topic was “Upgrading the 18th Century Restaurant Business Model to Modern Day” which was an exercise in reframing restaurants that will get into below.

HNGRY is the brainchild of Matt Newberg. He describes it as a media platform examining a world where technology shapes what we eat. It covers everything from drone delivery to personalized nutrition to CPG. I’ve said it before but if you like reading this newsletter, you WILL also like HNGRY. The Summit covers all of it and is honestly one of the only ones I’ve attended the last couple years. I love the cross-functional, boundary-less-ness of it, journalists like Kristen Hawley of Expedite and Dan Frommer of New Consumer alongside independent restaurant operators, ice cream start-ups, robotics companies, and Sweetgreen execs. It’s intimate with around 125 attendees which is one of the best parts. That said, I want it to grow for Matt and all the effort he puts into it. I’d also love for a Spring east coast version in Boston or NYC. Maybe a large POS or reservations tech company in either of the 2 cities could help make that happen (a subtle hint)?

Lastly I love the HNGRY summit because it’s in Los Angeles which is fast becoming one of my favorite food cities. See below for our dining itinerary which I think deserves it’s own post.

Matt did a great round-up of the day here so I am not going to try and do that. I am going to share the reframing workshop exercise and tools.

The goal of the workshop was to shift how we think about what a restaurant is at the very core. It’s a generative exercise where participants try to overcome functional fixedness and look at a restaurant in an entirely new way. I believe reframing is key to helping solve the profitability riddle we face as an industry. The directive given to the teams was to use one of the reframings I provided, or come up with their own, to brainstorm new ideas around how a restaurant could improve its economics by contributing to its community in new ways.

I also built a little tool the teams could interact with to help spark thinking. In hindsight, I probably should have spent more time giving clear instructions rather than this but I had fun building it and maybe it can be useful in a different format. You can see it and play with it at restaurantreframer.com.

We began by talking through the purpose of reframing in any context and then narrowed in to why it was critical for restaurants. We spoke of profitability challenges and the extractive nature of many companies in the ecosystem. We then broke up into 5 groups for the working session.

It took a few minutes for people to get the hang of it. Again, mostly because I was not as clear as I should have been and occasionally forget people cannot hear or see my thoughts. Once we got past the confusion though, there were some very interesting conversations and ideas.

One group reframed a restaurants as personalized private chefs and kitchens. They envisioned a world where smart data from wearables and other devices would assist chefs and operators to personalize meals to people wants and needs. Multiple groups sought to define a restaurants role in addressing issues of loneliness. Another embraced the idea of restaurants as micro-fulfillment stations for Doordash and Go Puff type orders. A restaurant might take a small fee or get reduced revenue shares for storing top skus of various products one might typically get a CVS. This could generate revenue or decrease revenue shares for a restaurant and decrease the number of trips drivers need to make.

We spent that last 15 minutes discussing the various ideas the teams came up with. Given the intimacy of the conference I’ve already been able to reconnect around the ideas with some attendees. I am excited to see what will come from it. I’ve already come up with a new reframing I’m noodling around.

Thank you Matt and everyone who helped put on the HNGRY summit to make that community a little more connected. Can’t wait for next year!