Article

Friendly's tweaks Express concept

Its new Brookline, Mass., Express location features a new logo and a takeout-friendly menu.

May 13, 2010

To fit the concept more snugly into the fast casual niche, Friendly's Ice Cream Corp. has made several adjustments to its Friendly's Express concept, the second of which opened April 28 in Brookline, Mass.

A new menu focus on to-go foods and new packaging ensures that customers will get the food home or to the office in top condition. The ordering counter has a case stocked with cold beverages and grab-and-go side dishes. Outside, a new logo tells passersby that this isn't their father's Friendly's.

So far, the Brookline store, with 60 seats and a footprint of 2,520 square feet, is doing exceptionally well, said Jim Sullivan, vice president of development and franchising at Wilbraham, Mass.-based Friendly Ice Cream Corp. The company operates 504 fullservice Friendly's. "It is meeting all our expectations," he said.

Friendly's management hatched Express late in 2007 after realizing its menu was a good fit for the fast casual market.

"We play very well in fast casual based on the portability of our product offering," Sullivan said. Ice cream, he adds, fills in daypart gaps of afternoon snacks and evening treats.

Smaller, faster

The new Friendly's Express design uses the company's signature red as accents in a light, contemporary interior.

The traditional Friendly's building — big, and with table service meant to provide a guest experience of 45 minutes or so — didn't work for the fast casual model.

Friendly's hired Louis & Partners of Akron, Ohio, to design a new prototype that's two-thirds the size of a traditional Friendly's. There also was only one design mandate: A smaller, more energy-driven space that celebrates ice cream, said Chris Nonno, designer at Louis & Partners.

Nonno was given free rein in all areas except the palette, which had to include red. It's an equity color for Friendly's, he said.

To scream ice cream, Nonno sprinkled the design with a sleek ice-cream-cone motif. The motif appears in the backs of chair — etched into a pebbled-glass partition that separates a service corridor from the dining area — and on the walls in a custom, blond-wood cutout.

Red appears in paper light fixtures, in the pattern of fabric covering booth backs, seat covers and a soffit above the kitchen pass-through window. Soft yellow walls and touches of robin's egg blue complete the color scheme, such as in a panel above the dipping area.

The result: An interior dramatically different from the traditional Friendly's, with a contemporary and energetic feeling, Sullivan said.

The look is different,and so is the service style. Instead of table service, customers order and then are seated and food is delivered to them. The new service style reduces the average guest experience to 25 minutes down from 45 minutes.

Additionally, a reformatted kitchen with a back-to-front production flow and a labor-efficient chain broiler cuts ticket times to 6 to 8 minutes, compared with 13 to 15 minutes for a full-service Friendly's.

Necessary adjustments

The first Friendly's Express opened last August in Mansfield Marketplace, a 24,000-square-foot retail center in Mansfield, Ohio. Friendly's chose the location because of its collection of big-box and specialty stores. The site pulls Friendly's core demographic, women ages 18 to 49 with children, and business people, who will be Express's target market, Sullivan said.

Ice cream motifs abound - in wall art, on chair backs and etched into a pebbled-glass divider.

During the first few months of operation, Friendly's discovered one flaw in the design: The logo was too similar to the traditional Friendly's, and passersby were mistaking it for such. A new logo on the Brookline location has far better curb appeal and does a better job promoting the new brand, Sullivan said.

Another example is making the menu more takeout-friendly. To this end, the Brookline store, in a gentrified neighborhood called Coolidge Corner, offers a new menu that includes cold sandwiches — turkey, BLT, roast beef, grilled chicken and tuna, priced from $6.69 to $7.79 — and other takeout-friendly fare.

A grab-and-go case up front offers packaged fruit, granola and yogurt parfaits, fruit salad and Cuban black-bean salads; there's also a cabinet of pre-packed ice cream. Takeout will eventually account for about 40 percent of total sales, Sullivan predicts.

Minimal design changes include the addition of carpeting to warm up the dining area and a simpler, text-heavy menu board without photos, which Mansfield customers said they found confusing.

Expansion plans

Express sports a $10 check average, compared to $8 for the base brand, due mostly to a bundle offer of a two-scoop sundae and 20-ounce refillable beverage for $2 extra, Sullivan said. He expects unit volumes to hover around $1.1 million, compared with $1.8 for the base brand.

The buildout cost for an Express is about $600,000, compared to $1.2 million to $1.3 million for a traditional location. Express units will average 45 to 50 seats and about 2,400 square feet, compared with 3,600 to 4,000 square feet and 145 to 160 seats for traditional locations.

Friendly's plans to open five to seven more Express units this year, and wants to experiment with a variety of locations, including malls, medical and university campuses, urban and suburban spots.

"We really want to communicate that this is a different way to use Friendly's," Sullivan said.

Franchising