A View From The Top

Nekter CEO reveals strategy leading to increased sales amidst pandemic

Technology may seem like a luxury to most new business owners, but Nekter CEO Steve Schulze said the chain wouldn't be growing in the midst of the pandemic without making such an investment.

Steve Schulze, CEO, Nékter Juice Bar

August 7, 2020

By Steve Schulze, CEO, Nékter Juice Bar

We founded Nékter Juice Bar in 2010 based on the premise that we wanted to make a clean and healthy lifestyle affordable and accessible to everyone. That guiding principle holds true today more than ever. Looking back, I think the legacy brands that blossomed in the early '90s meant well, but as time went on, they proceeded down a slippery slope and became glorified ice cream shops. As we sought 10 years ago to reinvent the juice bar space, with a renewed focus on hand-crafted freshness and transparency, we have become an integral part of the communities we serve, especially now in a time when health, wellness, immunity, transparency and ingredient-integrity is more important than ever.

This insight — to prioritize the relationship of trust between brand and guest from the outset and to create each menu item only in service of this bond — has led to an outcome that we once considered would translate only to a few restaurants near our home base in Southern California. Today, we have over 172 Nékter locations open, systemwide sales in excess of $100 million and are just at the leading edge of our national growth. Our strong foundation has also allowed Nékter to easily grow vertically even in the midst of the pandemic. In fact, we have plans to open 15 to 20 locations before the end of the year and will launch a new brand campaign in October as we celebrate our 10th anniversary.

Moreover, sales across our pioneering digital and delivery platforms, developed in 2015 and carrying a userbase of nearly 700,000 pre-COVID-19, have increased 200% in the past four months as compared to the whole of 2019. More astonishing still, check averages also grew by more than 30% with many locations now starting to comp over 2019. Here's how we did it.

Fully integrated our App, POS, loyalty, third-party delivery partners, payment and online ordering to create online ordering and rewards app.
The core of this success is the ability to gather complex customer data and deliver customized offers and messaging based on individual purchase history and preferences, which in turn drives frequency, engagement and retention.
We survey our rewards members after each visit and we closely monitor our reviews on Yelp, Facebook and Google.

By embracing this promise of technology early on, we were able to connect with guests in ways that seemed perhaps superfluous at the time, almost as a luxury, but this very attitude to explore each and every method of connecting with our community has allowed our company, and hence our guests, to thrive during turbulent times. Without it, we would certainly have more intensely experienced the immense challenges and growing pains that many franchises and businesses have been enduring these last months.

All of this was possible because of the fundamental structure of our business. It has allowed us to build out systems vertically on a solid foundation, versus scrambling to build horizontally in. From the outset, our goal was to open every avenue available to us and while most legacy brands fall into the "treat category," we have been in the lifestyle category since inception. Why is this important? Because Nékter plays in any climate all year long and is not limited to a Spring Break to Labor Day sales cycle of juice bars of the past.

While I do not claim to have sought these options with the thought of a pandemic in mind or even in search of security through diversity of channel, this choice has certainly secured the future of Nékter as "best in class" in the space of health and wellness. We will continue to seek out any way to connect with our community with the same mission: to bring healthy food to the world with integrity and transparency blended into each and every ingredient.