January 20, 2023
Damola Adamolekun, CEO of P.F. Chang’s
Rebooting in The Year of the Rabbit – Damola Adamolekun, P.F. Chang’s
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Over 1.5 billion people observe and celebrate Lunar New Year—symbolic of prosperous times, warding off evil spirits, and sharing meals with loved ones. Red lanterns for Chinese New Year, lighting of firecrackers, and spreading joy with culinary abundance, are all traditions that span thousands of years throughout Asia—from China and Vietnam to Korea and Thailand.
Newly rebooted P.F.Chang’s is honoring its roots in Asian tradition by celebrating the Year of the Rabbit, offering unique experiences to guests in their kitchens featuring dishes prepared using age old wok centric cooking style. The company has seen its fair share of reboots and restructuring over the years, transitioning from a private, to public, and back to a private equity owned enterprise again. Now, with 300 or more restaurants, in 24 countries and growing, the brand employs about 20,000 people that deliver over $1 billion in annual revenue.
One of America’s favorite restaurant concepts, offering sit down Asian cuisine, and well known for their iconic warrior horse outside their locations, P.F.Chang’s is growing into a more dynamic brand under the leadership of CEO Damola Adamolekun. His reboot-in-progress is creating new experiences and consumer loyalty that is accelerating growth—and he is just getting started. We unpacked Damola’s global expansion strategy on the eve of Lunar New Year—of The Rabbit, who are also known to be witty, quick-minded, and ingenious.
Health and Wellness? Fresh Ingredients From Scratch
I was surprised to learn that every P.F.Chang’s restaurant creates every dish from scratch everyday in their kitchens. From sauces to dim sum’s, everything is traditional 2000 year old Asian wok style and there’s a newly added Farm to Wok® menu, highlighting their wholesome, from scratch cooking approach. Broadening the heritage offering of Chinese food to a Pan-Asian offering is something the brand has achieved in recent times, focusing on and still preserving their fresh cooking concept.
Dining As An Exciting Experience
DaaS (Dining as a Service), is a concept some organizations have failed to deliver on recently. Revamping P.F.Chang’s restaurant setup in every location to reflect a new look and feel was one of the first things that came about with the acquisition for Damola’s private equity firm Paulson & Co. Investing more in the physical infrastructure meant some newer footprint with red, gold, black as dominant color schemes so everything from the exterior horse to the inside would reflect the theme, perk up the ambience and offer an experience to diners like never before with added lighting effects, and implementing music to offer a fun element.
“Injecting that sort of life into a brand that everybody knows and loves, was our number one focus. The experience is really critical – having an amazing dining experience. So we’ve remodeled about 80% of our fleet at this point with red, gold, black colors, the music and lighting. Added to that, the food made from scratch with fresh ingredients, offering a theatrical experience. Now dumplings come on a hot steel plate and not a simple white plate; we drizzle soy sauce on it and the whole thing starts to sizzle. People take pictures of it to post on Instagram. It’s a comprehensive experience. That’s our number #1 priority; offering guests as exciting a dining experience as possible. That’s where I think we’ve had our greatest success.”
Achieving Mass Scaling
Implementing newer strategies to scale beyond 300 locations and mass markets globally can be greatly challenging. An iterative agile process, to say the least—being able to offer consistency in great tasting food and operational efficiency across locations worldwide.
“We tested and we modified and made adjustments. But the most important thing you can do is, have your operators evolve from the beginning. They have a very good eye for things that are going to cause issues at scale. Certain theatrical elements are just too complicated to do, and maybe your best waiters can do it , but you’re going to have your average waiter struggle. So it’s incorporating the operational side of things from the very beginning. We end up with something that’s impactful in execution and that can be executed. So, all over the U.S, all over the world, we’ve rolled it out and had a lot of success because we focused on operations, in addition to the impact.”
Speaking of scale, what’s up next is global expansion with partners in Middle East, Mexico, South America, Egypt, India and other markets.
Personalized Tailor Made Approach
As we transition to an era of people focused on wellness and healthy eating—like SOS (Salt, Oil, Sugar)—many brands are scrambling to adapt to individual needs. Organizations now have to pay attention to divergent requests—from gluten free and vegan to feel just feeling happy and comfortable about the experience. With lessons learned from other brand reboots—from Chuck-E-Cheese to Disney—P.F.Chang’s has the platform elements (Food – Entertainment -Experience) needed to continue meeting diverse and agile customer (audience) needs.
“We have a good heritage in terms of, you know, we’ve always been able to personalize. We have a menu that can be adapted, depending on an individual’s taste. You can come in and substitute or change things. We’ve always allowed that and it has worked to our benefit. And then we have a broad menu. We have things for everybody, right? So for folks who don’t eat meat, we have a lot of vegan options – salads, a gluten free menu, which is something we’ve been known for, for a long time. So we have a broadly appealing menu. It’s a balance. No customer can come in and say there’s nothing for me here. But at the same time of course, most of our customers want delicious savory foods. So you’re not going to go to the extreme either and forget who your customer is. But it’s tweaking, it’s refining, it’s making it more interesting.”
Transitioning to a Post Covid Era
Offering authentic hospitality and achieving growth, by focusing on customer experiences has been the strategy post covid. A mobile app, new channels like takeout, delivery and catering, maximizing ‘social score” (Yelp, Facebook, Google), two tier loyalty program (a free Gold level and a subscription Platinum level) that lets customers choose the benefits they are entailed to, have been an added boost for the business—accruing 5 million loyalty members.
Growth lies in understanding more about the customer base with the help of the data, driving engagement, catering to specific tastes and tweaking offerings – just like “Down the Rabbit Hole” cocktail for the Year of the Rabbit, that even comes “with an augmented reality coaster” and as Damola says “we look at competing against ourselves and as a result, we’re, I think, delivering something that can’t be found anywhere else and is much more exciting than the competition in terms of overall chain sit down restaurants.”
Guess it’s time to light red lanterns for prosperity, usher in new and bye-bye old, ward off evil, and enjoy wholesome food with ones we cherish! One can even head online to the P.F.Chang’s website now and discover unique Year of the Rabbit menus—tailor made to an individual’s year of birth.
