In a lot of ways, an MCRC is one of the holy grails of foodservice sales teams. Yet many food manufacturer sale team members may not even know who they are. Let’s fix that right now.

In the world of foodservice sales, there are basically five types of target operators, and we will cover all of them in upcoming blog posts. Today, let’s look at Multiple Concept Restaurant Companies, or MCRCs. If you live in any metro market, you likely have a handful of MCRCs.

In the Lowcountry of South Carolina, there’s one known as the SERG Group. Begun as a single pizza restaurant in 1984, Giuseppi’s Pizza & Pasta, by Steve Carb. He began his restaurant career as a dishwasher in Pittsburgh, and brought a better kind of pizza, along with the trappings of the Penguins, Pirates, and Steelers to the panache of the pizza joint’s interior. His entrepreneurial spirit for creating and operating a variety of restaurant concepts in the Hilton Head area has made the SERG Group the largest single employer on the island.

Steve passed away in 2022, but his MCRC lives on with 16 different concepts ranging from Nectar Farm Kitchen to Skull Creek Dockside and Wise Guys, an upscale restaurant with an emphasis on bourbon.

Today, the SERG Group is led by Alan Wolf who is continuing to grow the MCRCs portfolio and the sales of each of the properties. He was the focus on a recent article in Total Food Service magazine that offers greater insight into his operation.

SERG Group has consolidated much of the back-office operations of its various restaurants for efficiency, such as menu development and purchasing, which is the beauty of an MCRC. Because food manufacturer sales teams just need to have one or two points of contact, there is opportunity to quickly land a high volume of business. 

How To Land An MCRC

The first step is landing MCRC business is to leverage brokers in each market to assure that they have relationships with important MCRCs. If not, work the market with your broker to build relationships with the senior staff, including the menu developer to set up a meeting. With MCRCs, building a relationship with the president of the company can open the door to sales quickly.

Otherwise, find out who within the organization is the menu developer and schedule an immersion session to demonstrate how your product is a solution to their multiple menus. Do your homework and look at each menu to work with your culinary team to also build a narrative on how your product(s) are versatile to fit well with multiple menus across appetizers, entrees, sandwiches, or snacks. With the menu developer convinced, now you have support for pushing your products through purchasing to land the sale.

MCRC organizations are less cumbersome and can provide faster results than regional and emerging chains which will be the topic of our next dive into how to grow sales in foodservice.

If you would like to discuss how Creative Energy can help you grow sales within any segment or operator type, tap into our expertise by contacting us for a call.