Welcome to Wendyverse! Are You Making Metaverse Restaurant Reservations?
Restaurants' plans for metaverse games and NFTs.
Photo Credit: Insider / Wendy’s
As we search through hundreds of articles each month, looking for updates in each of our six Web 3.0 areas, we tend to spot trending themes. In our April news clips, we saw a lot of publicity about restaurants and their plans for the metaverse.
It got to the point where we started thinking, "Is this an area our readers should be taking at least baby steps to understand?”
Well, here we go. Consider the following announcements we read.
Four major restaurant chains announced strategies or add-on tactics to things they are doing to become anchored in the metaverse area.
Wendy’s is building a few virtual restaurants in Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta with the chance to play games, win prizes and jump behind the ordering area to make your own burger.
Panera Bread announced it’s opening its own metaverse called Paneraverse.
Chipotle, who already was building metaverse restaurants in the Roblox game, is going into the venture capital business with a $50 million micro fund.
Finally, McDonald’s filed trademark protections for it’s products, ability to sell NFTs and open virtual restaurants.
The Bored and Hungry NFT hamburger joint opened it's first real restaurant in Long Beach, California, to good reviews. It is currently building a community of artists and entrepreneurs to share in food, art and fun experiences. It plans to issue 10,000 of its own NFTs for this approach.
A community of caffeine lovers in New York opened season 2 of its Crypto Baristas game, and the white paper calls for creating a new coffee in Honduras. Its goal is to produce the #1 ranked coffee in Honduras in a sustainable and socially responsible way.
The Food Institute put out a paper stating the time is now for all restaurants to start experimenting in the metaverse or get left behind. So what gives? Should we make sure any restaurant we want to invest in or dine in has exposure to the metaverse or NFTs? Or is this just another fad, like delivery within 15 minutes in some urban areas, which might be a great idea but is in no way economical?
We asked noted restaurant executive Jay Schimmel what his thoughts were on all of this.
Schimmel’s experiences include working in senior positions at the Kimpton Group and Real Restaurant companies. He was also the chief operating officer at San Francisco-based Scoma’s seafood restaurants, which make over $20 million in revenue per year.
Schimmel has been spending considerable time over the past few months doing research on ways the metaverse can add value to new and existing restaurants. His answers? It is still very early, especially for customers, but if you do jump in, you won’t be alone.
Here are four areas Schimmel described that are happening right now in relation to restaurants and the metaverse.
The speculative Build, Bang, Boom! ran out of the box with a country club membership NFT approach. Schimmel is worried that right now speculative prices are too high and, your NFT value might not be sustainable, so you better have the operations making money also.
Create a game for your customers, like breakfast anywhere in the world, with the metaverse restaurant. Or race to see who can make the best sandwiches in a set time period. The game ideas in this space are endless, and Schimmel thinks someone is going to create a killer app game that Gen Z and other tech-consumer experts will love.
Community, Community, Community. Whether it is for a social good, like the Crypto Baristas approach, or Guy Fieri’s delivery-only Flavortown Kitchen, you are in with like-minded customers that are ready to take some action. This approach and building the experiences for your community make a lot of sense to us now.
Finally, probably not an example for customers to experience, but virtually creating the nuts and bolts approaches to menu items and operating expenses geared towards finding ways to make the restaurant more profitable. Schimmel warned us that right now the restaurant metaverse area is more suitable for the trendsetter person who always likes to eat at the next new thing, even if many don’t make it. But some will, and if he could just give us a clue of a few of the NFTs we should buy now for financial return or making the world a better place, we won’t keep them to ourselves!
For Further Information:
Here is a peak into the virtual worlds of Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Chipotle.
Here is a great report on the Bored and Hungry pop-up NFT restaurant’s future plans.
Want to get involved with helping coffee growers, create a new top notch coffee bean and perhaps makes some money playing the Crypto Baristas game? Here you go.
Finally, you probably saw this Bud Light Guy Fieri super bowl ad, which takes place in the metaverse.
Here is Guy Fieri’s next big step.
Best,
Craig