[Podcast] Going All In On Virtual Restaurants with Alex Canter

 

Alex Canter is a fourth generation restaurateur at Canter’s, the famous Los Angeles deli. And he was very early on the delivery and virtual restaurant game. Now, he’s a leader in the space at Nextbite, creating virtual brands with celebrities like rapper Wiz Khalifa, and helping small restaurants maximize revenue in the process. We chat about:

• The early days of food delivery in LA
• The growing pains of adding delivery to a decades-old brand
• Alex’s first virtual brand, Grilled Cheese Heaven
• The creation of Ordermark, and later Nextbite
• How to build a brand from nothing
• Fax machines?

Meet Alex Canter

Alex is a restaurant industry innovator, in-demand speaker, and passionate advocate for restaurant operators and workers. He was raised in the kitchen of the world-famous Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles, where he and his team started work on what would become Nextbite. A fourth-generation restaurateur, the restaurant business has been in Alex’s blood for over 90 years. In addition to being the visionary and leader of Nextbite, Alex is active with the Techstars network and enjoys mentoring other restaurant technology entrepreneurs and occasional angel investing. He is a 2019 recipient of the Forbes 30 Under 30, Fast Casual Executive’s Top 25 and a recipient of Nation’s Restaurant News’ 2022 Top 50 Power List. Alex previously led several technology ventures and most recently, Nextbite announced the close of its $120M Series C funding round led by Softbank.

Big Ideas

Virtual restaurants can take a cue from successful DTC brands

“So we’re, we’re kind of looking at that same mode [as DTC brands], but, but in the restaurant space, there’s all these consumers who are now used to shopping online for food, through their favorite delivery apps, DoorDash, Uber eats, grub. And when you create brands and put them on these platforms and maximize the SEO of the digital real estate and, and are doing all the traditional digital marketing things to get people excited to try these, these new brands, it really is, is a pretty similar experience to what happened in online shopping and a lot of the brands that we’ve created.

We have to build a website, build an Instagram account, build a social media following the same way that you would for a physical store or a physical restaurant. You know, a lot of that stuff still applies. It’s just like a new approach and a new version of that…,” says Canter

Recommended Reading: Simple Restaurant Marketing Plan + [PDF Template]

Restaurants can benefit from taking on virtual brands different from their cuisine

“There is a benefit to taking on a different category of food or a different genre, which is that you’re reaching a totally different consumer base. We have a Mexican restaurant that’s doing some of our wing brands right now, and they love it because they’re selling to a completely different demographic, single, younger male audience in a college campus market on top of the families that they’re serving in the restaurant.

So they like that. They get to reach a totally new consumer segment. Even though they do now have to carry potentially a couple of different ingredients and SKUs, it’s worth it for them,” says Canter.