Resetting the Table

REVIEW SUMMARY
Company. Innovative Concept Group
Industry. Food service brokerage
Key. Helping restaurateurs put supplies in one basket
By The Numbers. Click here

Whatever your favorite menu item is at your neighborhood restaurant, chances are good that William “Bud” Taylor has some connection to it.

The president and CEO of Tampa-based Innovative Concept Group has been working the last 13 years to connect major food suppliers with regional restaurant chains, with the volume of business it handles each year approaching nearly $1 billion.

He has been trying lately to convince clients that they should use multiple connections to stock their kitchens instead of local single-vendor relationships that, though they may be good for friendships, don't often result in favorable pricing.

To prove his point, Taylor recently sent out promotional kits containing vintage disco eight-track tapes — the point being that they might as well be playing music that way if they haven't changed their sales systems anytime over the last 30 years.

ICG has relationships with multiple big-name food suppliers such as Tyson Foods Inc., Sara Lee Corp., J.M. Smucker Co., Mars Inc. and the Hershey Co. Restaurant chains the company current works with include Ale House, Tijuana Flats and Sonny's Real Pit Bar-B-Q.

Being able to represent multiple food lines allows restaurants to save on supply costs, according to Taylor. ICG also offers other related services such as promotional items, rebates, recipes and kosher certificates.

“We provide knowledge of and access to the marketplace,” says Taylor, 56, a third-generation Tampa resident and 38-year veteran of the food service industry. “The restaurant business is a tough business.”

Black Monday, then a merger
Taylor has had plenty of experience with tough times. He launched his own food brokerage business, SeaRich Menu Marketing Inc., from a Northdale townhouse Oct. 19, 1987, the same day as the “Black Monday” stock market crash.

A decade later, ICG was established through a merger of SeaRich with Jim Pless & Co., another leading Florida food service broker based in Tampa. A spate of expansions and acquisitions began in 1999 that now puts the company in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas and the Carolinas with 165 employees.

Now based in a business park along Benjamin Road north of Tampa International Airport, ICG changed the game regarding deals between restaurants and suppliers. Restaurateurs previously worked with individual suppliers, which was fine until industry consolidation started to take hold and profit margins got tighter.

“That works, but the business changed,” he says. “There were a lot of redundancies and not much efficiency.”

However, convincing restaurant owners to combine lines was a bit of a challenge, especially with relationships that were generations deep and often involved hometown ties traced back to first locations.

“There was a lot of pullback. It was house-to-house combat for a while,” Taylor says. “We had to prove not only could we be more efficient, but more effective.”

A falloff of dining business following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, might have convinced some owners that they needed to find better ways to get food to customers' tables, he says. The same wave of change is happening again during the current recession, which he points out has actually been worse for the restaurant and hospitality industry than the post-9/11 years but is showing signs of recovery through the first quarter.

No wings, no problem
Besides helping hold the line on margins, companies like ICG can help restaurant chains introduce popular new products and even make quick substitutions in case of food shortages, Taylor says.

One recent example involved a national shortage of chicken wings, a popular staple during sporting events. In response, larger chicken pieces were processed into smaller cuts and smothered in the same sauces, thus putting “boneless wings” on the menu.

Other similar experiments with menu items happen within a test kitchen inside ICG's offices, where restaurant chefs can learn techniques in an audience setting straight out of the Food Network. Taylor says the culinary facilities are helpful to smaller chains that don't have their own head chefs.

Recent acquisitions by ICG include Southern Food Concepts Inc. of Pelham, Ala., First Flight Foods Inc. in Norcross, Ga., and two other food brokerages in Prattville, Ala., and Knoxville, Tenn. Those additions helped the Tampa company's annual revenue ramp up to $14.3 million last year and $6.5 million through the first four months of this year, with 2009 overall sales totaling $715 million.

“We're making progress and we believe the things we're doing will put us in a much stronger position when the economy turns around,” Taylor says. ICG will also begin construction of its 16,000-square-foot headquarters along Race Track Road this summer, he adds.

When he isn't working with restaurateurs and suppliers, Taylor spends time on a number of other hobbies — bird hunting, fishing, golfing and attending University of Florida football games. He has two adult daughters who live in Tampa, and his wife Mindy has three young sons.

Just as there's no rest in the restaurant industry, Taylor says he has to keep innovating with ICG: “We have to figure out what will work over the next 10 years.”

Click here to review Innovative Concept Group's performance over the past three years.

The tale of the tape

Earlier this spring, Innovative Concept Group sent a unique marketing piece to 75 food service executives. The plain white box with the red “confidential” stamp appears tame enough, until the contents are opened.

Inside that box is something many of those folks likely hadn't seen in quite a while -- an eight-track tape of disco hits from the 1970s, still in fairly good condition.

The novelty, accompanied by graphics from that era, carried the additional message: “Times changed. Did you?”

Bud Taylor, ICG president and CEO, says the point is that if the recipient's sales systems had not fundamentally changed since that musical era, they were likely losing money.

“Many huge companies have relied on disconnected, localized networks for years, because no one wanted to turn their back on their 'good ol' boy' relationships,” Taylor says. That thinking should have gone the way of the eight-track, he says, since regional relationships offer economies of scale, leading to higher profits.

The real trick, though, was finding enough of those clunky plastic cartridges to put in those boxes. ICG worked with Shirley/Hutchinson CreativeWorks, a Tampa-based marketing firm, to design and distribute the packages.

“The supply has not yet been depleted, but it's darn close,” says John Shirley, the firm's principal. He says staffers were dispatched to plenty of thrift stores to find the obsolete tapes and hit pay dirt when they found a collection in their original cellophane and cardboard packaging.

Shirley won't reveal the cost of the campaign, or where his firm found those tapes. He says ICG and Shirley/Hutchinson plan may need those locations again when they roll out other mailings using various outdated metaphors to make their case.