Knowing a restaurants category up front would be convenient for customers, but it could have an even larger impact on restaurant owners and industry analysts who follow emerging trends, operational efficiencies and performance data, said Shuster, who founded the trade magazine Restaurant Startup & Growth in 2004, holds an MBA from Pepperdine University and a law degree from NCCU.
As an instructor in the Accounting Department at NCCU and a former interim director of the Hospitality Administration program, Shuster also sees how a classification system could be used in the training of future hospitality industry leaders.
“The main objective of this study is to develop a theory-based classification of the restaurant industry that could serve academic researchers and industry practitioners,” writes Shuster and his co-authors, H.G. Parsa of the University of Denver and Milos Bujisic of The Ohio State University.
The article based on their study was published in the January 2020 edition of Cornell Hospital Quarterly.
According to Shuster, classification is common in other industries, citing hotels, banking, and automobiles.
“The vast diversity among restaurants made their classification more complicated since they can be classified based on a number of different attributes,” the article says.
Aspects listed as potential variants include “size, cuisine, location, ambiance, service, price, age, number of employees, business format, technology, social media engagement and competitive approach.”
To overcome this complexity, the authors have proposed a theoretical model for the system based on a continuum of aspects that are “utilitarian” or “hedonistic.”
Utilitarian characteristics might include convenience, accessibility, effectiveness of addressing hunger, and price. More hedonistic values would include emotional gratification, sensation of fun or indulgence, entertainment value and demonstration of conspicuous consumption.
According to the authors, this model can be considered a continuum, ranging from highly utilitarian to highly hedonic and thus remain “relevant to classify evolving restaurant concepts.”
For example, an emerging concept such as “dark kitchens,” which produce fine-dining style meals for third-party delivery, could be ranked as both hedonic and utilitarian at the same time.
Next for Shuster, Parsa and Bujisic is an expansion of this study to determine restaurant subclasses as determined by culture, service style, menu, ambience, check average and other factors.
"As our research further unfolds, we would expect and encourage the restaurant industry to adopt this standardized restaurant classification system," Shuster said.
