![]() A virtual brand takes that buildout out of the equation. Traditionally, restaurants needed to create a concept, find a location, build it out and then use local marketing to get people into the store, then hope it works. You can build a brand without anybody walking into your store. If you have a good product, people like it, they’re going to tell people about it. ![]() They’d put an ad in the paper, radio or TV. “In the old days the only way to get food out to the people was to have a great restaurant and to make great food. “You have social media now,” Mark Wasilefsky, head of TD Bank’s restaurant franchise finance group, told me last month. In two years, that restaurant chain has generated $1.3 billion in sales. A single tweet about that sandwich led to an explosion in interest and one of the best quarters a single restaurant chain has ever seen. To understand this, go back to 2019, when a decidedly non-virtual concept, Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, introduced its chicken sandwich. It could also make it that more difficult for traditional concepts starting out the old-fashioned way to get funding. That could potentially bring in a flush of cash into the space. If an investor can devise a virtual concept that can get attention without traditional brick-and-mortar locations, that changes the game in the restaurant business. Why? Because the success of a virtual brand like MrBeast could offer a new route to success in the restaurant space without all those pesky capital costs. If these early returns prove to be lasting, MrBeast could well launch an awful lot of competitors. The concept’s incredible early popularity is a test of the potential of virtual concepts, and whether such concepts can get off the ground without the benefit of a big chain and its existing infrastructure. The company’s app quickly surged to the top spot on the Apple Store among food and beverage apps-on Friday it was 29th, ahead of such chains as Wingstop and Panda Express. ![]() As my colleague Joe Guszkowski noted recently, the virtual concept opened with 300 locations in December. MrBeast, otherwise known as Jimmy Donaldson, helped create MrBeast Burger along with the restaurateur Robert Earl.
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