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The biggest new restaurant trend is small. Special menus with petite, less expensive portions are popping up all over, from large chains like Olive Garden and The Cheesecake Factory to trendy urban eateries and farm-to-fork dining rooms. Restaurants hope that offering smaller servings beyond the children’s menu will meet many different diners needs. Some people want to spend less when they go out. Others are looking for healthier options or trying to lose weight. Younger consumers tend to snack more throughout the day and eat smaller meals, said Maeve Webster, the president of culinary consulting firm Menu Matters. These are really driven by, I think, changes in the way people are thinking about their relationship with food, the way they spend money on food, what is a good value and whats not, Webster said. Looking for value Beth Tipton, the co-owner of Daniel Girls Farmhouse Restaurant in Connersville, Indiana, introduced an eight-item Mini Meals menu last fall after several customers requested smaller portions. The menu, which includes daily specials like a half piece of meatloaf with green beans, mashed potatoes and gravy for $8, now accounts for about 20% of the restaurant’s orders, she said. Older adults make up about half of the restaurants clientele, Tipston said, and some customers told her the regular menu was a stretch for their budgets. As someone who underwent weight-loss surgery, she also knew from experience that many restaurants won’t allow adults to order from their children’s menus. We wanted it to be available to all without the word kids meals attached, Tipton said. With the rising costs all around us we wanted to help in any way we can, and this is a great option. Eating out and GLP-1s Some restaurants are adding menus to court users of GLP-1 weight-loss and diabetes drugs like Zepbound, Wegovy, Ozempic and Mounjaro. Last fall, restaurateur Barry Gutin ran into two different friends who told him they were taking GLP-1s and struggling to find restaurant meals that met their dietary needs and smaller appetites. GLP-1 users tend to eat less, so they need nutritionally dense foods that are low in fat and high in protein and fiber. Gutin, the co-owner of Cuba Libre Restaurant and Rum Bar in Philadelphia, Washington, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Orlando, Florida, reached out to a doctor who specializes in weight loss and to Cuba Libres culinary director, Angel Roque. Over the next month, they developed the chains GLP-Wonderful menu, which is available during dinner. The menu has five classic Cuban options. Roque said the pollo asado on Cuba Libre’s regular menu has nearly 1,000 calories; on the GLP-1 menu, that’s slimmed down to 400 calories, but heavy on protein and fiber. He said it was also important to keep the GLP-1 meals flavorful and colorful, to stimulate appetites. Many times when people are on those kind of regimes, they feel that they cant do the same as everybody else. So we wanted to show them, yes, at Cuba Libre, you can,” Roque said. Gutin said the menu has increased business. He estimated that 10 to 20 groups at each location every week have at least one person who requests the GLP-Wonderful menu. People say, Thank you for serving us, Gutin said. Big chains go small Olive Garden, whose seven-item Lighter Portions menu rolled out nationwide in January, said GLP-1 users were one consideration. The Italian-style restaurant chain also wanted to appeal to patrons pursuing healthier diets or more affordable meals, said Rick Cardenas, the president and CEO of Olive Gardens parent company, Darden Restaurants. There is a consumer group out there that believes in abundance, but abundance is different for everybody, Cardenas said in September during a conference call with investors. So consumers can choose. Were not changing our entire menu to make it a smaller portion.” The Asian fusion chain P.F. Chang’s began offering medium-sized portions last fall. The Cheesecake Factory added smaller, lower-priced Bites and Bowls to its menu last summer, while TGI Fridays recently began testing an Eat Like A Kid menu with smaller portions. A long-term change Smaller portions arent a new concept. Twenty years ago, small-plate tapas restaurants were all the rage, for instance. But to Webster, the menu consultant, the scaled-down dishes appearing now feel like a longer-term shift. For one thing, the trend is not tied to any particular cuisine. Webster also thinks consumers are thinking more about food waste than they used to, and smaller portions can alleviate some of their concerns. I think it is a core need that consumers have, and a demand that has been lingering under the surface for a long time because restaurant meals, particularly at chains, have become so large, she said. Sure, it sounds great to take leftovers home, but they never taste as good. During a recent visit to Shelburne, Vermont, from his home in North Carolina, Jack Pless was delighted to see the Teeny Tuesday menu at Barkeaters Restaurant, which specializes in locally sourced food. Pless, whos in his 60s and used to own a restaurant, said he cant eat as much as he used to at meals. So many times you go out to restaurants, especially me or my wife, and well take home a box and itll sit in the refrigerator for two, three days and start to grow a beard, he said. Julie Finestone, the co-owner of Barkeaters, said she introduced the Teeny Tuesday menu last month to bring in more weekday business during the winter. She was concerned about the cost of offering lower-priced food options, like $12 reuben sliders, but said the decision has brought in more business than she expected. Finestone said shes pretty confident Teeny Tuesday will become a year-round fixture. Some people, its dietary. Some have smaller appetites. Some people dont like to overindulge in the middle of the week, Finestone said. I think that it just spoke to people. Dee-Ann Durbin, AP business wrtier AP Video Journalists Mingson Lau and Amanda Swinhart contributed.
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E-Commerce
There’s a $298 midi dress on Reformation’s website with delicate lace detailing throughout and a button front that allows you to show some legit’s the kind of dress the brand is known for, versatile and a little seductive. On Quince, there’s what appears to be the same dress: It has the same silhouette, the same fabric, the same drape. The Quince version costs $69.90. That $228 difference is Quince’s entire business model. At a time of inflation, when consumers are looking to curb their spending, Quince’s approach has been wildly successful. Eight years after launch, Quince generates upwards of $1 billion in annual revenue, has a 1,000-strong staff, adds hundreds of new items to the site per week, and has expanded beyond clothing to furniture and home goods, menswear and kids, wellness products like collagen peptides, and even food. (Its $125 caviar has been a huge hit.) This week, Quince snagged $500 million in Series E funding, valuing the company at $10.1 billion. Quince hasn’t achieved this scale without blowback. It has been sued by the parent companies of Coach and UGG for copying their designs, and Williams-Sonoma has taken aim at its comparative advertising practices. Most recently, Quince has been hit by a consumer class action lawsuit claiming its pricing is deceptive. All of this has shaped the public perception of Quince as a company that makes cheap knock-offs. Now, Quince is betting that it isn’t enough to be known as a dupe factory. It needs something more: a brand. In a sign of this evolution, Quince hired Dakota Kate Isaacswho previously built the cult skincare brand The Ordinaryto be its first head of brand strategy and narrative. “My role is not to create a new story,” she tells Fast Company. “It’s to humanize Quince and let consumers get a glimpse behind the curtain.” [Photo: Quince] The Copycat’s Playbook In 2018, Sid Gupta, his wife Zunu Mittal, and two others launched Quince in Palo Alto, California. These founders believed they had identified enormous inefficiencies in the retail industry that consumers end up paying for. Whereas Direct-to-consumer brands educated consumers about how bypassing department stores allowed them to cut out retail markups. Quince was built to go deeper into the system and be, in its parlance, a “manufacturer-to-consumer” brand. By working directly with factoriescutting unsold inventory that inflate prices and eliminating brokers, suppliers, and other middlementhey could sell products at a fraction of the price of competitors, including $50 cashmere sweaters, $80 silk blouses, and $100 linen sheets. Quince isn’t shy about the fact that it is actively monitoring what consumers are searching for on the internet and figuring out how to make cheaper versions of other brands’ best-selling products. In a radical move that has ruffled the industry, Quince points out on each product page how much other brands charge for items that look indistinguishable; they are often two, three, or five times more expensive. [Photo: Quince] Can Quince Become a Real Brand? Quince brought on Isaacs to create an identity for the company that goes beyond being a copycat. Isaacs built her career at The Ordinary, a cult skincare label that disrupted the beauty industry with transparent pricing and ingredient-forward marketing. Starting as a P.R. intern, Isaacs quickly proved her mettle and spent five years building the company’s entire U.S. operation from scratchhiring staff, developing social media strategies, getting into retail. One of her biggest accomplishments was landing the brand in Sephora. Sephora’s merchants initially resisted The Ordinary because they thought it would encourage their customer to trade down from more expensive labelsbut it eventually became one of Sephora’s top-selling brands. The parallel to Quince is not lost on Isaacs. Just as The Ordinary challenged the assumption that skincare had to be expensive to be effective, Quince is challenging the assumption that quality clothing and home goods require premium prices. “The consumer has kind of been conditioned to believe that quality must be expensive to be real,” Isaacs says. “I’ve seen behind the scenes, I know how this works.” When Quince approached Isaacs for this new role, she was intrigued by the opportunity to help bridge the gap between consumer perception and what she thought was a very radical business model underneath. She empathizes with some consumers’ wariness about Quince because she had similar reservations when she first encountered the brand four years ago. “My perception prior to joining the business was like, ‘Something’s sketchy here, like something’s off,'” she recalls. But as she’s gone behind the scenes at Quince, she believes there’s a compelling story to tell about how the company is radically reimagining the supply chain and democratizing quality. “People should think about Quince less as a brand and more as a new operating model for retail,” she says. Her job, as she sees it, is not to spin a new narrative but to do a better job explaining what the company already does. Isaacs is inspired by Everlane’ approach to storytelling when it first launched in 2011, as it tried to explain how the cost of a t-shirt balloons thanks to expensive brand campaigns and department store markups. Over the years, Everlane has moved away from this messaging, which gives Quince an opportunity to pick up where it left off. Isaacs wants every consumer touchpointfrom the first ad impression to the moment a package arrivesto convey a consistent message about quality, transparency, and the logic of the system. [Photo: Quince] The Dupe Problem But changing consumer perception is no easy task. And Quince is known as being a dupe-maker extraordinaire. Quince’s rise is inseparable from the broader cultural moment that made dupe culture mainstream. For years, buying knockoffs carried a social stigmasomething you did but didn’t necessarily advertise. That has changed in the era of social media and inflation, when many creators proudly share cheaper dupes of their favorite products. Susan Scafidi, a professor of fashion law at Fordham Law School, has observed this change closely. “Everyone has access to imitation goods, and social media celebration of dupes has become a communal way to concurrently show off fashion knowledge and financial savvy,” she says. “Dupe, a diminutive nickname for ‘duplicates,’ does some of the work of making the otherwise morally questionable world of fakes, copies, knockoffs, replicas, and worst of all counterfeits, sound adorable.” When asked about the dupe characterization, Isaacs pushes back. “Many silhouettes are not unique to a single brand,” she says. “These are things that have existed for years across categoriesa silk slip dress, a cashmere sweater, linen bedding. These are not proprietary designs. They’re ubiquitous products that a lot of brands produce.” While Quince does makes general items that aren’t visually associated with a single brand, it has also copied designs with distinct features, like the Reformation dress, Coach’s Rogue bag, and UGG boots. Scafidi notes that while Quince has managed to avoid the most common fast-fashion IP violationsinfringing trademarked logos or copyrighted fabric printsit has found itself in more complex territory. Trade dress claims, like those brought by Deckers about Quince’s version of UGG boots, argue that a shoe’s silhouette alone can be protected IP if consumers strongly associate that shape with a particular brand. Quince pushed back against Deckers with an antitrust countersuit that argued that the company is running a “litigation mill” to maintain a monopoly over sheepskin boots. “That action may be largely part of Quince’s efforts to control the narrative and cast itself as a good guy,” Scafidi says, “a quality-oriented, transparent, slow-fashion brand trying to deliver value to consumers.” (Deckers lost its key trade dress claim, but it has come back with a new wave of lawsuits.) The Williams-Sonoma lawsuit alleges that by directly comparing its products to Pottery Barn and West Elm, Quince is unfairly benefitting from these brands’ hard-earned reputation for quality. Quince is fighting back, calling the suit a case of an established brand using litigation to squash a scrappier competitor. There has yet to be a ruling.“Brands can’t stop Quince from engaging in legitimate comparisons,” Scafidi says. But she points out that if Quince is, in fact, making lower quality products than those of Pottery Barn and West Elm, “creating a halo effect around lesser goods could be deceptive.”There hasn’t yet been a ruling. [Photo: Quince] The Work Ahead Legal issues aside, Neil Saunders, managing director and analyst at GlobalData Retail, argues that building a brand entirely on dupes is a losing business strategy in the long run. “If your competitive position in the market, especially in fashion, is that you go around copying everyone else, you’ll definitely find an audience for it, but it’s not very imaginative,” he says. “If you’re a copycat, you’re always later to market. Premium brands do well because they have a distinct point of view and people will buy into that aesthetic.” That’s a ceiling that even a $10 billion dupe company will eventually hit, Saunders says. Without a strong brand, consumers have no reason to stick with Quince if a cheaper dupe-maker shows up. “I don’t know how defensible this business model is,” says Vidyuth Srinivasan, founder of Entrupy, a tech company focused on fighting counterfeits. “They’ve done an awesome job scaling this business model, but it is definitely possible to replicate it.” Now, it falls on Isaacs to reshape Quince’s identity from being maker of lower-priced goods to having a compelling story in its own right. Her goal is to focus on Quince’s efforts to shake up the status quo and democratize quality. The companies that have done this bestEverlane’s ‘radical transparency’ era, The Ordinary’s ingredient-obsessed honesty, Warby Parker’s mission-driven pricingsucceeded by making their mission feel urgent and understandable, then keeping it front and center. The $500 million raised in this round will go toward building a world-class team, expanding into new international marketsCanada is live, Europe is nextand deepening the company’s range of categories. The investment, Isaacs says, reflects confidence in something more durable than a dupe strategy. “This latest round has really shown the trust in the system that exists,” Isaacs says. For now, the Reformation dressand the Quince dress that looks almost exactly like itare still both for sale. The question is whether Quince can get consumers to want it not just because it’s cheaper, but because it’s Quince.
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E-Commerce
For more than a century, Utah has kept gambling almost entirely out of the state. There are no casinos, no lotteries and no racetracks that allow bets, a prohibition rooted in the conservative ideals of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which views gambling as a vice that leads to selfishness and addiction.But now, the state is fighting a new, more challenging battle to keep gambling outside its borders. It’s on the verge of enacting a law intended to undercut prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, which allow anyone with a smartphone to wager on anything from whether it will rain in Los Angeles to whether the United States will go to war.While regulators and other states are still debating whether those markets constitute finance or gambling, Utah has already made up its mind.“We are putting a casino in the pocket of every single American, and they are targeting especially young people,” said Gov. Spencer Cox. “It is really awful what they are doing, and we are going to make sure this doesn’t happen in our state.”Cox said he will sign the legislation, putting conservative Utah at odds with the federal government. Kalshi has already sued the state, and the company is backed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency responsible for regulating financial markets.The conflict puts Utah, a place that’s not known for picking fights, on the frontlines of a cultural, political and economic battle sweeping the country. On one side is a state deeply rooted in what is widely known as the Mormon church, where both politicians and faith leaders have treated the issue as a moral crusade. On the other is a growing industry Kalshi and Polymarket are estimated to be worth $20 billion each after their last fundraising rounds with connections in Washington that may offer some regulatory protection.President Donald Trump‘s eldest son is an adviser for both Kalshi and Polymarket and an investor in the latter. Trump’s social media platform Truth Social is also launching its own cryptocurrency-based prediction market called Truth Predict.Whoever wins this round could shape how other states handle the issue in the future.“What’s at stake here is whether states will be able to regulate gambling or if gambling is going to be subsumed into finance and ultimately regulated by Congress,” said Todd Phillips, a professor at Georgia State University who has written extensively about prediction market regulation. Utah takes aim at prop betting Polymarket and Kalshi allow participants to buy and sell contracts tied to the probable outcome of an event. Contracts are typically priced between one cent and 99 cents, which roughly translates to the percentage of customers who believe that event will happen.The companies argue they offer products that allow customers to manage risk, like how farmers can buy corn futures to lock in the price of their crops ahead of time. And derivative markets like the Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange have long offered what are known as binary options to investors, which bet on whether an event will or will not happen.But unlike those derivative markets, the bulk of Kalshi’s trading volume and roughly half of Polymarket’s are now tied to sports. Kalshi said it saw more than $1 billion in volume traded on the Super Bowl alone.Utah is seeking to limit prediction markets from doing business in the state by taking aim at proposition betting in sports, which can be a significant source of their revenue.The bill that Cox plans to sign would expand the state’s gambling ban to include wagers on certain events happening in a game rather than the game’s outcome. An example of these “prop bets” would be how well a particular player performs, or a team hitting a specific threshold like rebounds or other metrics.The legislation also aims to stop sportsbooks companies like FanDuel and DraftKings that have set up their own prediction markets, which analysts say could allow the companies to get around state gambling prohibitions.Because of the vocal opposition of Utah officials, Kalshi preemptively sued the state in late February, asking a federal judge to stop Utah from enforcing its gambling restrictions on the platform. The judge has yet to rule on Kalshi’s request. Other judges in Nevada and Massachusetts have issued early rulings in favor of states looking to ban Kalshi and Polymarket from offering sports betting in their states, while judges in New Jersey in Tennessee have ruled in favor of Kalshi.Kalshi argues its product is different from sportsbooks companies or casinos because customers are betting against each other instead of against the “house,” spokesperson Elisabeth Diana said.The Commodity Futures Trading Commission under Trump has agreed with Kalshi and has asserted that it has exclusive regulatory oversight of prediction markets. The agency argues states cannot ban the products from operating in their jurisdiction just because they are morally opposed to them.“To those who seek to challenge our authority in this space, let me be clear, we will see you in court,” chairman Michael Selig said recently in a video posted to social media. A moral crusade with religious roots It’s the first major issue in which Cox has clashed with Trump in the year and a half since the Republican governor worked his way into Trump’s good graces after not voting for him in 2016 and 2020.Patrick Mason, the chair of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University, said he is not surprised to see Cox and other Utah Republicans take a stand against prediction markets, even if it means going against their own party’s leadership in Washington. In the state, where about half of the 3.5 million residents are Latter-day Saints, even a simple game of church bingo is a rare sight.“Maybe they play for M&Ms, but never money,” he said.All the state’s major politicians, including the governor, lieutenant governor and its entire congressional delegation, are members of the church headquartered in Salt Lake City. When they view an issue as moral rather than political, the faith’s teachings often take precedence over appeasing the party, Mason explained.Church doctrine prohibits gambling in any form, saying it is motivated by “a desire to get something for nothing” and is destructive to individuals and families.“The idea that it goes against a sense of work ethic, a kind of fair exchange, has always been at the heart of the way a lot of people think about themselves in terms of Utah identity, and certainly Latter-day Saint identity and ethics,” Mason said.Because of Utah’s religious roots, the state has prohibited gambling since it was admitted to the Union in 1895. Along with Hawaii, it has the strictest gambling prohibitions in the country. Utah doesn’t even allow broad multi-state lotteries like Powerball or Mega Millions. Utah leads on both state and federal fronts Phillips, the professor focused on industry regulation, said if Congress does not step in to clarify whether these new prediction markets are legal, the issue will be left to the courts.“The line between gambling and finance is very, very fine,” Phillips said. “There’s a reason why Congress has, over and over again, stepped in to define and regulate financial markets when the products skew too close to gambling.”There is already some moement on Capitol Hill, led in part by another Utah Republican.Republican Rep. Blake Moore of Utah and Democratic Rep. Salud Carbajal of California introduced bipartisan legislation this week to more aggressively regulate prediction markets. The bill would prohibit the platforms from allowing bets on war, assassinations, terrorist attacks or election outcomes, and allow states to ban sports-related betting.“We, as a society, should not be taking bets on whether we are going to invade Cuba,” Moore said.Democratic senators have also said they will introduce legislation to ban wagers on violence.“It’s insane this is legal,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said on social media.In court filings, Kalshi has tried to argue that its sports prediction market has economic utility and usefulness. It uses an example of an insurance company that underwrites the careers of college athletes using prediction markets to hedge the risk. Kalshi also argues that hotels, travel agencies and stadium management companies may be able to use prediction markets to hedge their risk against underperforming sports.Moore said he is not swayed by Kalshi and Polymarket’s economic arguments.“Utah’s economic outlook has been strong for many years,” he said. “I see no need why we need to embrace these as an economic tool.” Ken Sweet and Hannah Schoenbaum, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
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