1 year ago
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Photo courtesy Rouses Markets.
It started with an idea about selling boiled crawfish.
As Rouses Markets conceived its new Houma location, CEO Donny Rouse Jr. and team considered the benefits of constructing a drive-thru window for the spring crawfish season.
“We were going to do it just like a fast food restaurant but for boiled crawfish,” recalled Rouse. “As we were planning it, we decided, ‘Hey, we want this open all year long instead of just during the spring time.’ We sell a lot of fried chicken already in our stores and our delis … so we decided, ‘Hey, let’s make this a fried chicken restaurant and then come crawfish season we’ll add crawfish to the menu.’ We’ll be open all year long and we’re able to service the customers at the store very conveniently.”
In the first week since opening the self-styled “Houma Da Chicken” drive-thru restaurant within the brand new Rouses Market store, the Rouses drive-thru is selling about “a week’s worth of fried chicken” or approximately 4,000 pieces daily, Rouse said. Opened Aug. 16 and located at 2233 Martin Luther King Blvd., the Houma store is the 63rd location for the privately held Gulf Coast grocer based in Thibodaux, and the first of its kind for the company.
Rouse says it was not a hard business decision: the drive-thru window would provide significant appeal to customers and at a minimal cost to the company. Although he would not disclose the amount, Rouse said it represents less than 5 percent of the total construction costs.
“We already fry chicken in the stores, we already boil crawfish in the stores, we had the space on that corner of the store where we have our cafe and our delis, and already had the land so it was just moving a couple of things around,” described Rouse. “We already have all the equipment in the stores that we needed so we just added a couple of extra fryers and warmers [and] we had the space for it. When you look at the whole scope of the project it was very minimal to add.”
The 55,000-square-foot store is located next door to their former location, a 70,000-square-foot market built in 1989. Prohibitive remodeling costs for the large, aged building led to him constructing a brand new store next door and converting the old supermarket to retail space, Rouse said. This also enabled unimpeded construction and zero shopping disruptions for customers that would accompany a lengthy remodel.
The entire property footprint is approximately 15 acres, he said. The chicken — which he says sells very successfully at many of the Rouses locations — is his family’s own generational recipe: chicken is double-battered in their own flour and season mix and then is deep fried in 100-percent nut free soybean oil.
In addition to fried chicken, the drive-thru restaurant sells fried Louisiana shrimp, wedding cake bread pudding, and a variety of sides including dirty rice, coleslaw, meat pies, and egg rolls. Rouse said he chose the Houma store as the location to test this prototype because it is close to the base of operations allowing for close monitoring so that “execution was perfect.”
“I go to that store very often; our team members are in that store often,” said Rouse. “It is just easier to make sure that we have all of the right policies and practices flowing correctly. When we do something we want to make sure it is perfect and it’s just easier to do it right here in our home.”
With this new model, Rouses Markets is both innovating the grocery paradigm and twinning the fried chicken upward sales trend. In a report by global market research firm Market Research Future, the entity predicts take-out fried chicken sales will increase to $9.85 billion by 2030 at a steady compound annual growth rate of 5.5 percent, stating “the global market for take-out fried chicken will expand due to the increasing convenience and comfort of fried chicken distribution.”
CNN reports that Chick-fil-A will offer a new sandwich beginning Aug. 28: the honey pepper pimento cheese chicken sandwich as part of the ongoing, sizzling competition between it and other quick service restaurants such as Popeyes, Raising Canes, and McDonald’s. Although it is a limited-time offer menu item, it is the first time the Atlanta-based company has strayed from its regular chicken sandwich. Similarly, Rouse says he has plans for limited-time options such as hatch-chili fried chicken in July and a crawfish-boil flavored fried chicken that the grocery normally offers during Lent.
“There are different things we’ll be able to add as limited time offers,” Rouse said.
Although Rouses is building four new locations — in Lafayette, northern-Baton Rouge, Picayune and Biloxi, Miss. — none will have the drive-thru option as they were too far along in their construction, Rouse said.
“But in the future, I do expect we will have more drive-thru’s for our stores,” he said.
Rouse is going to be looking toward the success of this Houma store’s drive-thru to make that decision, something he says is going to be based on sales and customer comments — something he says he is already receiving great feedback for in terms of positive social media reviews and “phenomenal” sales. In that calculus is the exceedingly nominal costs to add these windows as part of store construction, Rouse underscored.
“We have our budgets that we operate off of and our goals, but what’s really nice about this is that the cost is minimal for us to get into it,” described Rouse. “It wasn’t like we were building a freestanding restaurant and we had all that cost and all that labor. The extra employees we need to hire for the drive-thru, it’s just a very minimal expense for us. We know come crawfish season it is going to be successful just from the amount of crawfish we already sell and the convenience that will be.”
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