What’s the Restaurant Investment Forecast?

To learn more about the current state of restaurant investing, Modern Restaurant Management (MRM) magazine spoke with Uday Ahuja, Chief Investment Officer at RSE Ventures, who played a key role in investing and identifying/growing scalable consumer brands restaurant concepts including Momofuku, Milk Bar, Fuku, Bluestone Lane, and Magnolia Bakery.  During the pandemic he helped advise Milk Bar CEO Christina Tosi’s shift from retail to ecomm—resulting in the launch of Milk Bar’s rapidly expanding collection of CPG products. He also worked closely with Dave Chang and Marguerite Mariscal on Momofuku’s extension into CPG. 

What makes a brand scalable?There are multiple different ways brands can achieve scale. In our experience, having an omnichannel presence certainly helps, but there’s no “one size fits all” strategy. Whether that is omnichannel in nature (e.g., direct-to-consumer/CPG) or strictly brick and mortar, I think investors are generally looking for repeatable…