Buffalo Wild Wings is a well-known restaurant and sports bar in the USA. It also has chains in other countries, such as Canada, India, Panama, and Mexico. Buffalo Wild Wings may be loved by many, but is it truly a fast food chain by modern standards?
Buffalo Wild Wings initially presented itself as a casual dining restaurant and sports bar where people could have a proper dine-in experience. This outlook was gradually changed by a new business model that introduced diverse menu items with various new sauces and attractive items. This, along with the opening of new express branches, redefined the restaurant into a proper fast food chain.
This was a short summary of whether Buffalo Wild Wings is a fast food chain or not. To learn about this in greater detail, read this article.
What Is Buffalo Wild Wings?
Up until a few years ago, Buffalo Wild Wings was a dining restaurant worldwide. It never considered itself a fast food chain and did not compete in the competitive fast food market. The restaurant specializes in wings, as the name suggests, but also offers other delicious food products for their customers to feast upon.
These involve burgers, sandwiches, bar pizzas, tacos and even greens in the menu for those who like to stick to a healthier option. Moreover, the restaurant is a sports bar where sports lovers can sit and watch games while enjoying their favourite meals.
What Is The History Behind The Chain?
Buffalo Wild Wings was originally founded by Jim Disbrow and Scott Lowery in 1982. The company soon began to grow in popularity and began franchising in 1992 to other locations. The total revenue for the company was $150 million in 2001.
Soon after, the restaurant began gaining traction internationally when it opened branches in Canada and United Arab Emirates in 2010 and 2015 respectively.
A major shift in brand design and marketing took place in 2017 when co-owners of the Arby’s Restaurant Group, Roark Capital Group and The Wendy’s Company, decided to purchase the chain for approximately $2.4 billion.
They proceeded to make revolutionary changes to the brand image of the restaurant, adjusting its brand image to make it more relevant in the modern world.
What Defines Fast Food?
Fast food is any food that is designed and manufactured for large-scale commercial resale. Fast food chains prioritize the speed of their food delivery as compared to casual dining restaurants, which usually take a longer time to prepare their food. Fast food is also manufactured to accommodate a wide population.
This is the reason why fast food chains incorporate a lot of variety in their food options to cater to a large range of people. In addition to this, fast food usually has a lot of different flavor options as well, which helps attract even more customers.
Buffalo Wild Wings Has A Diverse Menu
The restaurant is famous for its wild wings and tenders. But in order to appeal to a wider array of people, over time, the restaurant has managed to add beef burgers, chicken sandwiches, pizzas, nachos, tacos, wedges, and salads, to name a few, to their menu.
This kind of food diversity is a defining feature of fast food chains that want to offer a little bit of everything to suit the needs of large masses. This business model is well suited and widely adopted by other fast food chains in the world as well.
The Restaurant Offers Dozens Of Sauces
Another fan favorite feature of this chain is that it offers a large number of unique and distinct sauces with its meals. Some of the most famous sauces include Lemon Pepper, Chipotle BBQ, Nashville Hot, Honey BBQ, and Mango Habanero.
It is evident that these sauces present varying flavors for their customers to choose from.
This not only allows food lovers to customize their meals according to their taste but also enables the restaurant to maintain a set of flavors that do not get mundane and tedious after being used a few times, indirectly maintaining customer interest, and leading to many recurring customers worldwide.
If you want to learn more about the various sauces, watch this video
The Company Makes Use Of Promotions
Promotions are a useful marketing tool that is often used by fast food chains to increase popularity amongst customers. In order to rebrand its image, Buffalo Wild Wings also adopted this tactic and has introduced many attractive promotions throughout the years.
An example of this used to be the 15-minute promo, which would give customers their food for free if it took more than 15 minutes to prepare.
Express Branches Attracted New Customers
After the company was sold in 2017, it immediately decided to officially step into the fast food market to compete with industry giants of the time. They opened a few express branches in the USA, known as the B-Dubs Express, a name that would soon be known by all fans of the food chain. This was the chain’s attempt at entering a broader market and growing its revenue to newer milestones.
The menu would include only two-thirds of the original menu, consisting of the most famous and widely ordered items from the menu. This shifted the customer experience completely. Originally customers would order at the bar, sit at a table and wait for their food to be prepared as they enjoyed sports matches.
This allowed customers to order the food of their choice quickly without having to face a traditional dine-in experience or having to wait a long time for their food to be prepared. Service was almost instant and customers could even use the drive-thru to grab food in their cars on the go now.
Conclusion
Although Buffalo Wild Wings started as a casual dining restaurant, the modern generation had become accustomed to fast food and, at most times, preferred it over dining.
This urged the company’s new owners to make changes to their business plan by gradually transitioning towards express/fast food and introducing new menu items and express branches that made their products more accessible and relevant to the current generation of customers.
