Rather than rest on a successful, serviceable program, Hilton has started from scratch to establish one daypart as a differentiator in attracting guests.

Hilton Worldwide brainstormed, researched, and formulated an entirely new breakfast program at the corporate level—not just a reboot or update of its previous program, overhauled in 2007—and is executing it at the property level with a measure of success that says what they’ve crafted is working. With new equipment, menus, serveware, and more, along with smart, well-conceived training initiatives, Hilton’s new breakfast concept is casting sunshine on a new day of guest satisfaction.

THE DAWN
The 2007 breakfast program used a colorcoded system, with colors designating categories of low-fat/low-calorie, high-energy, high-fiber, low-cholesterol, and indulgence. A Hilton-hired dietician analyzed 200 common breakfast items and put each into one of the five groupings. Hilton rolled it out with a minimum of 70 approved items on the buffet at each hotel, along with new equipment and a collateral package. There was some leeway given to local sourcing and menuing, but not to the degree that Hilton’s now affording.

“If we’re going to be relevant to our consumers, is it going to be through a fancy collateral campaign or by putting boots on the ground and making it happen? Providing the best possible breakfast that is relevant to each individual hotel is driving our service scores,” says Shawn McGowan, senior VP of F&B for Hilton Worldwide. “We have talent in each hotel. Let’s understand their market and what is relevant to the guest.”

Markus Schueller, VP F&B, Asia Pacific, one of many personnel brain-picked in the formative stages, says, “It was not so much about what was not working but rather a global initiative to listen to our guests as well as internal stakeholders and to determine what is expected and desired in today’s market and introduce unique F&B offerings to cater to this demand.”

So, says McGowan, the brand went into “a very extensive deep dive into understanding what the components of the Hilton brand are, what works, what doesn’t work, and how we can be most relevant to our guests and our constituency and ownership.”

In 2009, Hilton Hotels & Resorts, the flagship brand of Hilton Worldwide, embarked on “H360,” a journey to build a strategic global plan for its future. This comprehensive global assessment and analysis reviewed every aspect of the business, including the breakfast program. The effort included extensive qualitative and quantitative market research in 78 countries among all key constituencies—owners, area executives, management companies, general managers, hotel team members, and most importantly, an existing and potential customer base.

From that exploration, Hilton developed a brand architecture focused on five concepts: Room for Me, Nourish Me, Meet My Needs, Respect and Value Me, and Show Me You Care.

“We took a good but somewhat outdated program and chose to start from scratch versus re-invent,” says Beth Scott, VP, F&B strategy and innovation, Hilton Worldwide. “The new program, aimed at the Nourish Me pillar, was developed to ensure our hotels could deliver a relevant (to guest and locale), fresh (food and design), as well as accessible (healthy choices and fairly priced) breakfast. We have provided merchandising guides, training tools, and menu guidelines to help guide them in the right direction; however, our properties need to implement the program in a way that makes sense for their markets.”

Now, says Scott, Hilton has reduced the “global core” in the new program, named simply Breakfast at Hilton, to around 40 items, “so we can ensure some consistency of offerings but have allowed the regions and locales to deliver more locally relevant breakfast items, such as congee versus oatmeal in China and cured meats and fish in certain markets.”

While some items carried over from the previous program (“Breakfast is going to be breakfast,” McGowan quips), the mostly original Breakfast at Hilton responds to the fact that the morning daypart is the primary hub at which guests are exposed to Hilton’s F&B. And since F&B holds the potential to sway a guest, breakfast becomes a priority touchpoint.

“Our customers have identified F&B as an area of differentiation for us and a key decision-making factor when choosing a hotel,” says Edwin Frizzell, general manager at the Hilton Toronto. “In fact, when many other brands are choosing to reduce F&B offerings, Hilton has taken a different approach, redesigning these areas with more emphasis to enhance our customer journey and meet their needs in ways they didn’t even know they wanted.”

The new focus on relevance with the guest, says Dave Horton, global head of Hilton Hotels & Resorts, takes shape with the following changes:

• A three-tier approach in menu programming (global offering, regional offering, and local menuing)
  
• Regional chefs promoting locally sourced and/or prepared specialties (jams, jelly, breads, and local favorite dishes)
  
• Enhanced product quality (bacon, sausage, oats, granola, fruit, artisan breads, croissants and house-made, fresh-fromthe- oven muffins)
  
• Improved presentation (communal induction and ambient display tables that transition to seating for lunch and dinner)
  
• Enhanced use of space (optimizing space by refining how Hilton builds buffets and reducing their footprint)
  
• Custom merchandising equipment (development of a component merchandising system that uses various Hilton custom risers, elevations, angle platforms, and display vessels)
  

“Another focus was fair pricing with tiered price points—full breakfast buffet, continental breakfast buffet, à la carte menus—as well as tools for hotels to better understand their true competitive set and how to develop pricing strategies to maximize guest capture and satisfaction,” Horton explains.

MENU PROGRAMMING
In its research, Hilton realized local has gone beyond trend status to become a guest expectation—something that is more clear and more doable now than in 2007 as chef expertise and acumen for local sourcing and menu creativity continue to expand. But the brand made studied, comprehensive changes to more than just breakfast’s local fare.

“We did some research with current vendor partners to help us understand industry trends and current restaurant trends, including fresh foods, whole grains, and emerging products such as oatmeal, which has been a phenomenon popping up at Starbucks and McDonald’s,” says McGowan. “We looked at how we can make that a feature, because it’s perceived by guests as a healthy item. We looked at fresh fruit, yogurt, and parfaits on our buffets. We looked at our buffets to see how we could give our guests an accessible choice of items to build a breakfast that suits their needs and lifestyles.”

And Hilton made sure its service teams are aware of key elements important to guests.

“You have to make sure everything on the buffet is fresh,” says McGowan. “The use of smaller vessels to make sure product quality is at all times kept fresh is paramount to understanding the guests’ association with healthy—and also offering those things that are deemed healthy in their mind, such as whole grains, oatmeal, and fresh fruits. We make sure to provide tools to the hotels so they can source fruit products with the highest soluble sugar content, which tells them that is a fresh product. We’re not buying canned.”

In training materials, Hilton reinforces the need to drive local content.

No market segmentations are identical, McGowan says. “For example, in the United States, going east to west, in the central area, you’ll see a change in terms of palate and what is appropriate. [In one area] it might be biscuits and gravy, while in New York it might be smoked fish and bagels.”

And training has involved “individual intercepts” with chefs,” says McGowan. “We can’t be more adamant about how local and seasonal awareness is important—from how we’re sourcing the product to identifying the areas we’re sourcing it from.”

Making sure the staff has the understanding to deliver relevant product on a consistent basis, Hilton developed tools such as virtual merchandising and the merchandising guide, McGowan says. Even basic nuances between products were made important. In training, leaders and staff compared orange juice from concentrate to fresh-squeezed product, for example.

“They clearly understand we are elevating our product specs,” McGowan says. Staff now understand “the difference between a packaged item and a freshly baked, warmfrom- the-oven, absolutely wonderful looking breakfast bread where they can see, smell, and taste the difference in product quality.”

Beyond vetting products locally, Breakfast at Hilton also focuses on cultural preferences. “We recently launched Hilton Huanying to address the needs of Chinese travelers at key touchpoints of their hotel stay, from arrival to the guest room to Breakfast at Hilton,” Horton says. “Our long-term goal is to develop programs for all emerging market travelers, and the new Breakfast at Hilton showcases diverse breakfast options in regions around the world, including biscuits and gravy as a staple within Atlanta, blood sausage and baked beans in the United Kingtom, prosciutto in Spain, congee in China, and streusel in Germany.”

REVENUE MANAGEMENT
All this quality makes sense, but it required a new tack to ensure Hilton could deliver it at a fair price rather than the expensive cover many hotels require of an assumed-to-becaptive breakfast audience.

Hilton created a new corporate position, director of non-rooms revenue management, held by Peter Van Allen. His focus is on providing tools for the field “to understand what their competitive set is,” McGowan says. “In how guests are selecting a hotel, one factor is having a great F&B offering. Capture ratios can be influenced by price. If we’re losing capture to potential outside third-party restaurants, what are those restaurants, who are we competing against, and how can we better position ourselves through a multi-faceted approach to that—providing tiered pricing, for example, and not just charging for buffet alone? We also understand that all hotels need to have an à la carte menu offering.”

McGowan notes that items such as bacon, eggs, and sausage may have to be priced differently depending on market factors, such as whether the market is unionized or nonunionized, urban or suburban, etc. The new focus on revenue management and capture helps properties drill down to determine pricing.

LOCAL FLEXIBILITY
The new emphasis on local menuing has put trust in talented chefs and F&B directors at the property level, with the Toronto hotel being a prime example.

“Executive Chef Kevin Prendergast was involved in the program from the beginning,” Frizzell says. “Many of the selections on the buffet are custom tailored by the property—so regional fresh fruit selections, the warm oatmeal recipe, the types of juices, cereals, muffin flavors, specialty breads, etc., are all at the discretion of the chef. Locally sourced preserves, marmalades, and honey are yet another area where the chef can tap into their environment to bring authenticity to the buffet, all while maintaining the high standards of Hilton while bringing a local, authentic experience to our guests.”

The Toronto hotel’s à la carte menu features key items from Hilton as well as local specialties. A wild berry oatmeal risotto served with warm breakfast bread is one of the most popular items on the menu, Frizzell says, followed closely by the duck confit hash, made with a poached egg, three potato hash, thyme jus, and toast.

“A really ambitious chef who wants to take it to the next level in local sourcing can really shine,” McGowan observes, citing the San Gabriel (California) Hilton. General Manager Carl Bolte talked with McGowan about addressing the needs of the many visitors to the hotel from China. “I put them in touch with another H360 project that was looking at emerging markets,” says McGowan. “Our VP of F&B got a beta test going at the San Gabriel hotel, and it’s working out extremely well. Each market is different, and each hotel can take it to the next level.”





Thurston E. (Tad) Wilkes is managing editor of HOTEL F&B and has covered on-premise food and beverage operations for the past decade.