TGI Friday's gets confidence vote
The new managing director of TGI Friday's UK said last week that he is confident the chain will survive the impending shake-up of Whitbread's restaurant portfolio.
Neil Riding, who took up his post on 1 May, said: "Friday's is a marvellous little business. It's done a very good job for Whitbread. It's a vehicle for growth and it's a vehicle for profits."
Whitbread chief executive David Thomas said in May that the overall performance of its restaurants over the past two years had been disappointing. Bill Shannon, managing director of the restaurant division, subsequently admitted that some of its chains would be scrapped or sold off this year, but said it was too early to say which ones (Caterer, 11 May, page 12).
Sales at TGI Friday's in the financial year to 4 March were up by 13% but like-for-like sales fell slightly. It opened three new branches during the year.
Whitbread's restaurants division has already been reorganised this year. For TGI Friday's this meant moving its head office from Milton Keynes to Whitbread Restaurants' head office in Dunstable, Bedfordshire.
The number of head office staff working directly for TGI Friday's has been cut from 30 to 13, but Riding stressed that he now had access to 50 or 60 other experts at Whitbread when he needed them.
In the three months to 12 June, TGI Friday's opened six new restaurants. The first was a 100-seat Friday's American Bar at Heathrow airport's Terminal 3 and the last a 220-seat restaurant near the Metro Centre shopping complex in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear.
The other four were converted from Exchange Bar Diner restaurants in Swindon, Watford, Aberdeen and Northampton. Whitbread bought 10 Exchange Bar Diners from brewer and pub operator Greene King in January. It is converting the remainder to various other branded formats.
There are now 38 TGI Friday's restaurants in the UK, with plans to open a further three this year, in Sheffield, in Nottingham and on Teesside. Five more are likely in 2001.
Riding said sales had improved greatly since the end of the Euro 2000 football tournament and that the new restaurants were "trading ahead of their projections".
He added that some of last year's fall in like-for-like sales had been the result of new restaurants opening too close to old ones. The new TGI Friday's at the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, for example, had affected sales across the River Thames at the Lakeside shopping centre branch in Essex. "It's come as a bit of a surprise to us how far people will travel to a Friday's," Riding said.
by David Shrimpton
