Food Business Review
November 2022
By Kristie Mitchell
Chief Marketing Officer
BISCUITVILLE Fresh Southern®
BISCUITVILLE Fresh Southern® got its start in 1966, and for over a half-century, we’ve proudly made biscuits from scratch, right in front of our guests, rolling out a fresh batch every 15 minutes. We’ve also held true to our original family recipe that calls for only locally milled flour, buttermilk and shortening. Each of our 69 locations includes a large biscuit window where guests can see the biscuit-making process as it happens.
Today, we serve communities in North Carolina and Virginia, and we are growing. In 2023, we expect to open roughly 10 new locations, including our first South Carolina restaurants. Biscuitville has been owned by the Jennings family since its start. Unlike most of our regional and national competitors, we are not a franchised operation. Unlike our competitors, we also self-distribute to our restaurants from our new central warehouse facility that opened in the summer of 2022.
Our guests are our priority, and we pay very close attention to what they tell us. Our Brand and Marketing team focuses intently on monitoring and measuring guest satisfaction/visit share for the hours we serve: 6 am-2 pm. While we are always looking to improve, we’re pleased that we typically score well above our competitors in key satisfaction measures. Our guests also are fiercely loyal, and we are grateful for that. For example, in 2022, for the third year in a row, Biscuitville was named one of the best Regional Fast Food restaurants in the 2022 USA Today Readers’ Choice 10Best contest. In October 2022, Food & Wine Magazine named Biscuitville the best fast food in North Carolina in a ranking of the best quick-service, locally loved restaurants in each state across America.
We have a rich story from how Biscuitville was born to what differentiates us in the QSR space. Making sure we measure the right things and tell our story well has been a big part of my job ever since my role expanded in 2018 to become VP of Brand and Marketing. I joined Biscuitville in 2015 as the Creative Director, just after the launch of our total rebranding, which included the addition of Fresh Southern® to our name. Since then, the company has remodeled, relocated, or rebuilt almost all our restaurants.
All of that is exciting, but the most important thing about the Biscuitville brand experience first is our scratch-made food made the old-fashioned way, by hand and no microwaves. And, we believe sourcing from local and/or family suppliers helps sustain our high-quality standards. That’s why we proudly display signage in our restaurants listing many of our suppliers under the banner: “The flavor of local. The pride of family owned.” For example:
With quality ingredients, our culinary team focuses on developing menu options that deliver consistent and delicious choices that include guest favorites as well as innovative, seasonal treats. We like to call it Southern with a twist. Our variety means there are more than a thousand different potential combinations in any given breakfast order. We are happy to give our guests lots of choices, and we know we build trust as a breakfast brand when we get our guests to work on time. That’s why we invested in a custom, state-of-the-art, point of sale system in 2022. Our new system increases speed and accuracy, and it gives us tremendous flexibility to customize and to be more responsive to our guests. It also allows us to move forward with initiatives like online ordering, a loyalty program and mobile apps.
Like our menu offerings and the layout of our restaurants, our advertising – print, broadcast, out-of-home, social – is designed to invite, to engage and to connect with our guests. It’s also designed to make them hungry! We are as thoughtful about how we post to our social platforms as we are about our highway billboards. In our marketing, we always convey the message of scratch-made and that we take our food and our guests’ experiences very seriously. While we never want to send the message that we take ourselves too seriously, we do work hard to create brand messages that will move our target audience from consideration to purchase.
Biscutiville’s purpose statement is “Enhancing Lives By Serving Others.” We take this statement to heart and are committed to doing the right thing the right way, for our guests and our team members. With this approach and our Southern offerings with a twist, we believe we have a solid recipe for continued successful growth.
