Listen in as we talk with San 49ers Chief Strategy Officer Moon Javaid, who explains the thinking behind the Member Inclusive Menu program, and how its success may spur additional innovations in the Levi’s Stadium concessions program.
Since Levi’s Stadium opened in 2014, the San Francisco 49ers have used their new home to push the envelope on technology-inspired innovation, mostly to see how they could improve the fan experience. One of the latest twists introduced by the Niners at Levi’s Stadium was an innovation that combined technology with process: Under a program called the “Member inclusive Menu,” season ticket holders now get free food and drink off a list that includes stadium favorite food items and non-alcoholic beverages for all 49ers home regular and preseason games.
Listen in as we talk with San 49ers Chief Strategy Officer Moon Javaid, who explains the thinking behind the Member Inclusive Menu program, and how its success may spur additional innovations in the Levi’s Stadium concessions program.
Always innovating for a better fan experience
From its opening in 2014, Levi’s Stadium has always been at the forefront of using technology to improve the fan experience. One of the original experiments in the Niners’ new home was the radical idea of having in-seat concessions delivery available to every seat in the stadium — a great idea that turned out to be too hard to implement at scale. To open our discussion with Moon, we talked a bit about the legacy of Levi’s Stadium and the Niners’ desire to innovate as much as they could to help improve the game-day experience, especially on the concessions side.
Fast-forward to a few years ago, and Moon said the Niners were continually stymied at their attempts to improve the fan survey scores for concessions operations, which consistently stayed at the bottom of the experience scoresheet. According to Moon, he and the Niners did some extensive research not just with other NFL teams but with teams from Major League Baseball and the NBA, and found similar frustrations.
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“Concessions everywhere were not seen in a good light,” he said. In many places, fans felt like it was too hard to get food and drink, and also that they were being charged too much.
Bringing the club experience to more fans
At one of the first regular season Niners games at Levi’s Stadium, I was a guest of stadium app provider VenueNext and got to experience the service at the stadium’s exclusive clubs, which had all-inclusive food and beverage service. I discussed the amenity with Moon, who agreed that having food and drink included with the ticket price made the game day a better experience — in part because you weren’t always reaching for your wallet when you got hungry or thirsty.
Bringing a club-like experience to more fans is partly what brought about the idea of the “Member Inclusive Menu,” a plan under which season ticket holders get free food and drink off a list that includes stadium favorite food items and non-alcoholic beverages. At the top level, the idea is fairly simple — but to implement it took a lot of testing and preparation on the back end, including what Moon said was “millions” of dollars in catering and kitchen renovations.
“We did a lot of load testing [in the offseason], building new kitchens and cooking up lots of hot dogs and nachos,” Moon said. And once the program was launched, there was still a lot of tweaking and adjusting, especially in the “how” season ticket holders would get access to the free-food stands. Listen in as we cover all the different bases that were needed to be covered to make the plan a reality, in a large crowd where not every attendee would have access to the program.
Fans say they want salads, but order hot dogs
As we recapped the first full year of the MIM and how fans reacted to the program, one of the funnier talking points revolved around the Niners’ almost obsessive use of surveys and other fan-opinion gathering tools (like the “how are we doing” button systems). According to Moon, extensive surveys of fans about what they wanted to see on concessions menus showed a lot of fans requesting “healthier” food at the stadium, like salads. But the reality?
“At the end of the day, they order hot dogs,” Moon said, laughing.
Other learnings from the all-inclusive program include what the system did to the separate concessions business, and what the Niners might need to add in the future (“more beer stands!”). In all, it was a great talk with one of the leaders of a team that hasn’t stopped trying to improve off the field as well as on the field.
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