Special Events (choose 1 of 8)
Every activity within the RLC agenda is an opportunity to expand your professional network. Whichever you choose, you'll be surrounded by the restaurant industry's best and brightest. Don't miss this opportunity to meet new friends, chat with old ones and, most importantly, have fun. Approximately 8-10 weeks prior to the conference, guests will receive an invitation to register for the outing of their choice. Please be aware that capacity is limited and excursions will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.
Preregistration for special events is required. You are also required to check in for each special event at the special event desk the morning of your selected activity to secure your spot. If you do not check-in at least 10 minutes prior to bus departure time, you forfeit your place to an attendee on the wait list.
Enjoy a morning of golf on the picturesque fairways of the Wildfire Golf Club. This is the perfect opportunity to continue building business relationships while practicing your swing. After the tournament, enjoy lunch with your fellow golfers.
6:45am - 7:45am - Check-in, breakfast and warmup
8:00am - Tournament begins (Shotgun Start)
Following Tournament - Lunch
6:30pm - Results and awards will be available at the RLC Product Gallery
Two different hikes will be offered by our professional guides: one for the more fitness-oriented hiker seeking a unique outdoor workout and one for the more leisurely hiker looking for an up close and personal tour of the desert's beauty.
7:30am - 8:00am - Check-in and breakfast at Saguaro Ballroom Foyer
8:00am - Bus departure from the Sunset Terrace (outside the Saguaro Ballroom)
8:00am - 10:30am - Hiking
11:00am - Arrive at JW Marriott Desert Ridge
Test your racing skills at Octane Raceway and zoom in your very own go-kart at up to 45 miles per hour. Will you have the fastest time on the track? Enjoy some friendly competition and get to know your fellow racers.
7:30am - 8:00am - Check-in and breakfast at Saguaro Ballroom Foyer
8:00am - Bus departure from the Sunset Terrace (outside the Saguaro Ballroom)
8:30am - 10:30am - Octane Raceway Experience
10:30am - Bus departure
11:00am Arrive at JW Marriott Desert Ridge
Climb on board in an open-air Jeep and experience the beauty and serenity of Arizona's Sonoran Desert on this guided tour. Learn about the spectaular trails from a genuine cowboy guide.
7:30am - 8:00am - Check-in and breakfast at Saguaro Ballroom Foyer
8:00am - Departure from the Sunset Terrace (outside the Saguaro Ballroom)
8:00am - 11:00am - Desert Tour
11:30am - Arrive at JW Marriott Desert Ridge
Great cooking is about more than recipes—it's about techniques. In this custom designed class you'll work together with fellow attendees in a fun, hands-on environment led by professional chef instructors. You'll also enjoy fresh make-your-own Mimosas and Bloody Mary's as well as pick out some swag with a $50 shopping voucher.
7:30am - 8:00am - Check-in and breakfast at Saguaro Ballroom Foyer
8:00am - Bus departure from the Sunset Terrace (outside the Saguaro Ballroom)
8:30 - 11:00am - Sur La Table Experience and shopping.
11:00am - Bus departure
11:30am - Arrive at JW Marriott Desert Ridge
Always wanted to experience skydiving but too afraid to make the jump? There's no airplane, no parachute and no jumping required! Join us at Scottsdale's brand-new indoor skydiving facility and cross skydiving off your bucket list!
7:45am - 8:15am - Check-in and breakfast at Saguaro Ballroom Foyer
8:15am - Bus departure from the Sunset Terrace (outside the Saguaro Ballroom)
8:45am - 10:45am - iFLY Experience
11:00am - Bus departure
11:30am - Arrive at JW Marriott Desert Ridge
Test your sharpshooting ability at the Scottsdale Gun Club, the largest public indoor shooting range in the United States with state-of-the-art features, including user-friendly touchscreen control panels and a 360-degree rotating target system.
8:00am - 8:30am - Check-in and breakfast at Saguaro Ballroom Foyer
8:30am - Bus departure from the Sunset Terrace (outside the Saguaro Ballroom)
9:00am - 10:30am - Range Time
10:30am - 11:00am - Awards presentation
11:00am - Bus departure
11:30am - Arrive at JW Marriott Desert Ridge
Are you an ace with a racket? We'll pair up doubles to go head to head, rotating through all the teams until we have a victor!
8:00am - 8:15am - Check-in at tennis courts
8:15am - Instruction for the tournament
11:00am -Tournament completes
Lunch & Learn (Choose 1 of 8)
RLC is pleased to present a brand new opportunity meant to promote expanded learning and networking! Join our partners for sustenance - as in food AND education - in a relaxed environment offering meaningful information to benefit your business!
During this session hear from market leaders about the best practices for delivering exceptional omnichannel experiences through a modern approach to loyalty. We’ll highlight the top digital transformation trends that create the most opportunities for brands today. Shyam will share candid insights on the current and future state of loyalty - show you how to build emotional connections with your guests to build lasting CLV, explain what’s needed to empower digital marketers today and why AI, when done right, is the only way to deliver personalization that scales.
Co-Founder & CEO | Moderator
Punchh
CEO | Panelist
Saladworks
CMO | Panelist
Jamba Juice
It is imperative brands focus on mobile-first customer experience, as they try to meet the incredible rise in demand for delivery and Order for Pickup. According to our research, delivery is falling short. As such, Rakuten Ready commissioned our 2019 Time Study to better understand today’s consumer experience expectation and what restaurant brands are meeting those expectations and those that are not. In this session, you will receive highlights from this study, and you will walk away understanding the core ingredients that make for a successful Order for Pickup program, according to consumers.
Sr. Sales Director
Rakuten Americas
It’s crucial for restaurants to have a strategy as they increase their sustainable efforts. From sourcing and waste reduction to recycling and more, there’s a wide breadth of paths operators can take to make their operation more sustainable---depending on the time, effort and budget they are willing to devote. Learn about different efforts and ways those can be implemented, straight from the experts.
Senior Editor, Restaurant Business and FoodService Director
Winsight Media
VP Sustainability
Georgia-Pacific
President
Foodservice Packaging Institute
The power, reach, and control of what happens in your stores has been shaken to the core with the explosion of digital ordering and third-party marketplaces. Today, the guest experience begins well before your guests set foot in your restaurants. The need to know your guests, predict what they will do next, and make each interaction personalized has never before been this important to restaurant vitality.
CEO and Co-Founder
Paytronix
Have you ever lost customers during the summer because your HVAC went out? Have your ovens ever gone on the fritz during your busiest night of the week? Have your refrigerators ever failed when you least expected, costing you thousands of dollars in inventory? If any of these scenarios sound familiar, then you probably know that not only is unplanned equipment downtime stressful for your staff, but it also threatens your customers’ dining experiences, your sales, and your brand reputation.
In this session, our panel of analytics and restaurant experts deconstruct the myths about predictive data and share insights on how others in the industry are leveraging it to achieve 100% equipment uptime and keep customers delighted, every meal, every time.
SVP, Strategy & Planning
Vixxo
Senior Advisor / Restaurant Industry Expert
Boston Consulting Group
Sr. Director, Client Analytics
Vixxo
Innovation Forums
Led by the brightest professionals in foodservice, RLC's innovation forums are packed with hot topics and powerful messages designed to spark new ideas. Connect with the industry's game changers and gain valuable takeaways from the latest and greatest in foodservice innovation. There's something for everyone!
Digital disruption. Machine learning. New delivery platforms. Hyped guest expectations. Fierce competition. Sound familiar? With expectations constantly evolving, restaurant marketers need to listen to their guests and serve them what tastes best for their palate while understanding their preferences both in and outside of the restaurant. From our research, we’ve learned that only 18% of restaurant marketers are extremely confident in knowing who their guests are after dining with them. Why is this the case? Well, with the constant ‘revolving door’ of guests interacting across the multiple channels, both digital and in-restaurant, it’s hard to keep track of who’s who. Although this is a challenge for restaurant marketers, identifying guests beyond the restaurant is essential to deliver personalized messages that connect with them on a 1:1 level.
Join the Epsilon team along with restaurant brands in this interactive session as they review the key innovations marketers are incorporating into their programs to ensure success.
During this panel, we’ll discuss:
- How to achieve 1:You ‘hyper personalization’ and the role of machine learning
- The disruption in today’s delivery model and how marketers are putting the telling data into action
- How accommodating dietary preferences has sparked an increase in sales
- Why mobile is a thriving channel and what this means for your omnichannel strategy
Vice President, Client Development | Moderator:
Epsilon
President & CEO | Panelist:
On The Border
Despite being slow to adopt new technologies in the past, most successful QSR & Fast Casual brands have now flocked to digital ordering. Restaurants must keep pace, considering the competitive landscape and the expectations of today’s highly digital consumer. The benefits to brands are numerous: increased engagement, higher check, better labor use, increased convenience, and many more. But simply offering digital ordering is not enough - brands must also have ways to bring customers back after their initial order, and use their ordering data in ways that advance all parts of their business profitably.
In this interactive session, Tillster CMO Hope Neiman will share insights from the fourth year of our exclusive consumer study of QSR & Fast Casual customers, conducted in partnership with consumer insights and research firm Sense360. You will leave the session with key insights and actionable takeaways, including:
- How consumers used digital ordering and delivery last year and what they are expecting from restaurants this year
- How to optimize your digital tools so they work best with your business goals
- How to measure and maximize the success of your digital ordering program, well beyond program launch
Chief Marketing Officer
Tillster
Millennials today make up 50% of the U.S. workforce. They’re also effectively redirecting how corporations spend $100B on business dining sales each year. They’re turning their backs on the entertainment and expensing behaviors typical of their predecessors and creating their own trends.
You can’t afford to assume you already know the impact this generation is having on the restaurant industry. Learn from your peers who have already figured out how a business dining focus adds up to higher check averages, incremental sales, and increased frequency.
In this session, a panel of your peers will discuss:
- Why you should look at your industry through a new business dining lens. • Which consumer behaviors are bleeding over into millennials’ professional lives (hint: they’re all digital, all the time).
- Insights around –
- Preferred tools and technologies;
- Experience expectations;
- Mobile device habits;
- Brand affinity; and
- Sentiment regarding loyalty and incentives.
- How tapping into this market can trigger a visit to your establishment and spark a profitable relationship.
Chief Revenue Officer
Dinova
Vice President of Finance
Boston's Pizza Restaurants
Chief Operating and Development Officer
Capriotti’s Sandwich Shop
Speed and convenience mean everything to consumers. These key factors have led to disruption in the restaurant space, seen most recently through new order kiosks, pick up only locations, delivery, and ghost kitchens. The same disruption is occurring in the real estate sector, with radical new solutions for mapping out markets locally and at scale. A.I. and mobile location data have played the greatest role in this shakeout, and in this session, we’ll explore exactly how.
Join SiteZeus’ VP of Customer, Tyler Carlson, and a panel of your peers, to uncover what’s new and available to amplify your growth strategy.
What’s in it for you? Learn how to:
- Evaluate top markets at a national level, in just minutes
- Augment franchisee recruitment and development proactively
- Leverage mobile location data to determine sales cannibalization
***Q&A to be held with our panel and a surprise giveaway for one lucky guest!
VP of Customer
SiteZeus
78% of US workers are living paycheck to paycheck and have trouble making ends meet and this can be caused by the timing of payroll. This seemingly insignificant issue can be the reason for employees country wide to ask their bosses for a short term loan/payroll advance in order to make it to payday. This places employees in a very uncomfortable situation because they have to ask their boss for money and be exposed to the inevitable WHY and For What Purpose questions. rapid! now empowers the employee to avoid embarrassment which will lead to less problems with financial stress, morale and absenteeism.
SVP Wage & Corporate Disbursements
rapid!
Church’s Chicken led the most successful LTO rollout in years, resulting in double-digit increases in sales and transactions using a “Ready, Set, Execute!” approach. See how they proved ROI in terms of higher profitability, guest satisfaction scores, and mystery shopper scores using a training contest tied in with promotion and other readiness activities. Discover the power of a new metric called the Knowledge Score to drive repeatable success for LTOs as well as other initiatives.
Senior Director of Training and Development
Church's Chicken
This session offers the opportunity for attendees to hear a panel of franchisees talk through personal insights of their “2020 Growth Playbook”. During the session, the panel will address the key issues facing franchisees in today’s market, including but not limited to: Growing Traffic Counts, Technology, Labor, Food on Demand, and M&A - Consolidation.
Chairman and Principal Operating Partner | Panelist
RCO Limited
President | Panelist
Wendy’s of Bowling Green
Director of Operations | Panelist
DRM, Inc.
Senior Managing Director | Moderator
Wintrust Franchise Finance
Managing Director | Moderator
Wintrust Franchise Finance
Is your business disrupted by high employee turnover? Do you struggle to execute LTOs? Is employee training expensive and inefficient? Join Michelle Kay, the Director of L&D at Taco Bell to learn how her team addressed these challenges by adopting a digital learning solution for their distributed workforce. Not only does Taco Bell now empower their employees with engaging learning to improve execution, but they also saved $2M in annual printing costs and have experienced a 5% increase in customer satisfaction scores.
In this session, you will learn:
• How reliance on paper-based training by 44% of organizations leads to low knowledge retention and disgruntled employees.
• Why 86% of restaurant executives state that the ability of frontline staff to meet customer expectations improves with mobile-enablement.
• How mobile learning addresses the lack of ongoing training hours for restaurant employees, who only receive three hours per quarter.
CEO
Inkling
Restaurants want new customers, more visits, larger average checks, and more profit. This is especially true now as consumers have more and more dining options. This session will cover how AI-powered personalization works, and why it’s the most profitable way to bring new customers, motivate customers to visit more often, and drive customers to buy more in-restaurant. See results from restaurants utilizing this strategy to increase visit frequency by 2x with a 50% return on investment and absolutely no additional work required.
Co-founder & CEO
GetUpside
To gain competitive advantage and boost profits, top operators are increasingly turning to a key operational lever: team execution. Specifically, they’re investing in processes, technology, and strategies that will give them an edge in both making restaurant and field employees more productive and that will raise the bar on the quality of execution across every one of their stores.
Join this discussion with Amy Hom, Vice President of Operations for Sweetgreen, to learn how they’re prioritizing initiatives to uncover trends and opportunities, and scale operations by elevating team execution and creating a great experience for both employees and customers.
CEO
Zenput
Executive Vice President of North America Retail and Kitchens
REEF Technology
A complete digital strategy employs tactics to both acquire new diners and engage them long-term. Today, third-party delivery platforms offer ample opportunities for restaurant brands to acquire new diners, but how can you turn those guests into lifelong fans?
50% of consumers say that a loyalty and rewards program would make them choose one restaurant over another. This session will focus on how you can leverage your relationships with third-party delivery partners to build diner loyalty, create customer stickiness, and win market share in a busy and competitive environment.
Head of Enterprise Restaurants
Grubhub
Opening General Session
Location: Grand Saguaro BallroomSix days after David Gibbs moved up to the CEO’s job at Yum! Brands, the restaurant industry giant announced its plans to acquire The Habit Burger Grill. Clearly this new chief is no passive caretaker of an industry powerhouse that already included the global KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell brands. What is Gibbs’ vision for one of the industry’s largest franchisors? How does he expect the restaurant business to adapt to rapidly evolving technologies and consumer trends? And how, after more than 30 years with the company, does he see Yum! taking the lead? Gibbs will share Yum! Brands’ Recipe for Growth and Good and his approach to leading a global system with more than 2,000 franchisees and a diverse portfolio of brands that generated over $49 billion in system sales in 2018. He will also discuss how innovative technology, talent and operations help the Company’s brands elevate the customer experience and how Yum! Brands is leveraging its massive scale to accelerate growth, drive sales and improve franchise unit economics. In addition, he’ll provide valuable insights on the state of the quick-service restaurant industry, best practices for building relevant, easy and distinctive brands and the importance of culture and talent to fuel results. His one-on-one discussion, with Winsight Media's Editor At Large Peter Romeo, will be followed by questions from the audience.
CEO
Yum! Brands
Editor-at-Large and Vice President of Content Innovation
Restaurant Business
President, Global Foodservice
PepsiCo, Inc.
Consumers’ habits continue to shift, but one thing is sure: They want control of their dining experience, from how and where they order and pay to where they actually eat. It’s up to operators to meet consumers where they’re at---or risk losing that guest. In today’s complex and layered restaurant environment, operators need to figure out how to integrate all of these different types of services, which often require a slew of different technologies and touchpoints, into an overall offering. With reliance on technology higher than it’s ever been in the restaurant business, learn how top operators are crafting and executing roadmaps that incorporate automation, AI, robotics and more for every facet of the operation, from labor optimization to streamlining the supply chain and predicting guest preferences and behaviors.
Chief Revenue & Innovation Officer | Moderator
Texas Restaurant Association
President
Applebee's Bar & Grill
Senior Vice President and General Manager, NCR Hospitality
NCR Corporation
In this session, we will get to know more about the Gary Sinise Foundation. Established under the philanthropic direction of actor Gary Sinise, their mission is to serve our nation by honoring our defenders, veterans, first responders, their families, and those in need. This is achieved through a number of national and local programs, funded by the generosity of the Foundation’s 50,000+ donors. Join us to hear more about this incredible organization and how you can align your brand with this cause.
Vice President, Industry Relations & Business Development | Honorary Co-chair
PepsiCo Foodservice
Chief Marketing Officer | Honorary Co-chair
Regal
Chief Operating Officer | Guest Speaker
Gary Sinise Foundation
Few individuals ever become iconic enough to be known by one name – Shaq. A cultural icon, Shaquille O’Neal is best known for an NBA career spanning nearly two decades and earning him the sport’s highest honors including membership in the NBA Hall of Fame. O’Neal has since pivoted that same discipline into several businesses, including television and media, and even restaurants. As a board member of Papa John’s, he has become the brand’s ambassador and investor in nine locations, in addition to his ownership over several other franchises, including Five Guys, Auntie Anne’s, and Krispy Kreme. Dedicated to overachieving, on and off the court, Shaq joins us to share his story and the lessons he learned along the way.
Member NBA Hall of Fame & 15-Time NBA All Star Player, Media Personality, Entrepreneur and Philanthropist
RLC Marketplace
Location: Grand Canyon Ballroom & FoyerWith almost 200 suppliers on display, you're sure to find all the industry-shapers within the RLC Marketplace. It's all about the connections you make and the hands you'll shake here, where suppliers and operators gather to uncover the latest solutions, sample new products and even close deals.