Leveraging competitiveness to develop optimal strategies: evidence from the restaurant industry

Purpose Performance evaluation is a good way to improve competitiveness, and leveraging competitiveness is vital to developing optimal strategies and sustainable development for the growing restaurant industry in the USA and across the globe. This study can benefit from the methods to inform business strategies and decisions. Through the combination of two methods, this paper aims to provide novel perspectives to realize each restaurant company's resource allocation and performance, to know their market position compared to with other competitors, and then to develop their own business strategies. Design/methodology/approach This study proposes an application of slack-based measure (SBM) to determine input excesses and output shortfalls of the restaurant industry. Subsequently, context-dependent data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to identify the level of each restaurant company and compute the relative attractiveness and progress scores for each restaurant at each level, positioning each restaurant company's stance in their markets. Findings The empirical results reveal that management teams need to pay more attention to human resources, asset management and food cost control because the analysis of SBM model shows an opportunity for restaurant companies to adjust their hiring numbers to reach the optimal amount of employees. In addition, restaurant companies are categorized by their efficient frontiers into four levels using context-dependent DEA. Furthermore, the findings provide the four quadrants that each restaurant company falls into. Each of those four quadrants can guide the types of strategies a restaurant should adopt. Originality/value This study can help the publicly traded restaurant companies to identify their market position with target benchmarks, and then to develop optimal strategies and future plans for growth.