Welcome to In the Weeds, a publication covering the business of independent restaurants.
In this edition, I spoke with Brandon Styll, founder of the Nashville Area Restaurant Alliance, about a topic that is truly in the weeds — negotiating contracts with broadliners.
Working with a broadliner isn’t for every independent restaurant. Still, for those who can and want to work with broadliners, NARA offers a compelling option: it takes on the complex contract negotiations so restaurants can get back to running their restaurants.
Also in this edition: restaurants are good for neighborhoods, the DoorDash-Instacart merger might be bad for restaurants, and Converse created a line of Chucks for hospitality industry workers.
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Brandon Styll and managing partner Vince Lanni
The proposed Sysco-Restaurant Depot merger has put the complicated relationship between broadliners and restaurants back in the spotlight. Brandon Styll, the founder of the Nashville Area Restaurant Alliance (NARA), which helps restaurants negotiate with broadline distributors and other vendors, is happy to be caught in the middle.
“We estimate right now that we’ve probably put $2 million back into the pockets of local restaurateurs here in Nashville,” Brandon told me when we spoke a few weeks back. NARA has about 125 restaurant members and works with 27 different vendors.
Brandon is uniquely suited to help with those negotiations. He has a background working for distributors and wholesalers like US Foods and What Chefs Want, and he has worked within a local restaurant group as a director of operations. During the pandemic, he started Nashville Restaurant Radio, a podcast where he speaks with folks in the local restaurant scene. After hearing about the struggles restaurants were going through, he realized he was in a position to help.
In Nashville, “I call it we're ‘under attack’ by private equity-backed chains and these massive restaurants that have directors of operations, and they're driving the rent up on everybody, and they're paying pennies on the dollar for everything. Their marketing budgets are insane, so local restaurants are really at a disadvantage,” he said. “And we're trying to fix it. We're trying to do our part.”
