Taking Their Sweet Time
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #164
One of the business stories to come out of the early pandemic period was the closure of the fairly large California-based salad bar/buffet restaurant chain Sweet Tomatoes/Souplantation. You’d think “Souplantation” would be more of a candidate for renaming than some old Lee Highway in Virginia, but somehow the name stuck up until the chain closed entirely for the pandemic—first temporarily, like most restaurants, in March, and then permanently in May. Apparently the corporate office feared that stricter health regulations would make life harder for buffet/self-serve restaurants going forward:
“The FDA had previously put out recommendations that included discontinuing self-serve stations, like self-serve beverages in fast food, but they specifically talked about salad bars and buffets,” said John Haywood, CEO of Garden Fresh. “The regulations are understandable, but unfortunately, it makes it very difficult to reopen. And I’m not sure the health departments are ever going to allow it.”
This didn’t really turn out to be true after the acute phase of the pandemic was over—can you believe people thought buffets would never be allowed to operate again?—and it remains true that despite the sense of unsanitary optics, the spread of COVID was no more likely in a buffet restaurant than in any other restaurant, or for that matter in any other shared, enclosed space.
But anyway, there’s an interesting postscript to that story, as buffets have obviously continued on in the post-pandemic period. One of the legacy Sweet Tomatoes locations, in a pretty generic Tucson, Arizona strip plaza, recently reopened in April. It reopened under a different company, which bought the rights, noting that there was still an ardent fan base for the restaurant out there:
“We first started talking with the tenant last summer, and the operating manager spent time bringing in contractors to understand the scope of work,” said CBRE’s Ms. McClure. “He indicated the concept [Sweet Tomatoes] had and continues to have a strong following with patrons still active on Facebook and Instagram sites. "
Sweet Tomatoes and Soup Plantation restaurants closed amid the pandemic. ST Three, LLC purchased exclusive rights and all intellectual property associated with the brands and has retained former Sweet Tomatoes operators to reopen the Tucson location, which originally operated from 1996 to 2020.
Here it is while closed, in 2022:
And here it is now, with the only difference being the old tagline sign being removed:
Because this is a reopening, the old reviews on its Google page are still there. It’s uncanny to see this scrolling through, right when the original set of old reviews ends. Go to the bottom review:
And then the new ones begin with people leaving “reviews” simply awaiting the reopening:
So many recent reviews are excited and nostalgic, and apparently the place often has lines out the door. It’s not yet been announced whether the new owner will reopen the chain in real numbers or stick to one or just a few locations. But it seems like there’s a real business opportunity here.
There are a number of cases of an old brand being bought up and reintroduced in some way—Wards.com, anybody?—but often the resulting product/service isn’t “the same.”
This more or less is, which is really cool.
Related Reading:
Three Cheers For The Blue & White
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The Sweet Tomatoes in Houston did a roaring business. It's still closed and empty. Time for some resurrection!