The Discovery Problem Hiding Inside Mixed-Use Food & Beverage

Written By Bruce William

A quick note before we begin.

In 2016, I created a free restaurant pro forma and published it on this website. To this day, it remains one of the most visited resources I have ever created. Every month, aspiring restaurant owners, café operators, market owners, and food-and-beverage entrepreneurs continue to find it.

While the economics of opening a food-and-beverage business remain important, something else has changed dramatically over the last ten years: discovery.

Search engines have evolved. Maps have evolved. Review platforms have evolved. AI assistants are now entering the picture. Increasingly, customers discover businesses through systems that must first decide what a business actually is before recommending it.

I do not consider myself a food-and-beverage marketing expert. What I do spend a great deal of time thinking about is how people, businesses, software, search systems, and AI interact. Over the last few years, I've noticed a pattern: many of the most interesting food-and-beverage businesses are becoming harder to categorize.

A coffee shop becomes a café. The café becomes a restaurant. The restaurant adds retail. The retail operation adds events. The business becomes more valuable to customers while potentially becoming more confusing to the systems responsible for helping new customers find it.

That observation led to this post.

Rather than offer a list of marketing tips, I built a prompt designed to analyze whether a mixed-use food-and-beverage business may have a discovery problem hiding beneath the surface.

Before running the prompt, replace the answers to the questions (in bold) with your own answers. You do not need a business plan. Simply edit the first section so it accurately reflects what you sell, the dayparts you serve, how you make money, and how customers currently find you.

Copy 100% of the text between the lines below:

Then run it.

I operate a food-and-beverage business.

What products, services, experiences, and categories do you currently offer?

We operate a hybrid food-and-beverage business that includes:

  • Coffee and espresso drinks

  • Bakery items and pastries

  • Breakfast service

  • Lunch service

  • Dinner service

  • Grab-and-go food

  • Prepared foods

  • Packaged foods and pantry items

  • Local and specialty grocery items

  • Beer

  • Wine

  • Spirits

  • Community gathering space

  • Seasonal events

  • Private events

  • Local products and gifts

What dayparts do you serve?

  • Morning coffee

  • Breakfast

  • Lunch

  • Afternoon café and market traffic

  • Dinner

  • Evening beer, wine, and spirits

  • Special event periods

What is your primary source of revenue today?

  • Food and beverage sales, with additional revenue from retail products, alcohol sales, and events.

If you were forced to choose only one public category for the business, what would it be?

  • General Store.

How do most customers currently discover you?

  • Local word of mouth

  • Passing traffic and local visibility

  • Google Maps and search

  • Social media

  • Community events and local reputation

After reviewing the information above, act as an expert in local discovery, hospitality, consumer psychology, search behavior, AI-assisted search, and platform-driven customer acquisition.

Assume that modern discovery systems prefer simplicity while successful hospitality businesses often create value through complexity.

Perform the following analysis.

Step 1: Human Understanding

Explain how a customer would naturally describe this business to a friend after visiting.

Step 2: Machine Understanding

Explain how Google Maps, search engines, AI assistants, review platforms, delivery platforms, social platforms, and event platforms are likely to classify this business.

Identify any disagreements between human understanding and machine understanding.

Step 3: Discovery Friction

Identify:

  • Category conflicts

  • Intent conflicts

  • Daypart conflicts

  • Brand conflicts

  • Review conflicts

  • Menu conflicts

  • Platform conflicts

Explain how each conflict may reduce discoverability.

Step 4: Discovery Architecture

Assume you acquired this business.

Design the discovery architecture you would build.

Recommend:

  • One primary discovery identity

  • Secondary discovery identities

  • Which offerings should lead discovery

  • Which offerings should support discovery

  • Which offerings should primarily be discovered after arrival

  • Which offerings deserve their own discovery surfaces

Explain your reasoning.

Step 5: Daypart Strategy

Analyze whether the business should present itself differently throughout the day.

Create a suggested:

  • Morning strategy

  • Breakfast strategy

  • Lunch strategy

  • Afternoon strategy

  • Dinner strategy

  • Evening drinks strategy

  • Event strategy

Step 6: Platform Strategy

For each of the following, explain what aspect of the business should be emphasized and why:

  • Google Maps

  • Website

  • Instagram

  • Facebook

  • Yelp

  • Event platforms

  • Delivery platforms

  • AI search systems

Step 7: Complexity Versus Discovery

Analyze whether this business would benefit most from:

  • A single discovery identity

  • Multiple discovery identities

  • Time-based discovery identities

  • Intent-based discovery identities

  • Separate discovery surfaces for distinct customer missions

Recommend the best approach and explain why.

Then evaluate whether the business should:

  • Present itself as one thing publicly and many things operationally

  • Present itself as many things publicly and many things operationally

  • Consolidate offerings into fewer customer-facing categories

  • Create separate discovery paths for different customer intents

Estimate the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Step 8: The Three-Move Plan

If you could change only three things over the next 12 months to improve discoverability, what would they be?

Rank them in order of expected impact.

For each recommendation include:

  • What to change

  • Why it matters

  • Where it should appear

  • What not to do

  • How success would be measured

Finally answer these questions:

What is this business really?

What does the internet think this business is?

What should the internet think this business is?

What is the simplest discovery story that creates the most customer traffic?

Be specific. Avoid generic marketing advice. Challenge your own assumptions before providing final recommendations.

The most interesting part of this exercise is not whether the recommendations are correct.

It is whether your description of the business and the internet's description of the business are the same thing.

For many mixed-use food-and-beverage operators, they are not.

Bruce William
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