Brand Tactics: Ram International's Audience Adjustment

Ram International roams new pastures with its family-friendly restaurant-brewery.

By Monica Rogers, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 5/1/2003

Jeff Iverson Jr. (l.) and Jeff Chandler have taken the Ram reins from their fathers.

Hatched on the back of a cocktail napkin, the concept started in 1971 as Ram Pub, a cozy little joint with founders Cal Chandler and Jeff Iverson serving as cooks, managers, bartenders and janitorial crew. Today Tacoma, Wash.-based Ram International includes 28 restaurants in eight states, all hoping to achieve the same atmosphere of quality, value and boisterous fun as the original. 

The company has 12 Ram Restaurant & Big Horn Brewery units, 12 CB & Potts and Humperdinks, and one of each of Texas Bar & Grill; Stonehouse; Murphy’s Seafood and Steakhouse; and Shenanigans Seafood and Steakhouse. 

But today, the second generation—Jeff Chandler and Jeff Iverson Jr.—is in charge, and a new decor and direction are in place for Ram Restaurant & Big Horn. The prototype for the company’s new growth vehicle, a smaller 7,700-square-foot unit minus brewery, just opened in Rosemont, Ill.

The goal: attract women and families. Bar areas still have big screen TVs, and in-house breweries produce craft beers with names like Total Disorder Porter and Buttface Amber. But the breweries also make draft root beer and cream soda.

Dining area decor features arts-and-crafts fixtures, and menus are rife with female-centric dishes like Thai BBQ Salmon Salad, $13.99; and Lemon Hefeweizen Chicken, $12.99.

Ram’s effort to cultivate a female customer base makes sense to brewing industry expert Bill Metzger, who publishes American Brewer, a marketing-strategy periodical. “The timing is right to reach out to women,” he says. “More women are drinking beer, and they’re interested in quality and flavor. Enhancing menus and decor to appeal to women gives them good reason to consume those beers at a restaurant.”

Picking Up Speed
“Over the last 15 years, we’ve gradually become more female and family friendly,” says Chandler, who took the company reins from his father along with Iverson in 2000. “And we’ve seen our demographics shift as a result.” Chandler estimates sales to women dining alone and to families have increased 20 percent in the last three years.

He adds that kids are currently “the fastest growing segment of our business.” One indicator is that “kid expenses” like crayons and balloons have doubled in the last two years.

Kid meals start with a complimentary plate of healthy munchies and finish with free ice cream and balloons.

Every January, Ram does a “Kids Eat Free” promotion. Kid traffic quadrupled during the promo this year, a substantial jump over 2002 figures.

To make the atmosphere at Ram restaurants suitable for families, dividers split units into two sections, with dining on one side and the bar on the other. The dividers only stretch halfway to the cavernous ceiling, where the clatter of the open kitchen, cheers of sports fans and chatter of dining customers comingle.

While the new unit doesn’t include the brewery and has slightly lower ceilings, it still exudes the atmosphere Chandler calls “our trademark: real high ceilings, an open feeling, a lot of energy, activity and movement.”

Food Foundation
Founder Cal Chandler says an emphasis on quality food has made Ram’s metamorphosis possible. When he opened the first Ram, “everyone was either a pub or a restaurant. We were a pub that prided itself in serving great food; burgers made to order, everything fresh. Nobody else had that focus.”

Menus are managed by Executive Chef James Cassidy, who took on the role in 1983 when Ram stepped up its transition away from the collegiate sports bar theme. The company had opened two chophouse concepts in the early ’80s, which necessitated bringing in chefs. “When those topped out, we knew we needed to stick with Ram as our growth vehicle,” Jeff Chandler explains. “But we wanted to take it up a notch.”

In response, Ram put chefs in charge of its kitchens, rather than kitchen managers, and instituted strict quality-control measures.

Cassidy says the foundation for everything Ram does now with its menus—all scratch-made dishes, troll-caught Alaskan King salmon, only corn-fed beef—were laid in the early ’80s. “But we didn’t really see it bloom until we put control systems in place,” he says.

Among the systems: daily food tests, which evaluate two recipes each day; weekly food reviews; a.m. and p.m. line checks; and temperature checks. And Cassidy travels to each location along with seven regional chefs three times a year for complete menu presentations. “Unit chefs have to prepare the entire menu so that we can see that it’s up to standard.”

Burger sales still dominate Ram’s menu mix, but in recent years Cassidy says the entree segment has picked up, especially in the Chicago market. “We’re selling a lot more seafood, steaks and entree salads,” he says. “We’re seeing more of our entrees moving into the top 25 in terms of sales. Entree salads moved into the top-10 sellers.”

Beyond Burgers
Chandler attributes bigger entree sales in Chicago with the fact that Ram has only been in the market for three years. “Chicago was our first new market since 1978,” he explains. “And we came in with a more developed casual-theme style. In other markets, where we’ve been since the ’70s, people knew us more as a pub in the beginning.”

Menus change every six months with the addition of several new items. About 90 percent of the menu stays the same. Two dishes that fit Ram’s female-friendly focus are being launched this year. They are the Santa Fe Prawn Caesar salad, $9.99, romaine tossed with jalapeño-spiked Caesar dressing topped with grilled prawns and black bean corn relish and served in a fried flour tortilla shell; and Grilled Salmon, $13.99, served with tri-color tortellini in garlic butter sauce and garnished with roasted red peppers.

Brewery Benefits
Ram added breweries to 22 of its 28 restaurants in 1995. Currently food generates 60 percent of sales, followed by beer at 25 percent, liquor at 10 percent to 12 percent, and 3 percent everything else.

Chandler says brewing its own beer has been a strong component of the business. Beyond adding to the restaurant’s ambience, he says it helps keep costs down. “Brewing our own beer reduces our cost of goods by as much as 4 percent.”

That the company’s new prototype doesn’t have a brewery doesn’t mean it won’t feature Ram’s craft beers. “The goal is to use the smaller unit in conjunction with the brewery unit in each market,” Chandler explains. “Units that have breweries will ship beer over to the smaller units that don’t.” Ultimately that will mean each market has at least two smaller units and one brewery unit.

Next up, Ram is reviewing potential for additional locations in Chicago and is looking at the upper Midwest. Says Chandler, “Florida is also a state with potential opportunities for us, and Atlanta and Washington D.C., are still on our radar screen.”