A Case study of RBJ’s Restaurant

By Seahee Lee

Kim Samuelson (Owner/President) started RBJ’s Spreadable Fruit as a side business of RBJ’s restaurant in Crookston in northwestern Minnesota. RBJ’s restaurant has served in Crookston since 1981. Originally Kim’s father, Roger Bernald Johnson, ran this restaurant. She took over the family business at age 19 when her father died of cancer. In 1996, RBJ's Spreadable Fruit was started as a small- town jelly company but now it is a very successful corporation which sells products nationwide. According to the history of the company on the website,

The company got its start when Kim Samuelson, Owner and President, began making a batch of her grandmother's rhubarb-strawberry spreadable fruit in the kitchen of her RBJ's Restaurant. With the sweet smell wafting from the kitchen, the restaurant patrons were soon asking if they could sample it. It was their urging that got Kim thinking she had something. "With all the positive response, I thought it would be fun to have jars available for people to purchase and take home."

About five years ago, Kim and her employees felt that they need to expand target customers from local customers based to wider range of customers and they decided to use the Internet as a business tool. On the Internet, they sell spreadable fruit, signature syrup, whipped honey, jelly, and gift sets of products. On the web site there are six sections listed on the top of each page; home, products, order, media room, the company and contact us which enables customers to go from page to page.

On the first page, customers are welcomed and there is a brief introduction of the products. The customers can subscribe to the company’s newsletter or can go directly to the recipe of the month. Product prices and product information, in more detail, is in the ‘products’ section. Recipes are also provided using RBJ’s products which give customers more ways that they can use the products. When the customers click ‘order’, they can see shipping information and can click the products they want to purchase. For their convenience, customers can choose express or standard mail. , Customers can find published articles and customer responses on the ‘media room’ section. In the section ‘The Company’ there is a story abut the company, introducing some of the employees and the company’s mission. The RBJ website also is intended to represent Northwestern Minnesota across the country and share their heritage with others. The company’s core beliefs are also in ‘The Company’ section..

OUR CORE BELIEFS:

RBJ's is dedicated to providing high-quality gourmet products that will tease your taste buds and enlighten your senses. We want our Midwestern flavor to become a staple in everyone's kitchen.

We seek to establish long-term relationships with those we work with. We create partnerships with our customers and get to know them, just as they get to know us.

We strive for top-notch customer service in all areas. We want our customers to be satisfied with our services, from the time they first learn about us until they receive their order, and beyond.

It is a treat for us everyday to visit with customers who contact us to order our products. Some of our customers are new, some have never even heard of Rhubarb, Chokecherry or Elderberry. It is a thrill for us to be able to share a little piece of our Midwestern heritage with individuals from all over the nation.

In the article “Designing effective cyber store user interface”, providing information about the company and other customers’ testimonials are emphasized. “Other customers’ testimonials could be interpreted as a quality measure of a product as well as a promotion of a product. Providing store information (company history, mission statement, location etc.) is important because customers want to know with whom they are dealing and to whom they are sending credit card information” (245).Ranganathan and Ganapathy also emphasized the importance of providing more information about the company in the article ‘Key dimensions of business to consumer web sites’, “Apart from product-price data, consumers also look for information about the organization that they are dealing with and some contact information. Therefore, it is essential that B2C web sites offer electronic means of interactivity to consumers.”(461) these are important factors in order to satisfy web customers.

RBJ’s restaurant and Internet business has a total of forty five employees. The company uses e-mail to communicate with clients, vendors and with some of their employees. Kim spends less than half hour on the Internet everyday. She basically responds to email and interacts with vendors. Her employees do most of the interaction with customers and vendors. In addition to communicating with people using the Internet, they use the Internet to research possible vendors and clients, and also to market their products. RBJ sells their products to other retailers as well as individual customers. There is some information about wholesale on the websites too.

In order to draw more customers to their website, they make sure that they provide their web site address on all of their products that they sell and all their printed literature such as company newsletters and brochures. Kim and her employees link their web sites to search engines like Google and Yahoo, RBJ’s spreadable fruits can be found by typing in a keyword like jelly or jam through these search engines.

A professional web page designer worked with one of the employees to design RBJ’s website. Periodically, a person checks the website and puts items up on the web. Kim mentioned that she definitely thinks the Internet is a good tool for research and it allows her business an opportunity to interact with clients, not just their local area but wider based extended customers. In addition, she mentioned, the Internet convenient and a good method because she can send email to the clients in the middle of the night without interrupting them and the customers can respond at their convenience. Although she thinks using the Internet helped RBJ’s to expand and allow them to reach a lot more people than they could without using the Internet, there has been a challenge as a result of having their own website. Kim and her employees continue trying to make the website effective.

“We are still trying to make it effective. There are a lot of websites out there. Ours, of course, is just one of the millions and we are, you know, not as big as Amazon.com by any means. And I wish we were able to, I wish we were selling little bit more and we are constantly working on that. That would be, you know, I think it’s a very good tool but our sales haven’t, we are not having solely big Internet sales as much as we expected and it would be nice if it is a larger portion of our sales. We are constantly working on that and making sure that every piece of mail and business card, everything we have has our website on it. So that we can hopefully draw people to that because more and more people are using Internet as a tool for shopping and communication.”

Kim explained that right now they are selling more products using mail or phone orders rather than Internet orders. She said that less than five percent of sales are from the Internet right now but she said people do not always buy the product on their first visit to the web page yet it works for advertising. RBJ’s also sends catalogues to people, developing a customer data base from people who have ordered in the past. Those names become a part of their database and periodically catalogues are sent to those on the database. 50 to 70 percent of the online customers are repeat customers. Kim said that once they start ordering online, they continue to order online.

Overall, Kim thinks using the Internet or having the website is a good method of communicating with people and advertising. She said, “It’s just another method of making yourself more visible.”

Kim suggested small business owners consider using the Internet in their business. Although, business owners who have a website should not expect that their business would become a success and effective in sales overnight. “It doesn’t happen that way so you just have to be cautious”. She also believes, “success comes from altering your sites and upgrading”.

Kim, E.B. & Eom, S.B. (2002). Designing effective cyber store user interface. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 102(5), 241-251.

Ranganathan, C. & Ganapathy, S. (2002). Key dimensions of business-to-consumer web sites. Information and Management, 39, 457- 465.