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Shipping Container Restaurants
Dining is an experience that everyone looks forward to.HIG Housing transforms shipping containers into culinary works of art, leaving a lasting impression. Modular construction using new containers is a growing trend, offering cost efficiency, sustainability, and unique aesthetics.
In 2023, modular construction is an ideal choice for shipping container restaurants and commercial ventures. It ensures a swift, customized, and modern facility delivery, meeting the demands of the present.
What Are Shipping Container Restaurants?
At HIG, we specialize in a wide range of custom shipping containers, including container restaurants. We fulfill orders to our customers’ unique specifications — we can help you assess your needs and develop the perfect modular design for your restaurant while following your local food facility policy.
Let’s examine a few facets of the modular concept and development process and consider how utilizing a modular unit for your restaurant would make a great choice.
Modular Restaurant Design Process
Shipping containers are available in a wide range of sizes, but we use a 20’ or 40’ long unit for most commercial applications. Modular units can be designed to be stacked on top of one another or placed side by side for additional floor space.
We work to find the right high-quality containers for your needs and budget. Generally speaking, any unit can be a candidate for converting to a restaurant container. While newer containers are more expensive, they require less cleanup time to remove dents, rust and other imperfections.
Benefits of Modular Restaurant Construction
Time SavingsBy buying a custom container restaurant, it allows your general contractor to prepare the final site while the actual structure is being completed in our factory. This drastically cuts down on overall construction time compared to traditional builds. In turn, this means your business will be up, running, and making money quicker. While a container restaurant may not always be “cheaper” depending on the design, this time-savings may actual turn out to save you money due to less down time for your business and faster cash flow through the restaurant.
Energy EfficiencyIn a busy restaurant, utility bills make up a large portion of your overhead costs. Any improvements in efficiency translate to considerable savings on a month-to-month basis. Shipping containers for restaurants can easily include high-efficiency appliances, solar panels, insulation and other green sustainable technologies. In addition, your choice of a modular unit is an investment in an emerging green building technology: the repurposing of building materials.
WorkflowModular restaurant construction gives you free reign to design the best kitchen area and front-of-house for your team. Rather than forcing you to use a set floor plan, HIG’s modular restaurant designs are flexible and modifiable in plenty of convenient ways. Shipping container restaurants are also easy to expand when you need to accommodate future growth. Simply stack a modular addition on top of your existing structure or add a couple on to the side for several hundred extra square feet. It’s an easy and cost-effective way to provide new customers and staff with a comfortable space while minimizing construction time on site.
DesignDécor and interior design play a large role in how your restaurant is perceived, and the type of crowd it attracts. While HIG’s modular construction process gives you plenty of options for creating comfortable, conventional spaces both inside and out, many clients find the industrial look of a repurposed shipping container to be one of its key selling points. Choose a modular restaurant to give your eatery the edge it needs in a fiercely competitive culinary landscape.
From giving your team the freedom to move to attracting a hip crowd to your restaurant’s unique look, modular construction is a great choice for your establishment!
Shipping Container Coffee Shops & Bars
Custom shipping containers are excellent choices for new coffee shops, food trucks, sandwich shops, seafood restaurants, and hip bars. A recent study conducted by Ohio State University revealed that 60 percent of restaurants fail in their first year of existence and 80 percent fail within five years. As reported by BusinessInsider.com, Robert Irvine, celebrity chef and star of the hit show, “Restaurant Impossible,” lists the following as the top causes of restaurant failures:
- Inexperience
- Poorly located
- Bad People Management
- Lack of Accounting Skills
- Spotty Customer Service
- Sub-Par Food Quality & Execution
While Carrie Luxem, president and CEO of Restaurant HR Group, agrees with many of the things on Irvine’s list, she considers poor location and overspending to be two of the biggest reasons why restaurants fail. Luxem warns that some of the pitfalls of a bad location include poor visibility, insufficient parking and a lack of foot traffic. When it comes to overspending, Luxem says that some restaurateurs spend too much even before they open their doors on remodeling projects that aren’t always necessary.
Overcoming the reasons Irvine cited as being responsible for failure in the restaurant industry can be done with hands-on training and education. You can get experience by working in someone else’s restaurant before you strike out on your own and use it as a guide. For instance, you learn how to prepare food and execute the menu you’re going to offer. You can also learn about the level of service customers expect at the same time, which will help you train your employees to tend to your customers appropriately down the line. You can learn how to manage others by taking a class or consulting with a seasoned mentor. You can also pick the marketing and accounting skills you’ll need to succeed as a business owner by taking a class in a formal setting or online.
Conquering the real obstacles to success that Luxem discussed is also within your control. You can research the features and demographics in a few areas where you’d like to open your restaurant to see which market your establishment will be most likely to succeed in, for example. You can also avoid overspending by identifying what is critical to the success of your project and staying within your budget by not adding unnecessary items to your to-do list.
Sometimes, no matter how much research you do about the demographics and competition in the area and regardless of how careful you are to stick to your budget, your business concepts may still be literally and figuratively positioned to fail. Often, this is due to a change in the neighborhood, a “jinxed” location that once seemed perfect, or something else. You can avoid pitfalls like these, however, by sidestepping a traditional retail location such as a strip mall or shopping center and opening your restaurant as a portable pop-up eatery instead.
One of the biggest advantages that pop up restaurants like shipping container restaurants have over conventional brick-and-mortar commercial locations is that they feature the option of relocating your business if you picked the wrong retail space or the consumer market around your restaurant changes. Another benefit is that a mobile pop-up is normally less expensive to customize the architecture to your exact standards than it is to build a permanent structure.
Shipping Container, Modular & Pop-Up Restaurant Ideas
Portable Coffee Shop
Shipping Container Cafe
Shipping Container Bar
Pop-Up Beer Garden
Even though you may not have thought about alternative building materials such as shipping containers before, the style and versatility they provide has been recognized by industry leaders, including Taco Bell, Subway and Starbucks. Taco Bell debuted its first shipping container store at an annual film and music festival in Austin, Texas in 2015. Starbucks introduced its drive-thru shipping container outlets in 2014 and is already using them in Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Oregon, Kansas City and Colorado.
During the construction of the Freedom Tower in New York City, Subway was tapped for what is perhaps the most creative pop-up restaurant idea to-date, and it was certainly one of the highest. While construction continued on the 105-floor structure, workers found it increasingly difficult to make it to ground level, eat their lunches and return to work on time the higher the building became. Subway solved this problem by using shipping containers to make a portable restaurant that could be lifted to the height of whatever floor the workers were on, saving them valuable time.
Pop-up restaurant ideas aren’t limited to national chain operators, though. Many independent restaurant owners have also recognized the practicality and flexibility that shipping containers provide and have used them to either add onto an existing structure or to create a new one. Asheville, NC residents Matt Logan, Kristie Quinn and chef Mark Rosenstein, used 19 shipping containers to open America’s largest shipping container restaurant in the spring of 2015, for instance. Amazingly, the structure was installed in just three days.
Ska Brewing opened the Container Restaurant to offer guests fare that would complement their beer tasting experience when they visited the brewery’s Durango, CO campus. The Container Restaurant consists of two containers that are positioned on top of each other. The Container Restaurant uses its lower level to prepare food while its upper container serves as an outdoor patio where people can eat their food and enjoy an elevated view of the brewery’s property.
While shipping containers are ideal for large-scale operations because they can be used to build outward as well as upward, they are also perfect for smaller businesses. If you’re trying to think of an outside the box pop-up restaurant idea that will enable you to enjoy the many benefits that come with having a mobile structure made from durable materials and the strong structure of custom shipping containers, you may want to consider the following popular ideas:
- Portable Coffee Shop
- Shipping Container Cafe
- Modular Bar
- Pop-Up Beer Garden
Shipping Container, Modular & Pop-Up Restaurant Ideas
If you’re interested in a modular café or mobile coffee shop, you have a lot of options if you choose to establish your business using a shipping container. Standard shipping containers range in size from 20-feet to 40-feet in length. While a shipping container’s usual ceiling height is eight-feet, six-inches, “high cube” containers that have a nine-foot, six-inch ceiling are available.
Shipping containers are made with 16-gauge corrugated steel which provides a modern industrial look, but you can alter the appearance of a container with materials such as siding. While Taco Bell decided to leave the external appearance of the containers used to make its first shipping container outlet intact, Starbucks chose to alter the look of its drive-thru shipping container locations by adding reclaimed wood paneling and a logo sign to the outside of each one.
Locations For Portable Café Shipping Containers or Coffee Shops:
If you already own a company and want an extra income stream, search no further. You may want to put a shipping container café in your own parking lot or down the street. You can use your portable coffee shop to serve items that complement what you serve in your permanent location or website, or you can use it to serve food when your restaurant is closed. For instance, if your permanent establishment only serves lunch and dinner, you can serve breakfast in your shipping container coffee house when customers visit in the morning. This type of forward-thinking between broadening your market and embracing modern trends based on data can greatly improve your business” sustainability.
Car Park
Marinas
Dog Parks
Beaches
Construction Sites
Transportation Stations
Business ParksFrom giving your team the freedom to move to attracting a hip crowd to your restaurant’s unique look, modular construction is a great choice for your establishment!
Benefits of Mobile Coffee Shop Construction
The benefits of having a mobile coffee shop or modular café include your ability to move your business from one location to another. This advantage can literally save your business if you didn’t initially pick an ideal location or if the mix of consumers in your area changes. It also gives you the opportunity to capitalize on special events in your area because you can haul your portable coffee shop to them.
Additional benefits of making a mobile coffee shop construction include:
- Environmentally Friendly: Using shipping containers for restaurant construction is environmentally friendly for multiple reasons. This type of construction is normally done indoors as modular construction typically is, meaning shipping container construction releases less dust into the air than stick-built, on-site construction does.
- Time-Saving: Shipping container construction can be completed faster than on-site construction because its progress is not dependent on the weather, and you start with a structure that already exists before the construction work even begins.
- Security: Since shipping containers are made from corrugated steel, they are virtually impossible to break into. At the end of the day, you’ll simply lock down your shipping container coffee house to guard against theft. Given the material they’re made of, shipping containers are fire resistant as a function of their design as well.
Shipping Container Café Floor Plans
For some ideas of how you may want to lay out your modular café, take a look at the graphic designs below:
The cost of a portable coffee shop depends on many factors, including the number of shipping containers you’re going to use to create your mobile structure. Other factors that will impact the cost of your modular café include your location and the amount of work involved with customizing your structure to suit your particular needs.
Shipping Container Bars & Shipping Container Beer Gardens
Benefits of Modular Bars & Mobile Beer Gardens
In addition to possibly needing less space for a structure, a shipping container beer garden provides the added benefit of portability. If you want a location that has more natural shade, you can relocate your business. If you want a spot that offers you the chance to serve more guests at once or one that already has the paving and landscaping that appeals to you, you can easily transport your pop-up beer garden there. If a special event is coming up, you can temporarily relocate your shipping container bar to maximize your sales.
The benefits that are attributable to shipping container coffee shops also apply to modular bars. Additional benefits of structures made from shipping containers include the following:
Durability: Shipping containers are made from long-lasting corrugated steel. This means structures made with them will generally last longer than buildings made with less durable materials.
Weather Resistance: Shipping containers are built to protect the goods they carry from damaging weather conditions and environmental elements such as sea salt. Before they leave the manufacturing plant, they’re treated with primer and numerous layers of paint to prepare them to withstand the elements and weather. Since your structure will have already been treated with primer and paint, your mobile beer garden will be protected from the weather and elements.
Pest resistance: The steel used to make shipping containers doesn’t attract pests such as termites the way wooden structures sometimes do. While the floor of a shipping container is typically made from plywood, the plywood is treated with a pest-resistant varnish to protect your custom shipping container bar from infestation.
Shipping Container Bar Floor Plans
If you’re looking for a functional floor plan for your shipping container beer garden, consider one of the ones provided below:
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