Perceptions of restaurateurs on quality grading

Abstract

A restaurateur's strategic focus is to maximise wealth for the owner(s). To achieve wealth maximisation, a restaurateur could implement one or more of the following strategies: focus strategy, cost-leadership strategy and/or differentiation strategy. A management intervention a restaurateur could implement to achieve this is quality differentiation. Grading of an establishment will assist a restaurateur in becoming a market leader. Currently there no national restaurant grading system exists in South Africa. As support and participation of restaurateurs in any future quality grading system are essential, it is imperative to test their perceptions of the implementation of a quality grading scale. The aim of this paper is to gather the perceptions of restaurateurs of an envisaged scale that could be used to grade independent full-service restaurants. In this study the researcher tested the perceptions of restaurateurs using nine possible outcomes of implementing quality grading in the independent fullservice restaurant segment. The outcomes to be tested were presented to restaurateurs in a questionnaire uploaded on "survey monkey". This was emailed to 3 286 restaurateurs and 265 responses were received. Respondents who were positive regarding grading indicated that they were enthusiastic about the impact grading would have on international tourism, as well as the fact that it could contribute to an increase in the value of their establishments