Company: FWRG
Filing Date: 2025-03-11
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001789940-25-000010
Chunk: 11

Company: First Watch Restaurant Group, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-11
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 11
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 recognize the potential of strategically marketing in appropriate channels to accelerate our brand awareness. We continue to build expertise in, and deploy tested strategies for, utilizing targeted digital channels to reach certain attractive customer segments and build top-of-mind awareness. By using our first party data, we have been able to identify higher frequency customers and target similar customers with digital media vehicles. These demand generation strategies have aided us to “balance out” our customer base in recent years by growing penetration with Millennial and Gen Z segments.

•Customer Technology & Customer Data: We accelerated the implementation of customer data acquisition systems in order to better inform the habits and behaviors of our customers. With the large increase in remote digital orders, we also sought to digitize in-restaurant orders for the purpose of creating an omnichannel view of the First Watch customer. By integrating remote waitlist, remote orders, tokenized credit card transactions and WiFi into one system, we now have the ability to better understand trial and frequency. Since implementation of these systems, we have gathered customer information for over 17.9 million unique customer profiles, 7.7 million of whom have opted for direct communication from First Watch. The advances in these foundational systems have allowed us to learn more about our customers and the behaviors that ultimately drive lifetime customer value. We see this as a long-term opportunity to drive increased visit frequency as we have the ability to build new customer technology features that elevate the customer experience.  

Operations

Quality and Food Safety

First Watch emphasizes high food quality and a commitment to food safety in each restaurant through the careful training and supervision of personnel and by following rigorous quality and cleanliness standards. Food preparation and cleaning procedures are defined, monitored and maintained by our quality assurance department. We contract with third-party inspectors to regularly monitor restaurant performance through unannounced non-biased food safety assessments with program standards that meet or exceed those of local health departments. These inspections are intended to achieve active managerial control in our restaurants in an effort to reduce risk factors and maintain a strong food safety culture. 

Restaurant management incentive plans provide strong motivation to meet and exceed standards. In addition, as part of our overall food quality assurance, we have a process in place to review vendors’ food safety practices to ensure they meet or exceed industry standards. 

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Restaurant Staff

As of December 29, 2024, we had more than 15,000 restaurant employees. None of our employees are part of a collective bargaining agreement and based upon independent surveys and our internal evaluations, we believe our “You First”