30 Jul COVID-19 Delta is Here. Are you ready?

It is with a hopeful heart that we write this blog. Over the last year & a half, the restaurant industry has taken a beating during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as cases begin to increase in Texas again due to the Delta variant, we feel we as a whole are stronger & more prepared to take on whatever is thrown at us. People in the restaurant industry are resilient, hard-working & all around bad ass.

For those of you who worked with Embark Marketing in 2020 during the start of the pandemic & throughout, you know that our team spent countless hours researching trends, laws, mandates & more. We did our best to help guide our clients through the difficult time by providing them strategies, implementation methods & hope. Additionally, we sent out emails every time something changed, or a mandate was put into place to ensure that we could help our clients navigate policies for the best of their businesses — and get everything digitally updated to reflect those changes in a timely manner.

As we enter yet another stage of COVID-19 with the Delta variant, we are re-implementing my COVID-19 blog updates as we become aware of new laws/changes so that we can ensure we’re all ahead of the curve.

This is meant to be educational for restaurants located throughout Texas. Regardless if your business is a client of ours, we want our industry to stand tall & strong.

Effective July 29, 2021, Governor Abbott issued a new executive order on COVID-19. The biggest change for our industry is that, effective immediately, there will be no business restrictions, even if a region exceeds the previous COVID hospitalization threshold. The order does not prohibit businesses from requiring masks, however.

This means that it is your business’s choice whether or not you implement a mask policy. Being that Embark Marketing only works with the food & beverage industry, we are able to see trends across the board locally and regionally. At this time, we have not yet seen a surge in businesses requiring masks. However, we did learn a lot last year on how fickle customers can be at times when it comes to mandated mask policies. This includes both online & in-person interactions.

Therefore, should you choose to implement a mask policy at your establishment, we recommend the following:

Prepare a Statement
We recommend preparing a short statement that effectively communicates your guidelines in a clear & pragmatic way, so that when customers ask about masks, you have a stock response to provide them. This copy can be used on your website, for social media inquiries, and as a response to reviews.

Posted Signage
Once you have this statement prepared, we recommend printing it and making a posted sign on the front door of your establishment. This is your first line of defense from the customer. They can read the sign & then choose if they want to come in or not based on their preferences.

Train Your Staff
Customer service is everything in the restaurant industry, so if you’re staff are trained on what to say, should a customer inquire about a mask policy in-house, it should make the exchange more pleasant.

Stay Educated
If you are not already signed up for the newsletter from the Texas Restaurant Association, we highly recommend that you do – as they are excellent at providing our industry with detailed information on how we are affected by state & national changes. They also have an amazing Coronavirus Guidance Resource page.

We are with you all every step of the way, so please feel free to reach out if you have any questions!