Business Case Studies & Business Publications

A New Vision for BBQ?

Feldman, Pnina, Ha...

Case

A New Vision for BBQ?

Feldman, Pnina; Halversen, Jeremy

OM-1839 | Published October 9, 2025 | 14 Pages Case

Collection: Darden School of Business

Add To Cart Buy Now

Product Details

Vision BBQ is a midsize restaurant in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia. The cofounders began by serving barbecue at pop-up events at popular Charlottesville locations and ultimately moved into a 14-seat storefront. Their primary sales channels were pop-up events, private catering, and delivery via delivery platforms (e.g., Grubhub). When the tenants at the restaurant next door went out of business, the cofounders chose to expand into that much larger location. The case opens a few weeks after that move was complete. This case introduces students to a relatively simple business model complicated by the fact that the business is serving two parallel channels of customers. The channels impose externalities on each other, and customers do not switch between channels in any single interaction. In this case, the two channels are customers who order meals through delivery platforms and customers who order meals in person. Ideally, students should know how to perform capacity, bottleneck, and queue-time calculations before tackling this case. While these calculations are not necessary for a rich discussion, this case provides a simple opportunity for students to refresh those skills and to practice drawing insights from their calculations. For more executive-level audiences, this teaching note also includes guidance on facilitating an in-depth discussion without walking through the detailed analysis. At the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, this case is taught in a second-year service-management MBA elective as part of a module on the use of platforms in service operations. It illustrates how a service provider can cater to different customer needs. When used in this way, the case complements an additional case on service platforms: “Lyft and Autonomous Vehicles: A Fast Lane to Growth?” (UVA-OM-1846), which focuses on platform fundamentals and scaling. This case is also used in an executive education setting to discuss service management and platform business models. But this case is also suitable as a capstone case in core undergraduate and graduate operations-management courses because it merges many operations-management concepts typically taught in core courses (e.g., process analysis, queueing, and contracting).

- Learn or review basic process-analysis concepts and tools: Unpacking Vision BBQ’s operating system affords the opportunity to introduce or review basic process-analysis concepts and tools such as cycle time, lead time, flow rates, bottlenecks, utilization, process-flow diagrams, Little’s Law, and queue times. - Gain a foundation in basic queueing terminology and dynamics: Students will encounter and learn about how arrival and service processes and the variability of each process contribute to the length of a queue, the wait time customers experience, and the resulting costs imposed on customers. - Understand the difficulties of serving customers across multiple channels: Students will investigate the trade-offs leaders are required to make when serving multiple channels of customers who are purchasing the same product or service in a constrained environment. - Consider how the design of contracts aligns or fails to align incentives between parties: Students will learn about the pros and cons of revenue-sharing contracts and will gain exposure to various contract designs, with the intent of creating coordination between Vision BBQ and the delivery apps the restaurant relies on. Through discussion, students will identify a plethora of contract relationships and the differences between contract design, the impact those design choices have on the contracted parties, and what conditions need to be met to make such contracts possible. - Consider the nature of the relationship between large platforms and small restaurants who use platforms. Students will be exposed to the difficulties Vision BBQ faces in feeling reliant on delivery platforms when the platforms have virtually all the bargaining power and the restaurant has virtually none. Students will come to understand why a restaurant owner may or may not choose to sell via such platforms to support their strategy and how that decision may affect their top line, bottom line, and customer service.