This article is part of "Made to Order," a series highlighting the business strategies driving today's food industry.
When Sam Mink, the owner of Oyster House, made his way through the Philadelphia airport more than a decade ago, he wondered what it would be like to have a restaurant stationed in one of the international airport's terminals.
That may have been a premonition: This spring, Oyster House will open its second location between terminals B and C in the airport. The restaurant will seat 140 people and feature a shell-shucking station, Mink said.
He told Business Insider he understands that some people might feel skeptical when they hear the words "oysters" and "airport" in the same breath. But it's a chance Mink — and plenty of other food-and-beverage entrepreneurs across the country — are willing to take for the potential payoffs.
Across the US, airports are upping their selection of local eateries, often favoring them over nationally recognized chain restaurants and brands. Over the past two decades, this food-and-beverage trend has unfurled as part of a larger move to make airports feel more welcoming and authentic to their locales. Rather than fill US airports' fluorescent halls with more national chain restaurants, airport operators want to feature food and beverage options that speak to the cities where they're located.
"Airports, just like other concessions and concepts out there, are becoming more experiential. The airport that you're visiting can be just as much of a destination as where you're going, so it's a reflection of the local city," Liz Einhorn, a hospitality consultant and the founder of Experience Threee, told Business Insider.
Einhorn said that post-pandemic, more people are traveling just for fun, further incentivizing airport leaders to create unique and welcoming experiences.
A June report from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that leisure travel has become more popular than business travel in recent years. Within the US, travelers seek vacation opportunities year-round, compared to their European and Asian counterparts who tend to travel in the summer, the McKinsey report said.
In addition to the forthcoming Oyster House location, the Philadelphia airport is home to the Philly-born coffee roastery Elixr, the brunch favorite Sabrina's Cafe, a Geno's Steaks outpost, and, soon, a Federal Donuts and Chicken.
Chicago O'Hare International Airport has Tortas Frontera, from the award-winning chef Rick Bayless, and Berghoff Cafe, a spinoff of the city's historic German eatery. Travelers to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport can visit Lil Woody's Burgers & Shakes, which has five other non-airport locations. The Austin-Bergstrom International Airport features local favorites Salt Lick BBQ and Salvation Pizza.
For restaurant entrepreneurs, these partnerships can enhance their marketing strategies by widening brand recognition. They also require less of a hands-on approach than opening an on-the-street store location from scratch, since hospitality-group collaborators take on the bulk of the planning, which can include training staff, designing and building the space itself, and creating the menu.
Airport leaders want to make their spaces feel unique
As conduits for mass travel, airports are inherently uniform in their designs. Walking through any given airport can feel like you're moving outside time or space.
As Steve Taylor, a professor of psychology who studies consciousness, wrote in an article for The Conversation: "They are liminal zones where boundaries fade. On a literal level, national borders dissolve. Once we pass through security, we enter a no man's land, between countries. The concept of place becomes hazy."
Airport business leaders know this, so they aim to turn their airports into more tantalizing and pleasurable experiences, said Melissa K. Montes, the vice president and publisher of Airport Experience News.
"At the heart of the industry's efforts is the guest experience," Montes told BI. "For some operators, this means leveraging new technologies or offering innovative products to cater to the evolving needs of a new generation of travelers. For others, the emphasis remains on delivering personalized service that creates meaningful connections with passengers."
She added that "experiences" has become a buzzword in the industry, as retailers and restaurateurs focus on strategies for keeping travelers with limited time — and an interest in spending on authentic goods and services — engaged with their offerings.
Increasingly, airports achieve that through localized food and beverage concepts in their terminals, said Simon Lorady, a vice president at Jackmont Hospitality, the food-service group responsible for bringing Oyster House, Federal Donuts, and Elixr to the Philadelphia airport.
It's a trend Lorady, who began his career working in Philadelphia-area restaurants, said he started to notice about 15 years ago.
"Travelers were getting more educated about food. People are traveling more, they're seeing more local and new concepts coming about, especially in these popular cities," Lorady said.
These shifting consumer expectations are reflected in the requests for proposals, or RFPs, that Jackmont Hospitality and other concessionaires — the companies responsible for bringing food, beverages, and other products to various markets, like on the street or at stadiums — receive.
Instead of asking for Burger King and Auntie Anne's outposts, airports are asking for barbecue joints, seafood restaurants, local roasteries, beer gardens, and other concepts that reflect each location's unique culinary culture, Einhorn said.
Turning an airport prospect into a local partnership
Once concessionaires view an airport's RFP for localized concepts, they seek out potential partners to collaborate with — often the owners of city-specific eateries.
Lorady said that the process of winning an airport hospitality contract is both an art and a science.
"They don't tell you the brands they are looking for, but they tell you a category," Lorady told BI. He gave the example of "elevated local coffee" as a category: "Our job is to decipher that category and think, 'What do they really want there?'" In this particular case, it resulted in Jackmont Hospitality bringing Elixr coffee to the Philadelphia airport in August.
The process is often driven by concessionaries' personal relationships with restaurant owners and involves ongoing conversations about how the partnership could work since each one can vary based on an airport's requirements for leasing, staffing, and safety, Lorady said. He added that a restaurant's resources and an owner's expectations can also play a role in shaping these partnerships. Some restaurants — say, one that slow roasts its meat for several hours — simply aren't suited for an airport outpost, Einhorn said.
Mink said that a hospitality company approached him about expanding Oyster House — his family's storied seafood restaurant — to the airport nearly 10 years ago, but he turned down the offer, unsure if he was ready to expand at the time. Fast forward to 2023, when Lorady contacted Mink with a similar offer.
"I was ready to take Oyster House out of Sansom Street and work on this dream of mine," Mink told BI about expanding the business. "I love the fact that it's a licensing deal, that they do a lot of the heavy lifting, and they work with us. I feel like we're partners in creating this restaurant that will be as close to the original one as possible — but obviously, it's not going to be exactly the same."
Restaurateurs see marketing opportunities with airport collaborations
Mink and Jeff Benjamin of Federal Donuts and Chicken — another Jackmont Hospitality partner restaurant — told BI that their collaborations provide an opportunity to market their brands to an audience of hungry travelers.
"It's a secondary or tertiary model to have these, what we call, nontraditional sites. It's less for the financial upside and more for the marketing and the visibility as we grow," Benjamin, the CEO of Federal Donuts and Chicken, said.
It's also a last chance for travelers to get a taste of local restaurants that they may have missed during the visit — or that they tried and loved — as they're heading back home, Lorady said.
Travelers appear to enjoy having more local options — commenters in travel subreddits often rave about their niche airport meals. And locals on business trips — including my father, a Philadelphia native — can enjoy a taste of home, in the form of a Geno's cheesesteak, even after they've moved away.
