As you may have read last month at our online home HME.com, the Middle East has been marked out as a potential site for a Nobu Hotel — yes, that’s ‘Nobu’ as in Japanese restaurant icon Nobuyuki Matsuhisa.

According to Chuck Wood, Middle East managing director for Rockwell Group (the interior design firm responsible for designing the first Nobu Hotel, located in the US) the company has had “some conversations with developers here in the Middle East” and are “probably interested in coming here at some point”.

“Nobu himself has a very strong personality that’s very tightly bound to the restaurant brand; people look to him as a kind of concierge,” insisted Wood.

“Every meal is a hand-crafted, deep experience for people and we found that those attributes map very well to a hospitality offering. It’s a different game altogether from taking a celebrity’s name and slapping it on a building,” he added.

All this begs the question: how far can a decent F&B brand go?

I have heard a few incredulous remarks about the Nobu Hotel, but really, when you think about it, it’s not such a surprising idea.

Within the F&B industry itself, there are copious examples of F&B outlets that have started small and gone on to enjoy global success as hugely popular brands, spanning the spectrum from McDonald’s to Gordon Ramsay Holdings.

Some industry professionals, such as Antonio Carluccio or Jamie Oliver, have launched their own ranges of ingredients and cooking equipment. But are they missing a trick by staying in the F&B arena?

Nobu Hotels are on the horizon: what about taking it a step further, and offering a McDonald’s airline (low-cost), or a Gordon Ramsay spa?

Because the truth is that consumers want to buy into a brand. Clichéed as it may sound, they really do want a ‘lifestyle solution’; products that represent who they want to be and fit in with the life they want to lead — and today this applies not just to clothes or cars, but to food as well.

If a person finds that one particular F&B concept meets their needs better than any other, then why shouldn’t they also buy the cookbooks from that brand, or purchase its range of ingredients, or even stay in its hotel?

Successful brands are a well-developed commodity: they have an identity, a style and a purpose. That is what their customers will buy into, and any F&B brand bold enough to pursue and subsequently achieve this status arguably has potential to be a lot more.

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