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).