New Firm Focuses on Curating Dining Experiences

The explosion of food and beverage experiences has created a need for niche expertise in the hospitality market, and Cultivate Hospitality Group—a new brokerage firm and real estate consulting firm—is arriving to do just that. The firm’s president and managing partner Peter Peterson has a unique background in both real estate and food and beverage that allows him to work directly with developers and owners to curate unique dining experiences for a property’s target demographic group. We sat down with Peterson exclusively to talk about the next firm, what inspired it and how the industry is responding.

GlobeSt.com: What was the impetus to launch Cultivate?

Peter Peterson: We are seeing the importance of food and beverage in all types of real estate these days. In the retail world, it is certainly becoming more important to have great food and beverage in all of your products, but even beyond that, we see what I call the hospitality-driven nature of all types of real estate. Office buildings and residential buildings are trying to distinguish the amenities that they have, and food and beverage is a way to do that. We are seeing that food and beverage has become important in all aspects of real estate. Our business plan is to focus on all asset classes. We didn’t realize how quickly we would really be in all of those segments, but we are really bringing in clients in all of those segments.

GlobeSt.com: Tell me about your background in food and beverage?

Peterson: I have a unique background in this because I went to hotel school. After graduation, I worked in the industry in operations, and I really got to learn how restaurants work from the inside out. Then, I changed paths and I got my maters in real estate development, and I fused those two worlds together. I went to work at Related, and I became their in-house food and beverage guru. I looked at all of the ways that we could bring food and beverage into the product to differentiate it. That helped me to understand the importance of food and beverage.

GlobeSt.com: What has the response been like from the industry?

Peterson: It has been pretty amazing. There is such a huge emphasis from developers and owners on food and beverage. In general, this is not an expertise that they have focused on in-house. Historically, they have relied on brokerage houses to go out and market to food and beverage concepts. That is a very different service than we offer because typically, brokerage houses don’t have any operational experience, and they don’t understand being on both sides of the equation.

GlobeSt.com: Tell me about your services.

Peterson: We can do straight brokerage, but we also get involved in larger projects that might be earlier on in the development process. In those cases, we are actually helping with the master planning. We are sitting down with the developer and the developer’s design team and really thinking holistically about the needs of the entire project. We are assessing who the end user is and what we want to build as an amenity base for that user. We are working on the entire ground plane of the project, how the office lobbies interact with food and beverage uses and as the developer is going out to try to find the best office tenants, we are thinking of the most incentivizing things that those tenants will want to see from food and beverage. We will take that all the way through. We go out and find the operators, and we help guide them through the development process to make sure that the tenants are building the spaces the way the developer wants and to make sure they are being operated and managed properly.

GlobeSt.com: What are your goals for the company?

Peterson: We are mainly focused on the West Coast. I am a huge believer of what is happening out here on the real estate side of things. Certainly in the future, we want to expand nationally and internationally. Being on the West Coast gives us proximity to Asia, and we are seeing more and more operators here are looking to do licensing deals in Asia. That is a huge untapped market, and we want to be positioned to really take advantage of that. That is a huge part of our future growth.