Retailers are thinking about opening more stores while restaurants are trying to squeeze more revenue out of the ones they already have. In Toast’s latest retail survey, 66% of retail operators said they were likely to open another location in the next year, rising to 69% among grocers. Restaurants look very different: just 11% named expansion as their primary growth strategy, versus 47% focused on increasing guest traffic and 26% adding revenue streams like catering and online ordering. The questions aren’t perfectly comparable, but the direction is clear: retail is thinking about replication while restaurants are thinking about utilization. Prepared food is increasingly where those worlds collide. Consumers are eating more meals at home without necessarily cooking more, grocers are investing deeper into foodservice, and restaurants are looking for ways to make money without filling another seat. In Chicago, Christophe’s Fine Foods is building a retail business around restaurant-caliber food that is batch-cooked, chilled, sold as modular components, and finished at home. This week, HNGRY sits down with founder Christophe Lagrange to discuss how his new concept is enabling a full spectrum of fully-prepared to semi-prepared meal solutions, as inspired by the likes of Meadow Lane, Round Swamp Farms, LA Grocery & Café, and, of course, Erewhon.