The Food & Drink Resources No-BS Guide for Executive Chefs, Restaurant Owners, and Marketing Officers

Menu Addicts

How toMake

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About Menu Addiction & This PaperAsk any marketing director of a multi-location restau-rant and they will tell you it all comes down to repeat customers. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out it’s more cost effective to have one customer purchase the same slice of pepperoni pizza 50 different times than it is to get 50 different customers to buy that slice one time.

It’s called menu addiction, and it’s something we aim for in our work at Food & Drink Resources (FDR).

At the FDR Innovation Center in Denver, Colorado, we work with multi-location restaurants from all over the country to develop menu items that will get their customers hooked. It starts in our test kitchen where we create recipes with ingredients we know are about to trend and historically have sold well for the brand. Then, we test the meal in our consumer research space located a whole 25 feet from our test kitchen and bar. All of this happens in a three-day event we call the 3C Development Process™.

In the following pages, we share our best tips for creat-ing those trending dishes we know will sell well and will make addicts out of your restaurant customers.

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Grow Your RootsThere was this popular high-end fast casual burger restaurant that we frickin’ loved about five years ago. It was one of the pioneers in the fast casual burger ex-plosion. They served quality meat and made fabulous burgers. Excellent sauces, too. No wraps at this joint.

Then they launched a cupcake line, among other things, and got so far away from their original vision that they lost their groove. That’s typically what happens when a restaurant abandons or waters down the thing that made them famous in the first place.

Here’s our first tip to making addicts out of your cus-tomers: Give the people what they expect and crave from you. You know, the concept that allowed the busi-ness to grow and expand from one location to three to dozens? Do more of that.

Don’t serve ramen just because it’s popular right now. Your role is not to please everyone or the vocal minority. Instead, grow your roots by making the best burgers you can, now and forever.

“All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

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Keep a Consistent MenuNothing matters more than consistency. Seriously, if you only take one tip from this paper, let it be this one.

Your committed customers want to see their all-time favorites on your menu without fail. (We almost cried when The Cheesecake Factory said bye bye to the Nava-jo Chicken Sandwich. Please, don’t do this to us.)

You may be tired of the same ol’ same ol’, but it’s not about you. Keep your winners on the menu no matter what.

Same goes with your ingredients. We see it all the time. A restaurant starts off with a kick ass all-natural chicken breast, and then to save a buck, they go with the chick-en everybody else procures.

Stop it!

Use better ingredients, not cheaper ingredients. Con-sumers today want to know where their food comes from. If you can say that your chicken is all-natural breast meat from local California farms, the result is more than great taste. Your customer will feel better, and we all know that addicts want to feel good.

“Restaurant customers want good food and good service every single time. Everybody wants it to be deeper and more meaningful, but that’s it.”

―FDR Chef Katie Sutton

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So, instead of futzing with your menu to reduce costs and minimize hassle in the kitchen, do this instead:

• Train staff in real life (more on this to come).• Document and enforce strict operating procedures.

You NEED checklists and timers. • Rely on some prepared foods like flash frozen

ingredients, quality sous vide proteins (followed by the proper technique), proprietary spice blends, and compound butters. While a lot of high-end chefs are against prepared foods in a restaurant kitchen, it only makes sense when you try to scale a business and may not always have a chef on the line.

• Last, If you can’t do it well, have someone else do it for you.

• Here are some of our preferred manufacturers:

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Train Wait Staff in Real Life…...and do it over and over again.

Many multi-location restaurants rely on one-time video training during employee orientation. That’s dumb.

The best restaurants train staff in person at the start and ongoing. The restaurant Houston’s is the example we like to give because they don’t let a single person hit the floor until they have memorized the menu.

Training should be constant. Educate whenever you can. The result will be an efficiently run restaurant and happy customers.

It’s logical. If your customers have a stellar experience with superb service, of course, they’ll want to come back. Wouldn’t you?

A good server...

• is attentive• knows a menu

• is not on a cell phone• has just the right number of tables• knows how to address a customer and problem solve

• wears hair back, has clean shoes, and doesn’t smell like cigarette smoke• can pair wine or cocktails with any menu item• doesn’t gather at host stand or anywhere else visible to guests• has the savvy to up-sell with appetizer and dessert orders

Make good servers with good training. Please.

Stat: According to the National Restaurant Association, there are 14.4 million restaurant industry employees in the United States today with an anticipated 1.7 million additional restaurant jobs created by the year 2026.

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According to Fred Reichheld, author of The Loyalty Effect, a 5-percent increase in customer retention can produce as much as a 100-percent increase in annual profit. The “get-it-before-it’s-gone” sense of immediacy encourages customers to visit the restaurant perhaps more than usual.

Source: QSR Web http://www.qsrweb.com/articles/limited-time-offer-long-time-benefits/

Keep it Fresh With Limited Time OffersYour standard American Grill menu items like ribs and shrimp dishes will never die. Your addicted custom-ers want to eat those time and time again. And, as we discussed, you’d be wrong to take them off the menu. Ever.

But what about new customers? New addicts? This is where your limited time offers (LTOs) come into play. LTOs are special. They are designed to attract new cus-tomers and wow them.

LTOs are typically seasonal or for a particular event. Could be a seafood dish during Lent. A decadent, share-able dessert around Valentine’s Day. Or a ridiculous cheeseburger with a hot dog, potato chips, and a fresh baked bun during the summer.

Play with something new and exciting that might be edgier, more global, or uniquely seasonal. This is where a brand can experiment without huge financial or customer loss risk. This is the time to have your chefs be creative or bring in creative experts to expand your everyday brand thinking.

Outside input can get the juices flowing in a new and relevant way that your daily exposure at the office/restaurant may be missing.The input of consumer research on an LTO is a must to be successful. More on that to come.

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Know ALL the TrendsThe creation of Rooster Hot Chili Sauce by Huy Fong Foods in 1980 was the beginning of the rise of Sriracha in the United States. As the sauce grew in popularity in Asian restaurants, its flavor and heat became a phe-nomenon that spread from its Los Angeles roots to the whole country within ten years. By 2010, it was a mainstream condiment. This was the year Bon Appetit named it the ingredient of the year.

Many savvy corporate chefs saw that Sriracha’s pop-ularity was about to bubble to the top and move be-yond Asian supermarkets and the back of the house of restaurants where the cooks were eating it. Those with their eyes open knew that ordinary consumers would soon want the condiment in their fridge and would expect to get it at their local Kroeger’s.

Enter Sriracha flavored popcorn, potato chips, dips, and even lip balm.

Sriracha may not be going away, but it is fair to say that it has peaked. Restaurants and food manufacturers who are introducing menu items now are behind the curve. Your goal should not be to imitate what oth-ers are doing, but instead, identify consumer interest before the trend goes mainstream. Be ready when your customers are hungry for a product, not when they are over it.

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How to stay on top of the trends:

• Stay cognizant of what high-end and unique indi-vidually-owned restaurants are doing.

• Be aware of other trends outside the food busi-ness, like fashion, home, and travel. There’s always a trickle down. For example, think about the things that are happening with Uber and Amazon right now. Friends, delivery is about to change radically and so will the way you think about getting food to your addicted customers.

• Walk the trade show floor of industry conferences. Pick up an industry magazine. Read the FDR blog.

DISCLAIMER

Tread gently with trends. For every person spouting about “trends,” there is a bottom line that proves otherwise. Look at your sales numbers. Do more of what sells, and do that better.

“If we see someone coming out with a Sriracha-anything right now, we know they are relying on trends from two years ago, instead of looking at what’s about to happen now...or their development process is painfully slow.”

― Chef Richard Keys, FDR Co-Founder

Before adding a new item or creating an LTO inspired by trends, study your num-bers. If you are a BBQ house and want to carry a vegan item, think about the finan-cial impact. What will happen if you can’t turn the product?

One of the most common examples of successful fast food LTOs has to be the Sham-rock Shake and McRib. McDonald’s has executed these two LTOs masterfully over the years. But McDonald’s isn’t exempt from LTO failure. In early 2016, it’s “McPick 2 for $2” quickly rose to “McPick 2 for $5” after less than two months. We would’ve liked to have been a fly on the wall for those corporate discussions, but we can guess it came down to realized margins.

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Take Feedback SeriouslyLaunching a limited time offer (LTO) for a 20-unit multi-ple-location restaurant runs in the tens of thousands of dollars. If the LTO bombs, you know better than anyone what a waste that was.

While investing in consumer research and product devel-opment with the professionals may add to your initial costs, it WILL back out when done right. This, unapolo-getically, is FDR’s one real plug in this paper.

FDR focuses on every aspect of the restaurant business with clients in all segments. Constant trend research, product development, ingredient exploration, manufac-turing methods, and consumer profiling keeps us on the pulse of the industry. This carries over to restaurants through our 3C Development Process, which allows for inspired innovation, testing, and perfecting menu items all in one place in one 72-hour period.

Anytime you introduce anything new, you HAVE to do quantitative and qualitative research. Your execs may say, “Oh, they’ll love it. They’ll love it. We don’t need to test.”

But no matter how well you think you know your customer, you cannot predict customer reactions. Repeat after us: You cannot predict customer reactions with any kind of detailed accuracy.

At FDR we provide the following consumer research services at our place in Denver or at your place: Focus groups, Sensory testing, Comparison testing, Central location testing (CLTs), On-site/in-store interviews or customer intercept survey, and The FDR 3C Development Process™.

“You can do loyalty cards and coupon campaigns for boosts in sales, but know that if a product isn’t good or consistent or resonating with diners, none of that will matter, and you’ll be out even more cash.”

― Chef Scott Randolph, FDR Co-Founder

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At the End of a Meal, Addicts Rarely Turn This One DownHere’s the real truth. If going out for a meal is meant to be an experience and a treat that satisfies the ultimate in cravings, then give your addicts what they want. Sweets always win.

Pictured: Meringue Sorbet Sundae from Paul Bocuse’s L’Ouest in Lyon, France

The end.

Stat: 58% of desserts are purchased on impulse. Technomic 2015 Dessert Consumer Trend Report

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How to Make Menu Addicts written and developed by Food & Drink Resources

Copyright © 2016

Content and images of this paper may not be repro-duced without express permission from Food & Drink Resources.

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