WOWorks, Craveworthy Brands, Cousins Maine Lobster execs talk menu optimization, strategy

We can all name several big chains with huge menus that sell everything from chicken tenders to shellfish and fillets. But if freshness and quality are what restaurants seek, can these restaurants genuinely be serving top-notch food?

During a breakout session titled “Optimizing Your Menu to Speed Up Service” at the Fast Casual Executive Summit in Louisville, Kentucky, held Oct. 8-10, a panel discussed how menu planning and strategizing — with a boost from technology — help streamline the ordering process and drive ROI for brands. The summit was sponsored by platinum sponsors Botrista, SUPERORDER, Evocalize, Upside, Lunchbox and Workstream.

The panel session, sponsored by Toast, featured speakers Adam Terranova, senior director of growth for WOWorks, Jeremy Theisen, chief growth and development officer at Craveworthy Brands and Annie Tselikis, director for marketing and franchise sales for Cousins Main Lobster. Tanvir Bhangoo, VP, enterprise solutions for Toast, served as moderator for the event.

How menu optimization affects brands

Bahngoo asked the panel to discuss what menu optimization is and how it affects the panelists’ brands.

Terranova said “as much as you want to, you can’t always optimize the in-store experience in a digital format.” He added menus need to be optimized for speed of service both for the guest and for the employee who is responsible for making the order.

Terranova said his company owns six brands and orderes nine different lettuce varieties at one time. Going through and reducing the number of SKUs a brand has is one way to optimize the menu.

Thiesen said his responsibilities include everything from new franchise development to tech and marketing. “We run our own virtual brands out of our own restaurants,” he said, so having a POS system that allows the brand to build its menu digitally is important. “The immeasurable is the employee satisfaction when you get the tech right in the restaurant,” he added.

For Tselikis, who’s company owns Cousins Maine Lobster, which primarily operates out of food trucks, the concept drives the menu “because we’re looking at delivering really high-quality seafood at an affordable price point in an accessible nature,” she said. The brand is primarily a heat-and-serve concept focused on quality food. The brick-and-mortar stores serve more items, such as fried clams, than are found on the food trucks because it’s too labor intensive and simply takes up too much space.

But lobster rolls are easy to prepare and serve on a food truck and provides a good value for the guest, she said.

From the customer perspective

Bhangoo asked the panelists how they’re catering to customers looking for convenience while at the same time providing a quality experience and driving ROI.

Theisen said it starts with brands’ technology partners. “Your POS is your foundation, and if you don’t get that right, nothing else matters,” he cautioned, adding Craveworthy Brands has built good relationships with its digital order and loyalty partners, and the company is still learning about the kiosks in some of its restaurants.

“It comes back to not only the consumer but your employees,” he said. “In the stores where you see the new technologies we’re rolling out, it’s night and day for the employees.” The restaurants focus on fresh food, and reducing cook times comes down to how fast those orders print out in the back of the restaurants. Just improving the order of the modifiers for the brands’ build lines make a difference.

In terms of the way Cousins Maine Lobster reaches its customers, as the restaurants are on wheels, they can go where the customers are, Tselikis said.

“We’re about to go to the customer and deliver what they are looking for, and some of those events — if we’re at a really high-volume event — the line could end up being an hour long or more for the truck,” she added. “So with the app, what we’re really offering our consumers is convenience.”

With only three or four employees in a truck, efficiency and optimization are paramount.

Terranova said it boils down to the difference between personalization and customization. In-store, its customer experience. For instance, you start with a bowl at many brands, then put in a base and a protein. “That’s personalized,” he said. “That’s something made just for you.”

With digital ordering and digital optimization, it’s about speed and convenience. People who order online or via apps don’t take the time to personalize their orders, but do take the time to customize them. “On a line in a fast-casual environment, it’s easy to make that custom salad because you’re seeing everything. You’re looking at it,” Terranova said, “and making your own decisions in real time. Digital formats are a little more (about) speed and convenience.”

Optimizing employees

Bhangoo asked what the panelists’ brands do that helps employees and helps drive the efficiencies as part of menu optimization.

Tselikis said her company focuses heavily on training, including training franchisees as they’re coming into the system, including a strong onboarding program and a 12- to 13-day training at one of the brand’s corporate locations for the franchise owner and/or the general manager. Corporate officials also visit the cities where new restaurants are opening to train the team at the store level.

“We focus first and foremost on training and then maintaining that relationship,” Tselikis said, “and continuing to update them if we are introducing new products, making sure that they feel confident in their operations because we … understand and recognize that if they’re not successful our whole system is not successful.”

Theisen said his teams are constantly in the restaurants. “Between our regionals (managers), our GMs, our training teams — they’re always in the restaurants. We don’t have office staff,” he said.

Craveworthy Brands is also rolling out a corporate training program that launches at the beginning of next year. While training is important to the brand so, too, is having a leader that is operator focused. “The expectation is ‘you’re in the store,'” Theisen said. “There’s no better place to learn than in the store.”

Terranova said employees are at the heart of WOWorks, but the definition of training differs by brand.

“Is training learning? Is it memorization, or just following a process?” he asked. “I think there’s be a little but more of a shift now in training where it used to be a lot of memorization … Now, in the day and age we live in where there’s personalization and customization, everybody wants something ‘for me.’ It’s more about following the process.”

The Fast Casual Executive Summit is run by Networld Media Group, publishers of Fastcasual.com, QSRweb and Pizza Marketplace. The company’s next event is the Self-Service Innovation Summit being held Dec. 4-6 in Miami, Florida.