... It’s about marketing, competitive positioning, and the ability to ride the crest of a trend.
It’s the old chicken-or-egg question—or, in this case, the chicken-or-beef question. Do quick-serve companies educate consumers about what to expect on the menu, or does menu development happen from the grassroots up?
When NPD Foodworld studied consumers and menu trends over the past year, the firm found that consumer demand has been driven recently by quick-serve companies rolling out menu offerings focused on higher quality, more innovative foods. The firm noted significant growth in foods such as higher-quality chicken products, premium burgers, and main-dish salads. In short, consumers are demanding more from menus, in large part because quick-serve companies have been providing more.
We were intrigued. So, here, QSR drills into six recent quick-serve menu additions, looking for competitive strategy and asking how well each item fulfills corporate goals and consumers’ desires. For insight and, we admit, fun, we conducted unscientific taste-tests, sometimes with surprising results.
Call them case studies in menu strategy. Taken together, these six items reveal much about the status of menu innovation in the industry—and what’s on tap for menus in 2006.
http://www.qsrmagazine.com/issue/81/advertised-1.phtml
About Me
- Jeffrey Summers
- I am the expert you call when you need to learn how to increase top line sales, lower your operating costs, increase your profit margin, hire and train better managers and staff, evolve your operation into more and better ways of doing business, buy or sell a restaurant, improve your service, engineer (or re-engineer!) your menu, market your business better and less expensively, keep yourself from going nuts because you have no life anymore, open more and better restaurants, don't want to have to give up your first born child to pay a consultant and have more fun! My mission is to enhance the quality of life for my clients by providing the best products and services to help them achieve their personal and professional goals. I take great pride in my clients, my company, my commitment to service and the products I sell. I am a recognized expert in the hospitality industry with over 24 years of success at planning and executing strategies for delivering dramatic results, a former "GM of the Year" for 2 major, full-service, franchises, an Award winning Multi-Unit Executive with 2 of the largest restaurant chains in the U.S., published author, husband and father of two.