50 Great Ideas 2024
Looking more broadly for childcare solutions
Childcare is so expensive that most restaurants have ruled it out as a possible employee benefit. But what if the cost was amortized not just across the industry but throughout the whole business comm...
50 Great Ideas 2024
$2 shake toppings
Dave’s Hot Chicken had a problem. It wanted to upgrade its line of shakes, which had been traditional vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, with toppings like Oreo. But it didn’t want to require franchisees to buy a $3,000 mixer or blender. So the company introduced Top-Loaded Shakes, giving customers the option of topping those shakes with crushed Oreos and M&M’s and, more recently, Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The toppings cost an additional $2 per shake. Customers get something extra, the franchisor gets a bit of additional revenue that is easy and profitable for franchisees. Win-win-win.
Last year, customers pushed McDonald’s to bring back the Snack Wrap, an item that has been off the menu for years. So Burger King took some chicken patties, cut them up, wrapped them in a tortilla with some toppings, and introduced Royal Crispy Wraps. They were relatively easy to operate and gave the chain a lower-priced item at a time when consumers were starting to pinch some pennies. And it beat McDonald’s to the punch.
Buy-one, get-one offers are a tried-and-true discounting strategy. But Domino’s found a way to use this idea to build traffic. The company’s “Emergency Pizza” promotion last year gave customers a free medium two-topping pizza. But customers had to come back again. It worked. The chain’s traffic turned positive late last year into this year. CEO Russell Weiner called it the best buy-one, get-one offer of his career.
Taco Bell spends much of its marketing effort over the course of the year on new menu news. It tests items and introduces other items and finds innovative ways to combine Mexican food with snack items like Cheez-Its or Doritos. The problem? People leak this news to bloggers and websites. So the company this year took a page from Apple’s annual developers conference. It booked a Crunchwrap-shaped tent in Las Vegas during Super Bowl weekend and revealed all its menu items at once. All big chains should do this.
Lugging ice is a lot of work. Over the course of a day, Starbucks workers would have to lug a 25-pound bucket of ice from the back of the coffee shop to the ice bin at the counter about 75 times a day. Do the math and that’s a lot of time and weight. So the company created an ice machine that fits above the counter. Workers simply have it dispense the proper amount of nugget ice based on drink size.
Who needs all these drink sizes anyway? While it may seem customer-friendly to have several different drink options, the cost of getting all those cups can add up. Freddy’s last year reduced the number of drink cup sizes from four—with five types of lids—to three, with just three lids. The move may seem small, but it saved franchisees $3.5 million on cup costs.
Dutch Bros is one of the fastest-growing restaurant chains in the country. But it remains little known in much of the U.S. where it wants to expand, and that made for slower introductions in places like Texas. So the company reconfigured its strategy for entering new markets. It used paid media to target customers who might be similar to those who frequent the chain in more mature markets. And it brought back the welcome drink on its loyalty program to introduce customers to its beverages. It all helped improve sales in those newer markets.