Blog

The Ultimate Sign Holder

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:35:00 GMT

You don't get advertising space more prime than this.

Times Square, New York City

Sliders

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:38:00 GMT

Can't decide what to order? Choose from a Slider Menu and sample them all.

Wine & cheese...

Beer Slider...

This item has no title.

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:52:00 GMT

This item has no description. Follow link to view item.

Original Chicago Deep Dish Pizza

Fri, 13 May 2011 11:33:00 GMT

What a menu - deep dish pizza

The original world famous pizza from Giordano's

Puppy Burger

Mon, 16 May 2011 06:53:00 GMT

Puppy Menu

This puppy ordered his own burger from the menu of the Beverly Wiltshire Hotel

"Pretty Womans Menu"

Mon, 16 May 2011 01:40:00 GMT

Menu Cover

The Menu cover from the Beverly Wiltshire Hotel - the hotel of "Pretty Woman"

GREAT USE OF A BLACKBOARD

Mon, 16 May 2011 01:06:00 GMT

Street stalls in Bangkok

Couldn't they use a blackboard to display their menus!

Now this blackboard is very clever marketing

What will your customers think about your food if you have terrible menus?

Thu, 05 May 2011 03:42:00 GMT

Are Your Shabby Menus Scaring Your Customers Off?

What will your customers think about your dining room, your kitchen—and your food?

You’re out for a romantic dinner with your spouse and you’ve selected the perfect, softly-lit bistro that serves excellent food. You’ve just been seated—and the mood is completely broken, because the host hands you a pair of dirty, stained and sticky menus…and is that a burn hole on one of them? Presenting your customers with clean, new-looking menus seems like such a small detail, but what does it say about your restaurant? If you can’t be bothered to keep the menus clean, then what about the tables? The dishes? The food? Keeping plain paper or card stock menus clean is practically impossible—paper attracts every bit of dirt and grime. Make sure you have a set schedule of when you reprint and replace paper menus, preferably at least once a week. Or even better—before each shift. Alternatively, invest in good quality menu covers, and keep them clean. Assign “menu cleaning” as sidework to a server or a host every day. And make sure that every employee keeps an eye out for dirty, grubby menus—and pulls them out of rotation. Posted by Amanda in Advice

Our first Restaurant of the Month !

Wed, 10 Nov 2010 04:34:00 GMT

We are proud to present our first Restaurant of the month - Nelson Bay Bowling & Recreation Club. This venue utilises our Black Acrylic Menu Roll on each of their restaurant tables. The flip over pockets make sure that each daily special can be easily displayed.

Situated overlooking the pristine waters of Port Stephens, Nelson Bay Bowling & Recreation Club is the perfect venue to experience all the Bay has to offer in the way of sport, leisure and entertainment. The Club has been a favourite venue amongst locals and visitors for over 50 years and has maintained a strong community focus by supporting many local sporting, community and charity groups. Superb dining and bar facilities together with a number of versatile function and meeting rooms catering for up to 300 people combine to provide a one stop recreation venue. From weekly live entertainment to concerts and shows, the club has all you need for a great night out, whether you are a local or visiting on holiday. The Club has full bowling facilities and welcomes all bowlers to enjoy the superior turf greens on offer.

Members enjoy discounts in all of the Club’s Bars & Dining areas and have the opportunity to enter exclusive member prize draws.

Healthy eating top of mind for consumers

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:41:00 GMT

Marketing to the Health Conscious - Healthy eating is top of mind for consumers now, more than ever before, and restaurants need to develop marketing strategies that display their healthy efforts.

Quick-service operators have a tough task promoting themselves in a market where consumers are increasingly concerned with keeping to a balanced diet. This year began with new healthy eating–based marketing campaigns—a renewed interest in a trend that had taken a backseat to promoting price and value for a while. While healthy eating is far from a new trend, the National Restaurant Association reports that 73 percent of adults say they try to eat healthier now at restaurants than they did two years ago. Furthermore, as eating out on the go becomes an ever-increasing part of consumers’ busy lifestyles, so too does quick service’s contribution to national health and, consequently, pressure on the sector increases.

Recent mandates for restaurants to post calorie content on menus could significantly change how consumers behave and consume, so it is important to figure out how to position and market a brand now, before it becomes widespread. Furthermore, mothers will always remain key decision makers when eating out, and a healthier image could be the deal breaker when they decide which brand to eat at. As such, we have seen healthy eating become a central part of marketing strategies, with key trends including improving brand transparency, not deviating too far from the core business, targeting the right consumer, and stepping up the use of endorsements to build trust. With the publishing of calorific and nutritional information increasingly available, quick service has to factor this into company strategy. It is now actively directing consumers to healthier parts of the menu—Quiznos, for example, promotes 20 sandwiches under 500 calories—to avoid consumers giving up on fast food altogether.

Subway built its brand from a healthy standpoint and used Jared Fogle and now the Biggest Loser winner as spokespeople, and brands are following in its footsteps by using endorsements to add weight to their marketing. For example, several years ago it would have been surprising to hear McDonald’s promote some of its meals as part of the Weight Watchers points system, but it is something the company is rolling out in New Zealand at the moment. Taco Bell is fronting its latest campaign with a customer who dropped 54 pounds by switching to its Fresco line. And Jack in the Box chose to include an endorsement by HealthyDiningFinder.com standards for its latest salad.

Brand transparency is another key strategy implemented in recent years, particularly by market leader McDonald’s. This has been central to its Plan To Win strategy and turnaround since the early 2000s. The burger chain concerned itself with promoting food quality as much as calorie counting, as preconceived perceptions about its food led many a consumer to think the food was bad for them. It introduced a range of initiatives that other operators could learn from, including online activity dedicated to communicating how and where it sources its food. It also gives consumers the chance to find out about any aspect of the business with a question-and-answer Web page, making sure it replies to everybody, no matter the question. It is also crucial to direct marketing towards the right people in the right way, with females and mothers still being the key target. Mothers often order nothing or very little for themselves while their children eat at quick serves, so expanding the menu to include smaller snack items with lower calorific values or new healthier menu ranges could actually act as a significant check booster. We have seen healthy eating become a central part of marketing strategies, with key trends including improving brand transparency, targeting the right consumer, and stepping up the use of endorsements to build trust. McDonald’s ran a successful “Moms Correspondents” campaign that allowed real mothers to see its supply chain from farm to restaurant firsthand and report back.

Meanwhile, Burger King shrewdly promoted its Apple Fries through the retail channel, a move that put the product in front of mothers and hopes to convince them that Burger King restaurants are worth visiting. It is also very important to keep focused on the core of the business. Quick-service consumers, now more than ever, want to get more for their dollar, and quite often the bigger the portion the better. Sometimes focusing too much on promoting low-calorie products can lead to the perception of smaller, less-filling portions. Carl’s Jr., which relies on an image of big hearty burgers, cleverly adopted the strategy with its new salads. Like its other marketing campaigns that have been created around the notion that sex sells, it flaunted its salads with Kim Kardashian fronting the campaign. Expanding its consumer base with more females is one of the reasons for adding salads, so Kardashian’s popularity among females as well as males was crucial for them to make this campaign successful. Operators like CKE haven’t traditionally jumped on the healthy eating bandwagon, so the very fact that Carl’s Jr.’s salads are now the focus of a major campaign, is an indication that all quick serves have recognized they cannot afford to ignore the trend.

Beth Miles is a foodservice analyst for Planet Retail, an online provider of business intelligence for the global foodservice.

Grab lunch and love at Just Salad

Thu, 11 Nov 2010 23:16:00 GMT

Hi, and welcome to my first blog. We will be searching the world to alert you to the quirky, interesting and hopefully beneficial items for your business. Just once a month to start.

Also we will be selecting a business of the month from all our customers. It will give you a chance to highlight your business to a whole new area. Tell everyone what you do, where you are and what you are famous for. We would love to hear from you – good or bad, tell us if you don’t like what we do or how we do it . It’s the only way to improve, so will you help?

“Grab Lunch, Love at Just Salad”
Customers were finding dates so often at the brand’s New York City stores, the company launched its own dating website. “A salad bar on the corner of Park Avenue and 51st Street doesn’t seem like the most obvious place for youthful romance, but on a sunny day, there’s a mob of post-collegiate suits lining up at Just Salad for takeout of leafy green veggies—and each other.”

New York Magazine printed the line in 2006, when Just Salad was only a one-year-old concept. Ever since then, the brand’s reputation as a midday meet market has been a point of pride for the Just Salad team—so they decided to create a free online dating site for customers. And SaladMatch.com was born. “We wanted to capitalize on that mood we’d created, even though it was for reasons unknown to ourselves,” says Nick Kenner, the concept’s managing partner. “So much of our brand is just about having fun, and this is just kind of another way for our customers to have fun when they’re not actually in our store.” The site asks users several questions about things like their go-to Just Salad location, their favorite toppings, and whether they usually visit the store or order delivery. Then, based on the answers, it gives them their top five matches, or “salad soul mates.” Since SaladMatch.com launched July 14, more than 1,000 people have created profiles on the site. In addition, users have sent more than 200 meeting requests and messages. “I’d describe it as ground-breaking,” says Darren Tristano, executive vice president of Technomic. “It’s sort of like ballparks that allow people to get married in them: It won’t necessarily translate to a huge increase in ticket sales, but it creates a slightly different image for the venue. And by launching such a cutting-edge site, Just Salad is really going to create buzz.” Salad Match has been covered in media outlets ranging from NBC to a North Dakota radio station.

Many of the sources have never covered the brand before, particularly since the chain is made up of only five New York City locations and two Hong Kong stores (that market has a separate Salad Match site that’s getting its own attention). “Some people are saying, ‘What are these crazy guys doing?’ … And a lot of other people are saying, ‘This is a great idea,’” Kenner says. “It’s hard to quantify what it all means, other than we like what Salad Match represents, and we like that it’s attached with our brand.” Marcia Yudkin, creative marketing expert and author of Persuading People to Buy, says Just Salad was smart to capitalize on the reputation it had unintentionally earned in the New York dating scene. “The lesson that some quick serves would draw from this would be, ‘We’d better do our own online dating site for our chain,’” she says. “That’s not the lesson. What always happens is the first company to implement a new idea in its category gets the lion’s share of the publicity, and the copiers don’t get the same benefit.” But that doesn’t mean that other quick serves can’t pick up valuable pointers from the strategy behind Just Salad’s development of SaladMatch.com. The lesson is really to come up with an idea that is working somewhere else in our society and apply it to your restaurant in a way that makes sense.” “The lesson is really to come up with an idea that is working somewhere else in our society and apply it to your restaurant in a way that makes sense,” Yudkin says. “Be alert, notice what’s already happening with your brand and with your customers, and then think of a marketing strategy that moves things more in that direction.”

Despite the fact that Salad Match resulted in several media mentions for Just Salad—and that the concept expects the site to more than pay for itself in new customers and increased visits from existing ones—Kenner insists that Salad Match wasn’t originally developed as a marketing strategy. “First and foremost, we set out to create a product that would involve and engage our customers and grow the brand at the same time,” he says. “But once the idea became more developed, we realized that this was going to be something that would be fun to talk about and write about. So we had an idea that this could also lead to some exposure for us.” Kenner says Just Salad customers who learn about Salad Match through in-store signage or the concept’s newsletter have already started to vocalize how much they appreciate it. “Our cashiers have told us how customers will come up to them and talk about how they think Salad Match is a great idea,” Kenner says. “Then in the end they’ll say something like, ‘I’m going to join, but don’t tell my husband—he comes to this store, too.’” Robin Van Tan is a regular contributor to QSR. Contact her at Robin@qsrmagazine.com. What can you come up with?