Audio Q&A: Pulling Together for a Hooters Limited-Time Menu
Rolling out a limited-time menu at Hooters of America for March Madness proves to be a team sport.
By David Farkas, Senior Editor -- Chain Leader, 5/1/2009 12:00:00 AM
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| Director of R&D and Corporate Chef Scott Kinsey added trendy dishes to a limited-time menu rolled out at Hooters of America this spring. |
Hooters of America's recent limited-time menu was something of a departure for the Atlanta-based casual-dining restaurant chain. It included a blackened dish, mahi mahi on a ciabatta roll, for the first time and introduced potato chips covered in blue cheese. Director of R&D and Corporate Chef Scott Kinsey explains how he and his counterparts in operations, training and marketing developed a game plan to ease the four new dishes into the front and back of the house in Hooters' 120 corporate and 322 franchised stores.
How much of a departure are Hooters new menu items?
Typically, we go with a seafood-based spring menu, hitting Lent and offering something light. This year we not only offered great seafood, but we brought on Blue Chips, homemade fried potato chips with blue-cheese topping.
What departments other than your own get involved in menu testing?
Vice President of Marketing Mike McNeil and his department design point-of-sale materials. Being that the menu promotion is March Madness, the design team created POS material that not only gives it a food focus but lets customers know it's geared toward basketball. Kat Cole is vice president of training. Her department not only develops all the training material, including recipes, but also the material needed to up-sell the new dishes.
What problems do you anticipate cropping up with any given dish?
[Because] we have so many different types of kitchen setups, what we have missed in the past is real-world workplace application here in the test kitchen. What we are drilling down to in test stores for six or seven weeks is to discover if the dish is operationally sound. Does it hit too many pieces of equipment? Does it fall past that 10-to-12-minute cook time? Are we bringing in too many items for this dish?
Do you play a role in training front-of-the-house staff on new menu items?
Yes. I work with Kat Cole and her team putting descriptors together for Hooters girls and managers. A lot of the time we are bringing in new products they may not be well versed in.
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For example?
The blackened mahi sandwich that's served on our new toasted ciabatta roll. Looking at consumer trends, you hear terms like ciabatta rolls and artisan breads. Yet some Hooters girls may not have heard of ciabatta bread. I will work with training to come up with easy quality identifiers they can relate to.
Did you talk to franchisees during this process?
I'm chair of [Hooters of America's] Food Advisory Board, which includes eight of our largest franchisees. That said, I try to keep them aware of what we are doing. I try to get them to buy in: Here are consumer trends; here's how the items consumer-tested; let me send this product to your stores-you test it and give me feedback.
What form do training materials come in? DVD? Manuals?
We create what we call storyboards. They are the training team taking digital shots of me preparing these dishes. They will make laminate cards with the pictures and include specific instructions.
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