Toque of the Town: Clearing the Sandwich Board
Zach Calkins’ game strategy removes slow sellers from the menu and adds bold flavors to Quiznos’ sandwiches and salads.
By Monica Rogers, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 5/1/2007
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Greg Brenneman’s primary objective since joining Denver-based Quiznos as CEO and president in January has been to increase franchise owner profitability. No small task. Increasing profitability means finding ways to improve efficiency, reduce waste and lower cost while building traffic and sales. All are reasons why Director of Culinary Development Zach Calkins and team split energies between trimming menus and honing new strategies at the 5,000-plus-unit chain.
"We’re really cleaning the slate," says Calkins. "For years, every product we launched stayed around because guests wanted it that way," making limited-time offers anything but limited time.
That’s abruptly changed. In April, Calkins revealed a new streamlined menu. He cut seven of Quiznos’ 29 subs, half of the salads, seven bottled drinks, seven snacks and three of the 10 desserts. Several bread products and salad dressings are also outta there. In all, Calkins slashed 27 percent of the SKUs at Quiznos, a reduction he says will save 2 percent of food cost. "Removing them opens the way to do new things and to find new efficiencies," he says.
"Changes like this on the margin should help franchise profitability," says Bruce Napell, a principal with San Francisco-based law firm Singler, Napell & Dillon, which represents some of the nation’s largest franchisee associations. "As long as they don’t cut customer favorites or do something else to drastically slow traffic."
Calkins has kept favorites, but "new" and "newly efficient" are overlapping terms that drive several menu items, menu categories and operational approaches at Quiznos.
Take the salad category, for example. Calkins chucked operationally inefficient Craveable Salads, a spring 2005 product intro that required heating proteins before putting them on salads. He then merged and morphed recipes to create five Flatbread Chopped Salads, $5.29, served with toasted and seasoned triangles of flatbread.
Two of the new salads reclaim ingredients from the former Craveable Salads of the same name: The Angus Black and Blue Flatbread Chopped Salad features Black Angus steak, blue cheese, tomatoes, red onion and balsamic-vinaigrette dressing, while the Chicken Caesar Flatbread Chopped Salad includes chicken breast, Italian cheese blend, tomatoes, red onion and peppercorn-Caesar dressing. The Classic Cobb Flatbread Chopped Salad, which features chicken breast, bacon, hard-boiled eggs, blue cheese, tomatoes, red onion and ranch dressing, was the best seller from the initial Flatbread Chopped Salad lineup in May 2006. And the company launched the Raspberry Chipotle Chicken Flatbread Chopped Salad, romaine with chicken breast, bacon, cheddar cheese, tomatoes, red onion and raspberry-chipotle dressing, in April.
Since their introduction in May 2006, flatbread salads have pumped salad category sales at Quiznos to 15 percent of the mix, up from 3 percent. Guests like them "because you get a little bit of everything—and a lot more flavor—with every bite," Calkins says.
Intense Flavors
A former chef at Mark Miller’s Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe, N.M., former executive chef of the Bishop’s Lodge also in Santa Fe, and chef for Strings in Denver, Calkins has always been drawn to the process of intensifying flavors. "Mark Kiffin, corporate chef for Coyote Cafe while I was there, had an especially eye-opening use of bold flavors," says Calkin, with a nod to his mentors. "And chopped salads have long been on my list of flavor-delivery-vehicle favorites."
Still, Calkins showed chopped salads at Quiznos menu-ideation meetings for years before getting buy-in. "The problem with chopped salads operationally is that there are so many moving parts," he says. To increase efficiency, Calkins now specifies ingredient pre-mixes for each chopped salad. Workers now easily sprinkle the pre-mixed ingredients over the chopped romaine lettuce base and toss them with guest’s choice of red onion, tomato and cheese.
The idea to texturally enhance chopped salads with toasted, herbed flatbread was serendipity. "Just a random thing that a vendor sent in for us to look at," he recalls. Experimenting with the bread, Calkins discovered that brushing it with the same herbed oil mix (rosemary, thyme, garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil) he already used for Quiznos’ bread bowls and toasting it in the oven gave the flatbread a great texture and flavor. Cutting it in wedges and tucking those around the edge of the salad proved an unbeatable combination. "The texture was amazing. And in guest tests, when we paired the chopped salads with flatbreads, they scored 10 out of 10 every time," he says.
Prime-ing the Sub
In the top-selling toasted sub sandwich category, flavor-tweaking has been key to the success of Quiznos’ three prime rib sandwiches, small $5.29, regular $7.29, large $9.99. The Prime Rib Peppercorn, the Prime Rib Cheesesteak and the Prime Rib on Garlic Bread are either spiced with a proprietary garlic-peppercorn seasoning "shake" or a four-peppercorn sauce. The Prime Rib Peppercorn is most popular, selling at 20 percent of the total sales mix.
"It all started early 2005 as an internal conversation where we were saying, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do filet mignon or prime rib?" Calkins recalls. During the 10-month development cycle, Quiznos sampled prime rib, New York strip, brisket, London broil and filet mignon before narrowing the choices to the first two options. New York strip had good flavor and pricing, but it looked like roast beef when it was sliced. "So when we tested it with guests, it didn’t communicate the same premium message as the prime rib," he says.
Calkins tried all sorts of rubs and marinades to season the prime rib. They included one spiced with chiles and Southwestern seasonings, a thyme-and-roasted-garlic rub, a garlic-salt-and-pepper rub, rosemary seasoning, and a peppercorn rub. Of these, the peppercorn scored highest and now goes on all prime rib used in the prime rib sandwich line.
Calkins then turned his attention to the sauce for the Prime Rib Peppercorn sandwich. Consumer test groups liked horseradish sauce and peppercorn sauce best. But the horseradish sauce—made with raw horseradish—was too polarizing. "People who liked it, loved it," he recalls. "But the people who didn’t like it, wouldn’t order it at all." Meanwhile, horseradish sauce lovers said they liked the peppercorn sauce enough to order it, even if the horseradish-sauce option was not offered.
Pepper Perpetuity
Tweaking the peppercorn sauce took some time. Calkins started with a version that had seven types of pepper including pink, black, tellicherry and white peppers, but the sauce was very volatile, unstable and expensive. He removed three of the peppercorn varieties and added beef and Worchestershire flavors, and some starch to stablilize the mayo.
The finished sauce is "incredibly in your face when you taste it on its own, but combined with the rest of the ingredients, it’s just right," says Calkins. "Because the bread is so neutral, and there’s so much meat and cheese, we’ve found that our sauces need to be big and bold to come through."
Calkins created the Prime Rib Cheesesteak by tweaking the recipe for a cheesesteak sandwich Quiznos ran three years ago. Avoiding cheese sauce, Calkins uses Swiss cheese, which rose fastest in consumer taste groups when combined with the peppercorn-rubbed prime rib and a mayo spread.
The idea for the Prime Rib on Garlic Bread came from Quiznos’ Canadian group. For this sandwich, the morning prep team toasts loaves of bread that have been brushed with herbed olive oil, then cools the loaves. To order, the toasted garlic bread is sprinkled with garlic-peppercorn seasoning, covered with mayo spread ("You need the fat to drive the garlic taste home," says Calkins), and topped with hot prime rib, mozzarella ("for nice pull and the goo factor") and another shake of garlic-peppercorn seasoning.
Tighter Still
Beyond salads and subs, Quiznos Breadbowls, $5.49—hollowed-out and toasted loaves filled with customers choice of soup or chili—will stay on the menu. Quiznos is moving toward only offering soups that work well in bread bowls.
Calkins has also cleaned up the desserts. He has dropped slow movers in favor of fewer but higher-end options. Because Quiznos cookies, for example, didn’t sell as well as competitors’ offerings, Calkins upgraded them to be twice as large, softer and more premium than they were before. New varieties ($1.49) include a cinnamon-sugar snickerdoodle and chocolate chunk.
Quiznos is also scrutinizing processes and equipment. Adding automated controls to conveyor ovens for better consistency throughout the day and from unit to unit is an idea the company is exploring. It currently takes about 50 to 55 seconds to toast sandwiches in the ovens, which are set at 600 to 650 degrees. "Speeding or slowing the ovens strongly affects the end result of the product," Calkins explains. "So controls are everything."
But even as menu streamlining plays out at Quiznos, Calkins is preparing new sandwiches for limited-time offers. "With LTOs, we’re really making them LTOs that only run for about six weeks," he says. First out of the chute April 16 was the Peppercorn Parmesan Turkey with Bacon sub, small $3.49, regular $5.49, large $7.99, oven-roasted turkey breast, bacon, mozzarella, romaine lettuce, tomato and peppercorn-Parmesan dressing. The Italian Caprese (price still being determined), tomato, romaine lettuce, mozzarella cheese and pesto sauce, launches in June. Also in the works: New Southwest American flavors continue to be on trend.
"All without adding any new SKUs," Calkins concludes.
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