Food for Thought

On the radio on my way into work this morning, they were playing the song “Trouble” by Ray LaMontagne.  Ray is coming to town, and the station was giving away tickets to the first caller who could identify which company has a current TV ad featuring this song. The amazing part is that 5 callers dialed [...]

Slightly geeky humor about food economics…  we like that.  This did get me thinking – are Girl Scout Cookies the ultimate LTO?

… are “mixing” and “redemption”.  Well, at least from the standpoint of someone focused on increasing profits.  Let’s take them one at a time: Mixing, as in “our new item is so great it was mixing 5% within two weeks!”  Umm, great, you are selling a lot.  What happened to profits?  To margin rates?  Did [...]

Here are three quotes from a great presentation yesterday given by Einstein Noah Restaurants and Bellwether Group.  The topics were around innovation and testing — near and dear to our hearts! From Jeff O’Neill, Einstein Noah CEO: Too often, value is what restaurants do when you don’t have innovation… because you don’t have an effective [...]

Ten years ago, a former colleague, then at Stanford Business School, wrote a business plan for a restaurant concept: essentially “the Starbucks of Tea”.  At the time, Starbucks had purchased Tazo.  High end consumer brands like Numi were just emerging.  She never actually followed through building the first store, but I’ve always wondered whether she was [...]

Blogging from the Restaurant Leadership Conference in Scottsdale: The breakout session led by Technomics was based on changes in their Top 100 Restaurants list over the past 10 years.  Based on who moved in and out of the list, they drew some more general conclusions. One chain that fell out of the list was TCBY, [...]

The Test & Learn Summit continued Tuesday, including the Food for Thought session focused on restaurant issues.  One major discussion topic was around the “local option”, periods of time in the marketing calendar when QSRs’ market-level franchisee groups can choose localized promotions and media support. Local option periods can provide a wealth of insight into which [...]

“Tweet to Eat” is a neat little campaign from Subway, linking Twitter, TV spots, and celebrity sponsorship.  A cool mix of media that we haven’t seen before, especially in conjunction with the likely PR bump from being a leader here. We see a lot of companies, mostly retailers, analyzing “online-to-store” activity these days.  Haven’t seen [...]

Stanford Business School’s Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Professor of Electronic Business and Commerce,and Management Haim Mendelson gave the keynote at the APT Test & Learn Summit yesterday.  Prof Mendelson spoke about Organizational IQ, a way to quantify how organizations handle information in decision making and relationships.  He highlighted three points: Higher Organizational IQ predicts future [...]