Understanding Our Menu Rotation: Why Frequent Favorites Appear Amidst Our 150+ Flavors
At Crave Cookies, our menu is a careful curation of over 150 unique flavors. However, it's natural to wonder why certain flavors seem to recur frequently. Let's explore the deeper strategy behind our menu design, especially focusing on why some flavors appear more often than others.
1. The Balancing Act: New Flavors and Fan Favorites
We've learned through analyzing over $20 million in sales that the blend of introducing new cookies alongside frequent appearances from bestsellers ensures high customer retention. We aim to introduce 1-2 new flavors each month, keeping our offerings fresh and exciting, while also honoring the flavors that our customers have grown to love.
2. The Creation Process of New Flavors
Creating a new flavor involves a lot more than just recipe development. It requires detailed photography, videography, and nutritional testing, which becomes increasingly complex as our franchise grows beyond 20 stores. We are also exploring additional menu items, like ice cream and shakes, requiring similar attention to detail.
3. Cost and Ingredient Considerations
Cookie production costs range from $0.50 to $1.28 each (based on ordering costs for our corporate location + nationally negotiated vendor pricing. Menu pricing is adjusted to offset regional variations in ingredient cost.). We strategically mix cookies from different cost brackets to maintain an average cost that aligns with our standards and budget, while ensuring we don't compromise on quality. Some of our all-time bestsellers are more expensive to make, but their popularity and customer demand make them irreplaceable.
4. In-Depth Menu Design: A Detailed Approach
Our weekly menu design is a sophisticated process, influenced by several factors:
Cost Management: Our goal is to balance the menu in a way that the average production cost per cookie, including packaging, stays below $0.90 (based on ordering costs for our corporate location + nationally negotiated vendor pricing. Menu pricing is adjusted to offset regional variations in ingredient cost.).
Production Complexity: Feedback from multiple locations has indicated a challenge in managing more than two stuffed cookies simultaneously. This limitation is a critical factor in deciding which cookies make it to the weekly menu. While we would like to see store efficiency improve to a level where three or more is feasible, we currently try to stick to this limit as often as possible.
Chilled Cookies Strategy: Our approach is to feature just one chilled cookie per week. Offering more than one chilled variety has been shown to negatively impact sales, as does completely removing this category from the menu.
Popularity and Demand: We regularly feature 1-2 top sellers in each menu to satisfy customer demand and ensure consistency in our offerings.
In addition to these considerations, we also factor in the popularity and customer demand for certain flavors. Based on our internal ranking system, which considers weekly sales volume and seasonal changes, some flavors have emerged as consistent favorites. These include:
Campfire S'more: 1156
Better Than XXX: 1105
Twix: 1005
Stuffed Cookies & Cream: 965
Chilled Cookies & Cream: 950
The Eclair: 945
Brookies & Cream: 945
Horchata Churro: 940
The Cookie Monster: 935
The Rockstar: 934
French Silk Pie: 933
Baked Butterbeer: 929
The Flintstone: 927
Biscoff Explosion: 913
Caramelita: 886
The Scotcherookie: 886
The Brookie: 881
The Parent Trap: 867
These flavors, due to their high popularity and demand, are likely to appear more frequently on our menu. The decision to include these flavors regularly is a strategic one, aimed at ensuring customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Ingredient Availability: We sometimes face challenges with ingredient availability from suppliers like Sysco. This unpredictability requires flexibility and adaptability in our menu planning.
Complementary Flavors: The success of certain flavors is dependent on their pairing with complementary flavors on the menu. For instance, fruity flavors like 'The Cherry Danish' sell better when offered alongside a variety of chocolate options to balance the sweetness. Menus that are too heavy on either fruit or chocolate tend to underperform.
Flavor Overlap: Popular flavors like Biscoff and Oreo are customer favorites, but having multiple Oreo-themed flavors in a single week can potentially impact sales, depending on the overall menu composition.
Seasonality: Season-specific cookies, such as our warm pie variants like 'Pecan Pie' and 'Caramel Apple Pie,' tend to sell poorly outside their peak season (October/November). Thus, seasonality is a crucial factor in deciding which flavors to include.
Efficient Inventory Use: We aim to ensure that multiple cookies share ingredients to save on inventory costs or that they share ingredients with a cookie planned for the following week's menu. This approach helps in efficient inventory management and cost control.
5. Understanding Customer Visit Patterns
An important aspect of our menu rotation strategy is understanding the visiting patterns of our customers. The average Crave customer visits once every other week. This means that a flavor appearing as a repeat for one customer may be a new offering for another, depending on their visiting cycle.
6. Customer Engagement and Feedback
Our approach is not just data-driven but also customer-focused. Regular surveys and feedback help us understand customer preferences. Many customers express a desire to see their favorite flavors more often, which influences our menu rotation.
In summary, our menu rotation strategy at Crave Cookies is a thoughtful blend of introducing new flavors and maintaining customer favorites. This approach ensures that every visit to our stores is a delightful experience, filled with both surprise and familiarity. We hope this insight helps you understand the dynamics behind our menu design and why certain flavors make more frequent appearances.
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