Stan Frankenthaler is an all-star chef but it wasn’t always that way. Before becoming the head chef at Jasper’s, one of Boston’s top restaurants; before co-authoring The Occidental Tourist, a New York Times’ editor’s pick; and before joining the Dunkin’ team as executive chef/director of culinary development he was an English major at the University of Georgia. It’s a surprising start for a man who went on to graduate first in his class from the Culinary Institute of America.

Today, Frankenthaler uses his variety of experiences from fine dining to lead Baskin Robbins’ team of chefs and specialists to develope new menu items. If it seems like a strange fit, he makes a convincing argument for why he and Baskin-Robbins, what he calls his “first scoop shop,” fit together like pralines and cream.

QSR sat down with Frankenthaler to find out exactly how new products are developed, where the industry is headed now that it’s trans fat free, and how operators can go about finding their own corporate chef.

What were you able to bring from your formal culinary training into your work with Baskin-Robbins? Are there techniques that can cross over into quick-service? I would say like any restaurant, whether it is a single, independent location or whether it be a multiunit business like our Baskin-Robbins, there are many of those core elements that are the same. If you thought about those, I’m sure that you would put hospitality fairly high on the list, always important.

Is there anything on the chef side that can be carried over? Oh, there definitely is a lot of crossover between all of the restaurant categories. Any sort of formal training and years of practice and experience will always add value as you move between those categories of restaurant.… On the chef side of things is the appeal of the menu items—being on trend with those menu items, really delivering something of a distinctive experience. Regardless of [whether we are a] single-unit location or multiunit quick-serve, there’s something that we all want, and that is distinctiveness for our name, for our brand, or that brand recognition. To me, that’s really about developing regular customers, and regular customers come to you for a variety of reasons.

Can you walk me through the process it takes to develop a new product for Baskin-Robbins? The starting points can come from a number of different places. We certainly watch trends, and we employ all sorts of those trend services that you can use to look at what the customer is doing in other categories, what ingredients are on the “in” list. We also do a lot of talking to customers. We have a number of different ways, whether it is through the Internet or through focus groups or through concept screens, to talk to our customers and ask them, “What are you looking for? What would you like?”

Then, of course, we have a very talented group of people who work within the concept and innovation group to develop not only new flavors and new products, new menu items, but also to really develop against the way that we present them, the way that we deliver the larger program and platform ideas. Our group really goes through a lot of brainstorming exercises. We go through a lot of creative exercises, innovation exercises that help our group to support all of those starting points.