Speaking of attention, the dessert and pastry sector as a whole has gotten some attention lately from people trying to cut out carbohydrates or banning trans fats. What do you think the future of the dessert sector will look like? I think that, again, it goes back to grounding ourselves in choices. I think that human beings in general, they bounce back and forth between indulgence, a strict discipline, over-indulgence, and a treat. I think it’s almost a natural part of most people’s lives. So, when an ice cream shop like Baskin-Robbins can offer choices to meet those different needs, feelings, occasions, times of day, days of the week, I think that’s when you’ve really asked and listened to you customer.

Some of the choices Baskin-Robbins provides for its customers are even joint promotions with movies or for certain holidays. How do these items come about? Is that a menu development or is that separate from you guys? The marketing team forges those relationships and helps to determine what makes sense and then we start to develop from there. So, they do really helpful things for us in a brainstorming sense; we’ll brainstorm together. We might get to see some drawings from a movie or we might get to see a clip from the movie early on. And the marketing group will take us through some telling of the story so that we can really get a feeling for who these characters are—what is the story, what do they do, what does that character say in the daylight and like to do? From there we’ll start to develop concepts for those ice creams and for some of the limited-time offers that might surround those ice creams.

So, there might be an ice cream like Fiona’s Fairytale, and Fiona’s Fairytale might also lead into a sundae. We’ll pull those things through the menu offerings, but we’ll probably show initially 10 or 12 concepts on paper. We might twiddle that down to six or eight concepts made into actual ice creams. From there we’ll twiddle that down to say the top three as we start to filter things.

…We start tasting and looking at the visual, talking about the flavors… Do these flavors really work, is this going to go back to marketing? Who was the target audience? Are we too adult? Are we too kid? Then we’ll emerge with those top contenders for some really big decisions. We’ll take those back to the customer to say, “Which of these three new delicious beverage flavors do you really like the best,” and then we’ll go out with that one.

Being a chef has become an “it” job these days. Can you give some tips to our readers about sorting the “real” chefs and culinary consultants from those just trying to get their name in lights? The celebrity chef can add a lot of value from the point of view of putting the message back out through marketing about what your brand is trying to do.… The celebrity piece, the consultant piece is probably best used when targeted the way you would any other consultant. You have a specific question that you are looking for a specific take on and then you might use that person to reflect back out to whatever that constituency is. Is it for the franchisee base? To the customer?

Where I would kind of make the differentiation is that if you’re a company looking to hire and develop a culinary team or a team of culinologists led by a chef, that’s a different commitment than you might be making to a consultant. So if the commitment is longer term to developing that team, putting a position into place, look to hire a chef. It’s about brand allegiance, it’s about brand ties and also the future direction that you see your brand going.