Back in the late ’80s, John Scardapane was involved in two mall concepts, Saladworks and Totally Pasta. He decided to combine the two for inline locations and, over time, tweaked the menu by adding sandwiches and wraps. Over the following decade or so, the menu at Saladworks Café grew into something that didn’t exactly scream salads. “Before we knew it, we had a pretty broad menu,” Scardapane says.

But that broadness wasn’t helping the brand. In fact, it was slowing it down.

The company decided it was time to define its core values. It came up with six: fresh and high quality, visual frontline made-to-order assembly, strong merchandising, quick service, large portions, and comfortable environment. Anything that didn’t meet those values had to go.

While pasta excelled at the important fresh and high-quality grade because the chain had a sauté station, its more than 50-second prep time did not pass the quick quotient. Only accounting for 4 percent of sales volume and far more in terms of labor, pasta was taking precious time away from salads, according to company research.

As for the customers who picked up some pasta, there were very few who visited Saladworks with pasta in mind. Once in awhile, regular customers would trade off and get pasta on an impulse, but internal data suggested that the ratio of pasta to salad was strongest in the first six months of operation but would eventually revert to about 70 percent salads, he says.

Cue the violins as the franchisees were informed that pasta would no longer be on the menu. “From a franchisee perspective, it was a nightmare because they had it on their menu and we made the decision to change it,” he says. Though the company tries to keep franchisees in the loop—meeting four times a year and pulling certain members in for monthly meetings—franchisees weren’t involved in the research and analysis that revealed how critical it was to remove pasta from the menu. “When you’re an owner-operator and you have a menu item, your belief when you take the menu item off—regardless of what percentage of sales volume—is that you’re going to lose sales volume.”

It was up to the chain to convince franchisees that this wasn’t the case. It altered its menu at its corporate store to prove its case. The pasta station was replaced with a soup station that tripled the number of soup flavors formerly available to patrons, half order soups with a salad.

The results spoke for themselves. “We actually increased our volumes,” Scardapane says. In fact, units that have opened up without pasta are averaging 25-percent higher in sales volume. Deleting labor-intense pasta led to other efficiencies for franchisees, too. “It’s a lot easier for us to train now,” Scardapane says. “It’s a lot less food product to bring in. We’re moving through fewer food items, so we have quicker turnover and fresher product.” Payrolls have also dropped, thanks to the reduced need for labor. Even the initial franchisee outlay is now more reasonable. “We’ve cut $125,000 off our initial capital expenditures.”

Scardapane says it took about a year to integrate the entire philosophy into the system. “Because we’re at about a 10-month development schedule, we had quite a few stores in the pipeline that already had the pasta,” he says. So, in total, it was a two-year conversion project, he estimates. There are still some holdouts—those 20 or so units in development before the menu changed—but the franchise agreement outlines a four-year program, so over the next two years, all the units will be pasta-free. “We realized that we’re the salad company,” Scardapane says. “We want to be the best in the nation, and that’s what we need to focus on.” end