Best Translation of a Trend
Jody Maroni’s Chicken Pomegranate Sausage
Bring a haute cuisine trend to quick-service while the trend is
still hot is no simple task. But California-based sausage shop Jody Maroni’s
managed to pull the feat off when it introduced Chicken Pomegranate Sausage
to its stores in early 2006. Pomegranate’s heart-disease fighting
and alleged beauty-enhancing antioxidants have made the Persian fruit
popular in recent years. Datamonitor reports 258 new products featuring
pomegranate were introduced in 2005, compared to 19 in 2004. Even Starbucks
got in on the act this year and rolled out a LTO Pomegranate Frappuccino
in June. Jody Maroni’s take on the trend is a coarsely ground mix
of smoked chicken, basil, and pomegranate served on an onion roll with
onions and peppers. It sells for $6 a pound and has become one of the
brand’s most popular items.
Best Snack Attack
Dunkin’ Does Cookies
The Dunkin’ Donuts brand has long been about more
than doughnuts—coffee, to be more specific. And while doughnuts
certainly do go well with the buzzy beans, so do other sweet treats. As
Dunkin’ expands its presence in dayparts other than breakfast, the
addition of hot cookies to the menu makes perfect sense. Not only are
the cookies a good complement to beverages and appealing outside the breakfast
hour, they also take advantage of a consumer trend reported by NPDFoodworld:
93 percent of Americans snack at least once a day. And Dunkin’ has
an advantage over other cookie brands—drive-thru windows for snackers
on the run. Three varieties are offered—chocolate chunk, peanut
butter cup, and oatmeal raisin—each weighing in at a, err, healthy
4.5 ounces.
Best New Breakfast
Carl’s Jr.’s Smoked Sausage Breakfast
Sandwich
No offense intended to the creator of the McGriddle,
but CKE Restaurants, parent of the Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s
brands, might have the best breakfast development team in all of foodservice.
The latest evidence of that came this summer when Carl’s Jr. rolled
out a smoked sausage breakfast sandwich that boasted a Hillshire Farm
smoked sausage link, egg, and cheese on a croissant. Carl’s Jr.
gets kudos for using smoked sausage, which one doesn’t often see
featured in our industry.
Best Brand Fit
Ribs at Buffalo Wild Wings
You could get beer at Buffalo Wild Wings. You could,
of course, get chicken wings, too. And you could watch sports on television.
What was missing? In retrospect, ribs. When Buffalo Wild Wings announced
in February that it was adding beef ribs to the menu, it suddenly seemed
so obvious that one wondered what took so long. The rollout coincided
with the launch of the brand’s Crave It! combos, which pair ribs,
popcorn shrimp, or chicken tenders with cole slaw, chips, or potato wedges,
and one of 14 signature sauces for dipping. Speaking of which, that’s
an additional perk: Instead of plain barbecued ribs, you can have, say,
Parmesan Garlic.
Best Product Repacking
McDonald’s Snack Wrap
“It’s one of those right-in-front-of-your-face
products,” McDonald’s head chef Dan Coudreaut told the Chicago
Sun-Times in September in describing the genesis of the chain’s
Snack Wrap. It seems that Arches management instructed Coudreaut to come
up with a way to increase sales of the slow-moving Chicken Selects chicken
strips, and Coudreaut adroitly combined the chicken with three other ingredients
already in the restaurants—tortillas, lettuce, and ranch dressing—to
create a new menu item. Perhaps more important, the wrap was aimed squarely
and marketed perfectly for snack time, an area not previously addressed
in any formal way. McDonald’s leadership credited July’s debut
of the $1.29 wrap for sustaining 2006 summer sales gains.
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