Noodles & Company has been hard at work reinventing its menu and refreshing its brand positioning. Now, after more than 18 months of research and testing, the fast casual is launching a new menu nationwide on Wednesday, featuring new dishes and updated versions of existing favorites.
“We realized a couple of years ago that we had lost some of the attraction to our brand, and our sales were having a downturn coming out of COVID,” says chief concept officer Scott Davis. “We knew that there were a lot of new guests out there that were looking for new experiences, and we needed to up our game.”
The new dishes launching Wednesday address key gaps, offering everything from lighter, health-conscious choices to bold, adventurous flavors. They include:
- Buffalo Chicken Ranch Mac & Cheese – Elbow noodles in creamy cheddar and jack cheese sauce with parmesan-crusted chicken, topped with Buffalo sauce, green onions, crispy onions, and ranch.
- Garlic Bacon Crunch Mac & Cheese – Elbow noodles in a creamy garlic cheddar sauce with bacon and white cheddar, topped with crispy onions, parmesan, and fresh herbs.
- Pulled Pork BBQ Mac & Cheese – Elbow noodles in creamy cheddar and jack cheese sauce with smoky pulled pork, topped with BBQ sauce, green onions, and crispy onions.
- Cajun Shrimp Fettuccine – Fettuccine noodles in Cajun-spiced alfredo sauce with shrimp, bacon, and roasted red peppers, topped with parmesan and green onions.
- Green Goddess Cobb Salad – Mixed greens with grilled chicken, bacon, hard-boiled egg, avocado, feta, grape tomatoes, Persian cucumber, pickled red onions, garlic croutons, and green goddess ranch dressing.
- Lemon Parmesan Broccoli – Fresh broccoli florets topped with salted butter, parmesan cheese, Italian seasoning, parsley, and lemon.
Several existing items have been reimagined with richer sauces, more vegetables, and elevated finishes. These upgraded classics include:
- Creamy Cheddar Mac & Cheese – Formerly Wisconsin Mac & Cheese, this fan favorite is now cheesier and creamier, with elbow noodles smothered in a cheddar and jack cheese sauce and topped with shredded cheese.
- Rigatoni Rosa – Previously known as Penne Rosa, this revamped dish features more spicy tomato cream sauce, slow-roasted tomatoes, 18-month aged parmesan, and heartier rigatoni noodles.
- Basil Pesto Cavatappi – This favorite now includes more basil pesto sauce, fire-roasted tomatoes, and aged parmesan for a richer, more indulgent flavor.
- Chicken Caesar Salad – A refreshed take on a classic, featuring crisp romaine, grilled chicken, new buttery herb croutons, and creamy Caesar dressing, finished with both grated and shaved parmesan for added depth and texture.
For the remaining 30 percent of the menu that isn’t changing, there are still some small updates, like improved cheese and a switch from sliced roma tomatoes to roasted cherry tomatoes.
“Those small details around the ingredient changes really make a big difference for us,” Davis says. “One of the things that we’ve been leaning on is, how do we continually look at the pantry of ingredients and evolve that over time to help us drive the dish flavor profiles as well?”
The initiative began with an in-depth research phase aimed at understanding how guests perceived the menu and the brand overall—what was working, what wasn’t, and where there were opportunities for improvement. To help guide the process, Noodles partnered with consulting firm The Culinary Edge to reevaluate its offerings and refine how the menu is presented to guests.
“They dug into the research along with us from a menu point of view and helped us rethink how we wanted to position our menu in a way that is clear for guests to understand and more compelling in terms of what they’re looking for in today’s offerings,” Davis says. “We went through and looked at each category of offerings, each dish inside of that, and we looked at whether or not we needed to reimagine an existing dish or create a new dish to fill a gap that we had on our menu.”
Once the strongest ideas were identified, The Culinary Edge moved into recipe development. From there, Noodles tested items in a central location, gathering direct customer feedback. Updated dishes had to outperform their original versions and exceed the current menu average to make the cut. New offerings had to score higher than the current average, too.
While Noodles has consistently introduced limited-time offers, it has been a long time since the core menu received a significant update. When CEO Drew Madsen took the helm last year, he told investors the menu “looks dated compared to newer fast-casual competitors” and “is not currently a compelling alternative for lapsed guests or for new guests.” At the same time, the company recognized that long-time favorites remain a major draw for existing customers. The challenge was finding the right balance, introducing fresh options while preserving the appeal of core dishes.
In some cases, that meant creating two variations of a dish—one that retained the essence of the original and another that reflected more modern, trend-driven updates.
“Sometimes, when you do this kind of work, you think you’re on the right track until you put something in front of guests and they tell you a different story,” Davis says. “We learned that we had a number of dishes that we were looking to make improvements on, adding more sauce or using higher-quality ingredients. We did that with a couple of dishes and actually got a lot of pushback from our guests. They were like, ‘I come here because this is exactly what I want. Now you’re changing it.’ Sometimes we think something is an improvement, but the guests don’t always see it that way. So, we have to calibrate with them. We’ve made a lot of adjustments to fine-tune our offerings based on that feedback, which is always the best way to get there.”
The third phase of Noodles & Company’s menu transformation kicked off last summer, when the brand tested its top new and improved dishes in select locations. This phase was critical in assessing real-world guest satisfaction, operational feasibility, and financial implications, including potential menu mix shifts.
The result is a sweeping overhaul that impacts roughly two-thirds of the menu through new or upgraded offerings. Given the magnitude of these changes for both guests and operations, the company began staggering the national rollout late last year.
It started in October with the launch of three dishes. The Crispy Chicken Bacon Alfredo, a modernized take on the Alfredo Montamore, quickly became the most-viewed item on the chain’s digital menu and the second best-selling dish overall, with average daily unit sales more than doubling the original alfredo. The second addition, Lemon Garlic Shrimp Scampi, was introduced to cater to demand for lighter, fresher options. Meanwhile, Chipotle Chicken Cavatappi brought a Latin-inspired flavor profile to the menu.
Encouraging results from this initial launch gave the company confidence as it moved forward with its broader culinary refresh.
“We’ve seen our overall customer set scores go up by about five points in the last six months,” Davis says. “Our taste of food scores have been up about four points. So, we’re seeing a lot of positive customer response to the new menu, and that’s been driving traffic as well as sales, which gets everybody excited. Our guests definitely feel like we’re putting more value back into the brand. They really appreciate the fact that we’re investing into the food and giving them some new choices.”
The big rollout follows significant sales improvement in Q4. Comps increased 0.8 percent in the quarter, consisting of a 0.5 percent increase at corporate stores and a 1.9 percent rise at franchise restaurants. Traffic was nearly flat at negative 0.1 percent.
Through the first eight weeks of Q1, the brand’s same-store sales grew more than 3 percent, including positive traffic. The chain also exceeded the fast-casual benchmark on comp sales and traffic each over the last four months.
Alongside the menu overhaul, Noodles is refining its brand positioning.
“When you go back and look at where we’ve been, our tagline has been ‘uncommon goodness,’” Davis says. “While it’s a great sentiment, it leaves us in a place where I feel like there could be something more.”
To sharpen its identity, the company took a closer look at what sets it apart—something Davis says “all goes back to the noodle.”
“We are the noodle company, right? So really, our new way of thinking about it is that we own the noodle,” he says. “We are experts in the noodle. We spend all of our time thinking about how to make the best noodles, which noodles to offer, what sauces to do with them. It’s really more of a food-focused approach than in the past, which was a little bit more of a lifestyle-focused approach.”
That renewed focus is coming to life in the restaurants through a complete refresh of in-store graphics and communication. A new system of merchandising includes much larger window clings to promote key offerings, creating “much more of a street presence” for the brand, Davis says. Updated uniforms and a new welcome wall featuring interactive videos will further showcase the company’s investment in menu innovation.
The menu layout itself is also changing, both in-store and online. Previously, offerings were divided into categories like “Asian” and “Stuffed Pasta,” but that structure has been streamlined. Now, items are grouped based on whether protein is central to the dish.
The new format features two distinct columns: “Culinary Classics,” which includes longtime favorites like Japanese Pan Noodles and Rigatoni Rosa, and “Chef-Curated with Protein,” which highlights dishes specifically built around proteins, such as the new Crispy Chicken Bacon Alfredo.
“We tried to make the navigation a little bit simpler and more straightforward, with a much cleaner look overall,” Davis says. “We’ve taken away a lot of the color blocking we used to use. We want the menu to be as clean and readable as possible, and then use our ancillary boards for visual communication, like video screen streams of new items, little explanations about what they are, and things like that.”
And the evolution isn’t over. More new items are set to arrive in May, with the possibility of long-missed favorites making a comeback. Existing offerings will continue to be refined, and the momentum will carry into fall when the brand celebrates its 30th anniversary.
“This is us taking our menu and leveling up to the best players in the business,” Davis says. “There are a lot of folks in this segment. Some are better than others. We want to be in that top tier. From my perspective, this is what it’s going to take to get there—a significant investment and change in our menu and a major upgrade of all of our assets. It’s our unlock to the future for really becoming a highly relevant brand again.”
