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Restaurants spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on launching new menu items.
And they’re tricky to get right, because you have to make sure they’re successful for all three of your main stakeholders: your franchisees, in-restaurant team, and guests. They're high risk bets, all in the name of driving innovation, traffic, and brand awareness.
So how do you make every launch a success?
Here are five key takeaways from our conversation with Brad Haley, CMO of Dave’s Hot Chicken, on how the fastest growing restaurant chain in the country launches new menu items.
Great menu innovation starts with listening to your guests.
It's crucial to engage them in conversation regularly, paying close attention to their feedback and preferences. When a significant number of guests express a similar need or desire, it serves as a call for further exploration.
At Dave’s Hot Chicken, no one embodies this better than Founder and Chief Brand Officer Arman Oganesyan.
“Arman listens to guests, as he has since literally Day 1,” says Brad.
In those conversations, the desire for a meatless option kept coming up. While potentially reflective of a broader shift towards more plant-based menu options, the brand didn’t rush their product to market. Instead, Arman and the team got to work searching for the right base and combination of flavors that could match what guests loved so much about their core chicken items. This little bit of feedback sparked a process years in the making, setting the stage for what would become a highly incremental, brand-positive menu item launch.
Dave’s Hot Chicken started seven years ago as a popup in an East Hollywood parking lot.
Shortly after opening, the brand received a glowing review in Eater LA, saying that the food “might blow your mind.” Fast forward to today, and they have nearly 200 locations open, with commitments to open up to 1,000 across the United States. While scaling at that pace can present challenges in both culture and culinary consistency, the brand still fiercely adheres to that simple north star: everything they do has to blow your mind.
Once armed with the insight of growing demand for a meatless menu option, Arman, Brad, and team knew they needed to develop something that lived up to that mission statement.
“We’ve tried all the plant-based meat alternatives over the past few years, and none of them met our standards. They literally didn’t blow our minds. So we tried the cauliflower product, and interestingly, it tasted more like chicken than the plant-based options,” says Brad.
This commitment to culinary excellence means that every new item must pass the high bar of adding a unique, irresistible flavor that complements the existing offerings. So rather than rushing to capture a trend and deliver immediately on guest feedback, the brand patiently searched for the right base that could support their culinary philosophy. Dave’s prides themselves on being incredibly flavor-forward, and cauliflower’s traditionally mild flavor presented the perfect blank canvas to use the same special blend of flavors and spices as their chicken products. They rigorously tested the right way to season and prepare the new offering, innovating to deliver what their guests want while staying true to their roots.
“As Arman likes to say, ‘it’s all about the food bro,’” says Brad. “We’ve seen on social posts where people try the cauliflower product blindfolded against our chicken products and have a really tough time telling the difference because the flavor works so well across both.”
Arman’s simple, yet profound statement underscores their relentless focus on product innovation and the imperative to develop something extraordinarily tasty. This patience and focus has been rewarded with, as Brad recounts, a product that’s so good that even die hard meat eaters enjoy it.
Restaurants are operationally complex businesses that live or die based on their speed of service.
Guests expect food executed in a timely fashion, whether it’s fine dining or fast casual. For in-store teams, introducing new menu items can often be a challenge, requiring additional training across prep, cooking, and service. This is where - despite best intentions of giving guests what they want while driving incremental sales - new menu item launches can go wrong.
Brad and the Dave’s Hot Chicken team took this to heart, ensuring that whatever new items they introduce need to be easy enough for in-store teams to execute.
“We have a very simple menu, so we take the operational impact of whatever new item we bring in very seriously. That’s super important because right now, given the size of our menu, it’s easier to execute and deliver great food every time,” says Brad.
“For this one, we bring in fresh cauliflower heads, slice them in the restaurant, and prep, cook, season, and spice them just as we do the chicken products. So there’s obviously cutting and a new ingredient involved, but how it’s handled is very much like chicken. This gives the restaurants a very easy way to execute it.”
Introducing a new menu item isn’t just about a great marketing idea or strong culinary ideation in a test kitchen. You need to introduce it into the real world to the franchisees and teammates that will be preparing it in their kitchens and serving real guests. As Brad notes, this always adds a bit of operational complexity, so ensuring it seamlessly integrates with your core offerings from an operations standpoint needs to be part of your thinking in the development process.
In fact, it’s so critical to the process that Brad has never been a part of a public launch that failed for operational reasons.
“I can’t think of an example from my history, even with restaurants that have menus that are much more complicated than ours. We wouldn’t roll something forward if it actually gummed up the works, so to speak. And in terms of what other brands do, if they’ve messed up, they tend not to go very far out of test.”
By making sure that new menu items minimize complications in the kitchen's workflow, Dave's Hot Chicken has successfully avoided any potential operational pitfalls. Instead, the in-store teams can focus on what they should always focus on: executing the food to the best of their ability and providing a world-class guest experience.
A menu item won’t win in the market if franchisees aren’t on board.
Winning them over requires a strategic blend of direct experience, empirical data, and customer insights. Here’s Brad’s three-pronged approach for Dave’s NOT Chicken.
First, it comes down to the product itself. As mentioned above, the brand’s patience during the development process yielded a product that lived up to their “blow your mind” standards, and franchisees were similarly won over by the bold flavor of the cauliflower product. As Brad notes, they may not have gotten it at first, but that changed once they tried it.
Second, they showed concrete sales data from their test markets to prove to franchisees that cauliflower drove an immediate lift to top-line sales. This provided a clear, quantitative measure of the menu item's success, reinforcing the franchisees' confidence in its viability and potential for short-term revenue generation.
And finally, through the brand’s partnership with Bikky, Dave’s was able to show franchisees the longer-term impact:
“With the Bikky data, we could show that we were actually bringing in a high percentage of new guests, as you would expect,” says Brad.
“The thing we didn’t expect as much, which also came from Bikky, was that each cauliflower transaction had a higher average check than ones that didn’t, and that people who buy cauliflower come back to the brand more frequently than our regular guests. So new guests, they spend more, and come back more frequently - that’s a powerful combination that made our franchisees feel good about the potential impact of this product.”
Together, these three elements—the product, sales data, and customer insights—formed a comprehensive strategy to win over franchisees, ensuring they were fully on board.
Above all, every aspect of the launch of Dave’s NOT Chicken was authentic to the brand: from Arman’s conversations with his guests, to their search for the right “base”, to their development of flavor, to how they introduced it to franchisees and their in-store teams. And nowhere was this more apparent than in the brand’s marketing strategy post-launch.
From its inception, Dave’s Hot Chicken has been a social media darling. As Brad recounts, the social presence that Arman started is still a large part of their marketing strategy today, and the brand boasts over 3 million followers between Instagram and TikTok. That’s almost on par with a national player whose store count is nearly 20x larger. The root of this strategy lies in how they leverage user-generated, organic content.
This played a large role in their advertising efforts for Dave’s NOT Chicken, particularly on connected TV. By using authentic guest stories, they could target localized ads to their core demographic, ensuring that the messaging was highly relevant and engaging to the local communities they serve.
“We had an unsolicited influencer go into a Dave’s restaurant while we were testing NOT chicken, and he did such an amazing job posting about it, that that became the connected TV ad we ended up using for the launch. And of course, it’s completely credible because they did this entirely on their own…As long as we are true to that, and stay as authentic as we can be, and we let our guests basically tell the story of the brand…the brand has a very bright future.”
Adherence to brand authenticity, from product development to marketing and communication not only captivated their existing customer base, but also attracted new patrons, demonstrating the power of authenticity in resonating with consumers and driving business growth.
Launching new menu items is never easy. It takes a mix of marketing and operational magic to create something that resonates with guests, franchisees, and front-line workers. But Brad Haley’s recent example with Dave’s NOT Chicken showcases how it can be done successfully.
At the end of the day it's really no different than what it takes to succeed in the restaurant business overall: creating great food that's easy to execute, true to your brand and its values, and delivers a phenomenal guest experience.
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