Dave’s Hot Chicken is one of the fastest-growing fast casual restaurant brands in the country. After starting out as a parking lot pop-up in 2017, the brand exploded in popularity and now has nearly 200 locations in the U.S., Canada, and the Middle East.

Dave’s mission statement is to blow your mind. They achieve this with extraordinarily tasty food, authentic relationships with guests, and advanced data that provides a deep understanding of customer preferences.

Before embarking on a tricky menu expansion, Dave’s Hot Chicken needed to understand the impact of their new menu item on customer behavior and sales.

Founder and Chief Brand Officer Arman Oganesyan always listens to his guests. And for years, he’s heard that Dave’s should introduce a meatless alternative to their Nashville-style chicken. Rather than rush to create a plant-based menu item, Arman and the team took their time creating the perfect recipe with the right base—one that would live up to their mission statement: to blow your mind.

Dave’s didn’t hurry to launch the new product either. Menu expansion is a challenge for even the most seasoned restaurants because it needs to make sense for all aspects of the business. New products should be easy to prepare to a high standard without slowing down in-kitchen teams, they have to appeal to guests and taste fantastic, and they must demonstrate their ability to drive sales. 

With all this in mind, Brad Haley, CMO of Dave’s Hot Chicken, developed a strategy for success.

The team opted for a cauliflower product that could be prepared just like the chicken, which meant easy execution for in-kitchen teams. Franchisees were surprised by how much the cauliflower—referred to as “Dave’s NOT Chicken”—tasted like the original Dave’s Hot Chicken. Even the die-hard meat eaters were sold.

But would adding a meatless option actually grow the business? Brad could gauge overall sales data, but had no way to measure how guests were interacting specifically with the cauliflower product. Without those insights, buy-in from franchisees – let alone a system-wide rollout – would be difficult.

With insights from Bikky, Dave’s Hot Chicken was able to prove that their cauliflower product drove thousands of dollars in new revenue per week in test stores.

Before partnering with Bikky, Dave's could only understand the behavior of the guests in their loyalty program. This was just 10% of their customer base. With Bikky's platform, Dave's could measure the behavior of the more than 10 million consumers outside the program.

For the first time ever, Brad had a clear, quantitative measure of a single product’s performance and its impact on guest behavior. Bikky’s data offered concrete proof that cauliflower drove an immediate lift to top-line sales and had real potential for short-term revenue generation.

Brad was also able to demonstrate cauliflower’s longer-term impact on the business. Bikky’s Menu Item Retention Dashboard and Segmentation Tool helped him understand the impact of cauliflower on everything from new customer acquisition to retention, frequency, and average ticket size.

The data from Bikky proved that cauliflower brought in 75 new guests and an additional 180 orders per store per week. All that added up to thousands of dollars in additional weekly revenue per store.

According to Bikky, guests who ordered a cauliflower entree on their first visit were 45% more likely to come back than those ordering the original chicken. Plus, 50% of these guests went on to purchase core meat-based entrees, suggesting cauliflower was a gateway menu item for non-vegetarians.

With concrete evidence that cauliflower was attracting new guests and converting them into high-value regulars, the internal debate was settled and franchisees came fully on board.

Partnering with Bikky gave Dave’s Hot Chicken the confidence to roll out the new menu nationwide.

In January 2024, Dave’s started a system-wide rollout of the new cauliflower menu item and launched a marketing campaign to support their efforts. While the brand has a tried-and-true marketing strategy, Bikky helped them see that cauliflower attracted customers outside of their usual target market.

“We saw in the test that cauliflower had a slightly new audience than our typical menu, namely more women, and we were able to apply those learnings to the marketing campaign.”

After just one month, Bikky demonstrated that cauliflower was contributing incremental sales and continuing to attract high-value, return guests. The platform showed that guests who ordered cauliflower were far more valuable to the brand with a 38% higher lifetime value.

With Bikky’s help, Dave’s also analyzed the checks of return guests. They saw that people who purchased the cauliflower product consistently ordered multiple entrees, some of which were meat-based. This likely indicated that cauliflower was a draw for vegetarian objectors and potentially eliminated the veto vote for families and couples. Overall, cauliflower seemed like a success. It was enticing new customers, bringing them back, and getting them to engage with the rest of the menu.

Did that mean cauliflower was here to stay? Brad enlisted Bikky’s Comp Sales and Engagement dashboards to understand guest behavior after cauliflower was removed from the original test market.

“Did they stay with Dave’s, did they go elsewhere? It was very helpful because I haven’t been able to answer those questions before without the analytical resources of Bikky.”

Five months after the launch, cauliflower is still on the Dave’s menu. And the results from the initial test stores have held up: 54% of guests who order cauliflower are new to the brand, and guests who order cauli are almost 50% more likely to return than those who started with a core menu item.

Brad is relying on Bikky to monitor the new product’s performance. “Cauliflower is highly incremental,” says Brad. “Other products might sell higher in the absolute, but they’re just moving people around the existing menu. There’s so much to account for when making these decisions, but Bikky is able to tell us exactly what’s happening and why. And that’s awesome.”