Full transcript of Menu Engineering: Data-Driven Design That Lifts Margins — episode 333 of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, with Rafi Chehirian and Kim. Speaker labels preserved; lightly edited for readability.
What this episode covers. Rafi Chehirian and Kim on menu engineering: the discipline of using data and design to guide guests toward the items you actually want to sell. The conversation covers why menus were historically built on intuition, how visual positioning and layout change browsing behaviour, the tension between brand consistency and local relevance for multi-unit brands, how limited time offers really perform, where AI is starting to change the work, and the pricing question every operator is living with right now.
- In this transcript:
- Meet the Team
- Why Kim Calls Herself a Menu Nerd
- The Engineering Side of Menu Design
- What Happens When You Are a Multi-Unit Brand
- Knowing What Marketplace You Are In
- Brand Consistency Versus Local Relevance
- Working With Big Brands
- Regenerating the PDF and Shipping It
- Limited Time Offers and How They Work
- How People Actually Read a Menu
- Where AI Is Changing Menu Work
- Pricing, and Whether the Eggs Should Be $5 or $6
- How to Reach the Team
Jeremy Julian (0:01): Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. thank everyone out there for joining us. As I like to say each and every episode, I know you guys got lots of choices, so thank you for hanging out with us today. For those that see on video, you’ll see that we have two guests today, and it’s going to be fun to be bouncing back and forth with Kim and Rafi, but um cool topic today. And funny enough, I’ve not ever had a guest on before that’s kind of talked about this topic. So I’m selfishly really intrigued to kind of hear. what they do to try and make the dining experience the way that they do. But Kim, don’t you, ladies first, why don’t you introduce yourself? Who is Kim? And then you can introduce your coworker and then we can get into the episode and what you guys get to do with Dine Tech.
Rafi Chehirian (0:35): Okay.
Jeremy Julian (0:44): Tim, you are muted. I don’t know where you went. You’re like. She was talking. Rafi, was she coming through on you?
Rafi Chehirian (0:54): No, I can’t hear her. you?
Jeremy Julian (0:56): I can’t, no, were, she was all audio and then she went, went away. Okay. Can you hear us now? You can hear, you’re just, yeah, we’re not getting any audio coming back from you. I heard you perfectly fine earlier. Raffi, why does it never work when you’re showtime, you know?
Kim (1:39): Never work. Can you hear me?
Rafi Chehirian (1:41): Technology. There it is.
Jeremy Julian (1:43): I can hear you now.
Kim (1:45): Okay, so for whatever reason, uh my phone is… When I turned my phone off, that’s when you lost me. So I turned the phone back on. I have no idea, but I’m not expecting anybody. So I vote we just roll with it. And if we have a blooper, I’m fine with that.
Jeremy Julian (2:05): That’s fine. You want me to reintroduce or do you want to just kick it off and then I can just cut that 30 or 45 seconds out when we’re doing with that?
Rafi Chehirian (2:07): you
Kim (2:12): I’m fine with starting where we are. Okay. So, well, hi everybody. I’m Kim Updike. I’m the chief operating officer at Dynetech. Dynetech is the menu and dining division of Sandy Alexander, which is our parent company. And uh I’m somewhat of a self-proclaimed menu nerd. I’ve worked in the casual dining space. I always date myself for over a couple of decades and just…
Jeremy Julian (2:14): Okay, perfect.
Meet the Team
Kim (2:40): really enjoy bringing technology and solutions uh in this space and seeing how we can enhance the guest experience. I’m gonna introduce you and send it over to Raffy, who’s our VP of technology at Sandy Alexander. He makes all this stuff happen. So he’s the guy who wanted up.
Jeremy Julian (2:57): I love it. I love it. But we are going to have to dig into what a menu nerd is, Kim, before we get off the call. Because I am certain if I go look it up on the internet, people are going be like, oh, it’s a menu nerd. But Rafi, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick, and what do you get the privilege of doing for DynTech?
Kim (3:03): I don’t know. You heard.
Rafi Chehirian (3:13): Yeah, great. Hi, everyone. My name is Raffy Shihary, and I’m the VP of technology, as Kim noted, for Sandy Alexander. uh And I’ve been in that position for almost a decade, and I’ve had a pleasure to work with Kim for a lot of that time, most of that time. And a big part of my job is to support our menu. print initiatives from a technology perspective and build all the cool stuff that we’re going to talk about today.
Jeremy Julian (3:39): I love it. Kim, since you started with the menu nerd comment, what is a menu nerd at first real quick? And then let’s talk a little bit about what is Dine Tech as a subdivision or a subset of Sandy Alexander real quick. What do you guys do? Set the groundwork of why a menu nerd first, and then we’ll talk a little bit about what you guys get to do for casual dining brands.
Why Kim Calls Herself a Menu Nerd
Kim (4:06): I’m a menu nerd because I’m also a bit of a marketing nerd. you know, the menu is like the most important piece of collateral that a restaurant brand has once a guest comes into the restaurant, right? It has to fit with the brand. has to deliver on the brand promise. uh It guides what guests order. It guides check impact. And it is just an enormous amount of touch points that you almost don’t even think about. And then, so once I got in this business, was like, you mean all of this stuff happens behind the scenes to help me make one decision. Once I’d come into a restaurant and sit down and decide what to order. So just, just the process, everything from deciding what dishes go on a menu to how you price it to what versions may be needed for what part of the country that they’re in. So it’s actually a very complex. uh process that we really try to simplify and streamline and work with our brands as much as we can. So it is kind of a scientific nerdy thing. And I’ve just kind of been in that space for a long time. As far as the dine tech goes, it’s really the dining division of Sandy Alexander. And we really specialize
Rafi Chehirian (5:14): you .
Kim (5:30): without being too cliche, everything from data through delivery. So, you know, our understanding really goes to everything from how effective your menu needs to be to how efficient it needs to be and how accurate it needs to be. And just really trying to help with all of those touch points. So from engineering, deciding to see what a guest is going to see first to automating and centralizing data, menu data. to print and national distribution is really our core competency.
Jeremy Julian (6:05): Well, and I think it’s fun. like I said, when you guys some approach to try and be on the show, I’ve heard inklings of kind of menu engineering. I’ve heard those phrases kind of in and around the space over my career, but I’d love for both of you guys to talk a little bit about what even does that mean? You’ve kind of alluded to it and I know a little bit of inside baseball, Kim, you’ve lived this for a long time. So, but for those listeners out there that are like, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I just put the items that I want to sell and I put a price on them and I hope they sell and if they don’t sell too tough and I move them and if they do sell great, I just make sure that I have enough product to be able to serve that. But to your point, there’s a lot of data behind that. I’d love for you guys to talk a little bit about overall arch oh overarching, I guess, in general from a brand that truly gets it for a casual dining. I guess holistically talk about what even is menu engineering from a physical menu all the way through to recognizing the data and Rafi maybe you can talk a little bit about that as well to understand that. I’d love to kind of just give a huge overview because I know there’s a lot of listeners out there that like, dude, I like eating Philly cheesesteak so I put a Philly cheesesteak on my menu and I know that I’d pay $11.95 for it so I put $11.95 on the menu. ah Or I know my food cost is here and that’s what I do but I know that’s not really how you should do it using data and using science as well as marketing and art to do that I guess.
Rafi Chehirian (7:14): Mm-hmm.
The Engineering Side of Menu Design
Kim (7:29): Well, I’ll kick it off on the engineering side and then I’ll let Rafi take it from there. So yeah. So, so if you do have a Philly cheesesteak and you, and you know that it’s 1195, right? So, you know, with menu engineering, we kind of look at the format of the menu. So whether it’s like a single panel, a bifold, a trifold. So we look at the format of the menu. We look at your design and your graphics, because if you’re Philly cheesesteak is your best seller, then you wanna make sure that your guests see your best seller within the first three to five seconds of looking at your menu. So you really wanna look at positioning of that item, whether it gets an icon, whether it gets a call out, photograph, because all of those things draw a guest’s attention to that item. So sometimes you want to highlight an item. Sometimes you may want to carry an item, but you don’t want to draw too much attention to it. uh So it’s engineering or guiding your viewer to the items that you really want them to order. So you have a good check. So you drive revenue, I guess, know, if it is the best.
Rafi Chehirian (8:36): you
Jeremy Julian (8:46): Yeah, so you’re getting them to get the best items that you can deliver consistently that you can make the most amount of money on. It’s kind what I’ve heard from people.
Kim (8:53): And it’s true. you know, in guests, you know, the funny thing about guests are guests don’t read menus. They scan them. Right. So.
Jeremy Julian (9:01): They look at the pictures, they look at the items that have the highlights, they have the favorite button, they have the star next to them. And they go, oh, that must be the best item here, because I’ve never been here, right?
Rafi Chehirian (9:03): you
Kim (9:05): Good luck. never been here or I have been here and I know that’s my favorite title. but making it, but using technology to make the ordering, the selection and ordering process easy for your guests is really important. I mean, cause you can engineer and map a menu and it can still be too busy. So you really want to make sure you’ve looked at the number of items in a section, how they’re. how they’re ordered within a section. To your point, if they get a call out, if they get an image, all of those things. But knowing that this is how I make money and this is where I live or I would like to live. So structuring that menu to really work smart for you is really what we try to help do.
Rafi Chehirian (9:43): you
Jeremy Julian (10:03): I love that. So Rafi, talk to me a little bit about how data plays a part in this, because again, I know that way too many times and we’ve all watched the John Taffer, Robert Irvine or Gordon Ramsay yelling at a restaurant operator on TV about how they design their menu and what items go on there. But I think all too often restaurant tours, they don’t really look at the data. And so I’d love for you to talk a little bit about the data and how that plays a part into this whole conversation.
What Happens When You Are a Multi-Unit Brand
Rafi Chehirian (10:10): you Yeah Yeah, absolutely. So if you’re a one-off restaurant, what Kim talked about, that’s pretty much the end of your journey. You design your menu. You take advantage of where things are placed. And you put in your pricing based on some research that you’ve done. And that’s the end of it. And then your data might be traffic data or usage data or… what somebody buys at your particular restaurant. What we specialize in, right, where we have to extend our solution in the restaurant space is when, you know, when you’re a corporate brand that has 600, a thousand locations or something like that, right? So then the story just doesn’t end with I designed my menu and we know that things are positioned where they’re supposed to be positioned. Now I have all sorts of data that I have to generate different versions of any one particular menu. So. Even if you have a single menu, like a dinner menu, and you have a thousand locations, I might have to generate up to a thousand different versions based on different variables on the menu, right? So I basically have a thousand menus now. And if you have three or four different menu types, like if you have a dessert menu and a brunch menu, and I might be looking at 3000 different versions of your menus that you have to print. That’s where our data solutions come into play to help corporations try and solve for.
Jeremy Julian (11:31): Wow.
Rafi Chehirian (11:50): uh you know, all of their restaurants and all the versions of their menu that they need, right? Ultimately after that, it’s up to them to analyze their POS data and whatever, you know, goes on in the store. But where we help the industry is uh first, we centralize our data, all of your pricing data and all of your item data and all of your location data will profile your locations and we’ll centralize all that data in one place. ah Historically, The way people would solve for that is they would just shuffle through spreadsheets and would go blind on spreadsheets for months until they figure out, you know, what is my starting point for this next thing that I have to generate 500 different versions of my dinner menu and who does it go to and how do I even go about doing it? Right. It’s a very stressful endeavor. And, you know, that’s one of the biggest pain points that we solve for is we take all of that data, which is usually pricing data and location data and item data, and we centralize it and we give it. we give the brand access to it. then uh the next thing we do is we allow the restaurants to uh map that data onto digital menus. We’ll create digital versions of your menus. And then once we do that, we map items and pricing based on your locations, profiles. We’re able to generate how many versions you actually need for your restaurants. It’s another big pain point that, go ahead, sorry Kim.
Kim (13:14): which is No, I’m sorry. I was going say, which is a really huge advantage because being able to get a very quick snapshot of how many versions that I have, who’s on that version, and then why is that version different from the next menu version? And then being able to make business decisions, is that version Is that version necessary? Because if a version doesn’t drive preference or profit, you probably don’t need it unless it’s for some legal or nutritional manner. So really being able to visually look at what’s different and some of the reporting tools, Raphael probably touch on is really amazing because it really gives a brand marketers a really very clear, concise picture of all of their menu data. and what makes it different and who’s on it. And it’s just a, it’s a snapshot that you can get instantaneously, which really didn’t exist years ago. oh
Jeremy Julian (14:17): Well, that was where I was going. got enough gray hairs here to remember the days back when menus were like printed and you’d have like these little cutouts and people would move them around. You guys are gonna laugh at me, but that’s how you used to design the menus is you’d have a full layout and even something you said earlier, Kim, that I guess I’d love to dig in a little bit, a trifold versus a bifold versus a spiral bound, know, versus a single sheet. Those are all conscious decisions that it sounds like you guys worked through with these brands. And I guess what goes into that, you know, and again, having to have done business with the Cheesecake Factory for over 20 years, they’ve got their spiral bound notebook that everybody’s like, oh my gosh, that thing’s crazy. And that is a, but that is a conscious decision because they do 200 menu items made from scratch every day in the store versus somebody else that might be a single page that’s, know, I guess I’d love to talk through a little bit of that because it is a little bit of art and it is a little bit of science that goes into that as you guys are working with these brands.
Kim (14:55): Thank you. Yeah, no, it is. You’re right. It’s a little combination, I would say, of art and science. I think a lot of it has to do with what is your core brand philosophy. Who do you want to feel like and who is your guest? Because that’s going to drive a lot of it. uh If you go find dining, you rarely find a trifold menu with photos in it. But ironically, we all know we eat with our eyes. But if you’re in a dining segment where we kind of specialize, you know, the combination between items and photography and icons uh is kind of a standard because it is what resonates with the guest. So, um so we work a lot with, you know, who is your end user or your end guest?
Jeremy Julian (15:47): Uh
Knowing What Marketplace You Are In
Kim (16:09): You know, what kind of marketplace are you in and what do want your brand to feel like? Because we’ve worked for with brands before, um, and I’ve done engineering and some other studies and it was very much like, we don’t want to use photography. That’s not who we are. We know we started out as like this really cool, hip, trendy food truck and pictures aren’t our thing. And it’s like, okay, but you now have 200 restaurants and you’re in the, you know, know, fast.
Jeremy Julian (16:36): You’re in the suburbs where you got kids that are making the decisions. You need to, you need to drive that, right?
Rafi Chehirian (16:38): Yep.
Kim (16:40): I’m like, I appreciate your hipness, my friend, know, all good. uh So you’ll go through and you can do different, we’ve done different studies and that’s also kind of like a brand decision because we can clearly demonstrate in that segment, you do, we do eat with our eyes. So items that are photographed or photography within a menu will drive sales to those items versus. oh a menu without any photography. But like I said, if your brand is, this is what we want to feel like, that’s fine. We can help either way. um Really with formatting, we really look at the number of items that a brand might have. Your point with um Cheesecake Factory and their wire bound menu. We look at how long the menu is going to be in restaurant. So how many times do they print a year? um
Rafi Chehirian (17:25): you you
Kim (17:36): because that can drive things like what type of stock you print on. uh If you’re going to switch your menus out every eight or 12 weeks, you probably don’t need to print on a synthetic, uh but you might want to anyway. But really just understanding what the menu initiative is, how long it’s going to be in restaurant, kind of. at the core who your brand is and who your guest is. And then taking all of those things into consideration. And then really also leveraging and optimizing size and formats that best fit manufacturing equipment. So we can really leverage um our equipment to get you to market faster. So speed to market is always an important factor. when you’re doing a national rollout, right? You you have an in restaurant date, know, you have an in restaurant date, you have a live date, and you want to get there as efficiently and effectively as possible. So we try to work with brands to do those, you know, to do those things and create those different formats with different stocks.
Rafi Chehirian (18:40): Okay. you
Jeremy Julian (18:47): Well, and I think that goes into kind of the next line of questioning, which is it’s not cheap to print menus. We know that, you know, again, it’s not, it’s not inexpensive to do it. And so doing it right and doing it right the first time is a huge piece. And so, um and I know that there’s oftentimes friction in the franchise world. So I’d love for you guys to talk a little bit about how you guys help to ensure that the franchisees can see what the value of these new menu printing, you know. It’s dictated by corporate. We’re doing this rollout. You’re going to be taking these new menu items. You’re going to be taking these things off. But we also know that it drives behavior. You guys have talked about the data behind it and the behavior that it changes. I’d love for you guys to talk about how you guys help franchisees and really franchise orders to be able to deliver this product to the place that they can be national with these brands that are 500 or 1,000 stores, because that’s a huge deal to create consistency across the board.
Brand Consistency Versus Local Relevance
Kim (19:40): Yeah, it definitely is. You want brand consistency on a national level, but you want your individual franchisees to be able to have input and make business decisions. Because it’s just a different operating model than a completely corporate uh model. So I’m going to let Raffy take this because we’ve developed some really cool technology that really allows for brand consistency, but has really streamlined
Rafi Chehirian (20:00): you
Kim (20:09): the franchise involvement and really making that process easier. And it’s back to being a menu nerd. It’s like super cool stuff. So I’m to let the super star.
Rafi Chehirian (20:16): Thank
Jeremy Julian (20:18): Yeah, no, I saw you guys was right up on it. like, I need to, I’m going to sound ignorant if I try and give you guys details to Rafi. I’d love for you to kind of explain. Cause again, I think we all have seen this push and pull in the restaurant space of franchisees want control, but they don’t want total control corporate wants control, but they know they’ve got to get flexible. And so I’d love for you to talk about how tech is enabling that from a menu selection perspective.
Rafi Chehirian (20:24): Yeah.
Kim (20:26): in the future.
Working With Big Brands
Rafi Chehirian (20:39): Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve worked with some really big franchise brands and we have our software working for some really, really big franchise brands that have that exact dynamic. The franchise owners are pushing and pulling with corporate and they’re like, we want to be able to make these decisions. And that’s the key thing is franchisees want to make decisions at the restaurant level. So I can’t just dictate as a corporate person how much your eggs are going to be. You have to figure that out. 500 to a thousand franchise owners. I have to have 500 to a thousand decisions made and we have to synchronize those, that decision making process so that we can get the pricing in, compose menus in print them and have them in restaurant, you know, on time, right? There’s uh these national rollouts that go on every, you know, three, four months. And this is a sync, used to be a synchronization nightmare between franchise owners and uh corporate, right? So uh You know, that’s one of the biggest problems that we solve with the franchise version of Dynatech 360 is we created, you know, an end-to-end workflow that allows franchise owners to go in and seamlessly figure out all the things that they need for the decisions that they have to make, provide that data in a short order window. That data doesn’t have to make it anywhere. Our software will take the data, will take the creative that was approved by corporate, will generate PDFs. We’ll spit them back out to the franchisees and say, here’s an actual PDF of the menu that you just created. Does it look right? And we’ll put them through that loop of that proof and approval loop that just didn’t used to exist in the market other than people sending data over email or smoke signals or whatever. And then somebody will put together a PDF and email it back to them and be like, this is right. So that round trip is really…
Jeremy Julian (22:19): Yeah. Yeah, where the menu would say Budweiser and somebody would have to cross out Budweiser because it’ll sell Budweiser in that store. We’ve all seen that too.
Rafi Chehirian (22:38): Right. Exactly. Exactly. So you have like these marked up menus that like go back and forth over email and email is like this really slow process, right? ah So bottom line is what we did is we empowered franchise owners to be able to go in there, put in all their variables that they want, you know, and then just in real time, generate PDFs and proof them on the fly. And if they have issues, they can just go back, right, go back one step or two steps and update pricing or whatever variable they want to update.
Kim (22:41): Mm-hmm.
Regenerating the PDF and Shipping It
Rafi Chehirian (23:07): regenerate their PDF and when they’re happy with it, they say, okay, I’m happy with it. Thumbs up. They approve it. And then now that just automatically translates to an order that Sandy captures and produces when the end of the order window is closed. Right. The entire thing is automated end to end. Our orders go from the software into our print production workflows. So there’s really no hiccups between the time that franchisees open an order window, select all the variables that they want to have input on, and then print. gets produced and delivered to them. um Another really cumbersome process that used to take a really, really long time that we compressed into something that franchisees can do for a day. The problem statement used to be, hey, and we had several franchise groups um really state the problem this way. Hey, um I have to go into this existing software three or four times over the course of several weeks to be able to complete my menus. It’s driving me crazy. don’t remember what I did last week. I have to pick up from where I left off. Who knows? This is taking me way too long and we need something better. Two, some of the testimonials that we’ve had since we’ve launched the software was, hey, same guy. I got my work done in less than a day. Amazing. um The menus made their way over to my restaurants. I only have to log into the software one time, make my decisions, click okay, and move on with my life. Right? These are owner operators that don’t have time to be sitting around and logging into portals and trying to do it several times over the course of several weeks, right? So they could just get menus in the restaurant. So, right? So that’s, it’s not what they do, Right.
Kim (24:45): Well, it’s not what they do,
Jeremy Julian (24:47): Yeah, it’s not what they do. They should be out in the front of house. They should be with their staff. They should be with their guests. Not messing around with menus. Could corporate decide to do some LTO that’s coming out now they got to go approve it,
Kim (24:52): Yeah. Right. Yeah. They’re operators. We’re talking, you know, good guest experience, hot food, hot cold food, cold. You know, if I got to go in and make some item and pricing decisions, you know, just making it as, as, as easy and as painless as possible. And to Raffy’s point, really being able to drive weeks out of a timeline. So again, that whole speed to market, um, giving brands and franchise brands the flexibility to be really nimble in, you know, and
Jeremy Julian (25:31): And the word nimble and franchise, franchise order does not exist in most places. So the fact that you guys have figured out technology and how to enhance that is awesome.
Kim (25:40): Yeah, I think really a game changer.
Jeremy Julian (25:41): So. Well, it’s and I really love that you guys have have started at the core. said, you know, sitting and looking at what the pain points are and saying, you know, how do I make it easier? Because you still need to get the answers. You still need to get approval that this is what their menu is going to look like. But how do I use technology to enhance that rather than a marked up PDF with somebody scribbling and scanning it back or taking a picture with their phone and emailing it? The fact that you guys put this on a portal and allow them the flexibility to have what they need, but not increase their workload is awesome. um Real quick, just for my own education, where does PLP play into this? Like when I purchase table tents or things that go in the trifle, where does that play into menu innovation in general and highlighting things? Again, my wife enjoys uh a margarita here and there, and so we’ll go places. Sometimes, places will have the casual dining brand will have the margarita of the month. She might order that versus her normal one because of PLP. I’d love to understand the push and pull of table tents and that, and how does that play into kind of guest experience and what you guys do from a printing perspective?
Kim (26:49): Um, well, uh, Rafi and I, can tag team this. mean, really from the technology side, Rafi, I would say, you know, all of, all of our platform, the DimeTech platforms, it supports POP, not just menu. I know that this has kind of been a menu specific conversation, but really any piece of collateral material that’s in a restaurant that needs to be versioned.
Rafi Chehirian (27:00): .
Kim (27:16): can be handled so that can be your table tents that can be your floor graphics that can be your window cleanings your ceiling danglers for.
Jeremy Julian (27:23): menu inserts. Yeah. Okay.
Limited Time Offers and How They Work
Rafi Chehirian (27:25): Yeah, it all falls under the umbrella of variable data print, right? And then these things specifically do have versions. So our versioning software will version, right? And we’ll generate however many versions of these things we need. And then it ends up being, from a production perspective, just another piece of variable data print. So if we have the data, we have the versioning algorithm that generates the versions that are required.
Kim (27:28): print. Yeah.
Rafi Chehirian (27:49): They’re just like another simple menu, I would say. They can be treated as a simple menu with one item.
Jeremy Julian (27:56): Well, and really where I was going, Raffia, that I’d love to get a little bit of color on is just how does the data play into that? You know, if it’s highlighted on the menu versus a POP, like, have you guys figured out, and again, this is just my own ignorance, so if you guys haven’t, but I’d love to understand, you know, does that LTO that gets dropped on the table, does that drive more behavior than highlighting it within the menu? And again, I know this is a little bit of the science that goes behind what it is that you guys do. I’d love to love a little bit of education.
Kim (27:56): And they usually
Rafi Chehirian (28:20): Sure.
Kim (28:24): It does. mean, usually LTOs historically, depending on brand, but usually they roll out, I would say six to eight times a year is some sort of uh LTO campaign. So whether we’re aligning with uh March Madness or Mardi Gras or anything like that. usually that’s… It’s an event that’s really to highlight driving traffic at a specific time. so you will usually change those out more than you would change out your core menu. So you might only change your core menu out twice a year or maybe three times a year, but you are constantly going to want to be having some sort of promotion um at the restaurant that really is an attention getter to also drive traffic. And it may be new traffic, it may be repeat traffic, but usually they kind of go hand in hand. So from a POP perspective, we’re able to version and print all those type of materials. And then we also kit and pack them all out. So if you’ve got a LTO promotion for Cinco de Mayo, because you mentioned margarita, we could talk about that later, but don’t you like to margarita? uh You know, that could be a multitude of pieces that are all multi version that all get packed in one box that goes to the restaurant with specific instructions on how to install that LTO promotion in the restaurant. So we’re able to help facilitate that as well.
Rafi Chehirian (30:04): So yeah, brands learn through experimentation just like anybody else, right? They’re like, we want to experiment, and we want to experiment a lot. And that’s where we come in and we facilitate those cycles. We truncate those cycles so they can experiment a lot. historically, they’d have to do the LTLs. have to get all the spreadsheets together. They got to get six departments, right? By the time you generate an LTO, it’s Q2.
Jeremy Julian (30:30): Yeah, your Synchronomio special didn’t get launched until July, right?
Kim (30:34): It’s so important to slice but…
Rafi Chehirian (30:34): Right, exactly. So, you know, in order for them to optimize, you know, their operations, they run endless experiments and, you know, we just give them the platform to be able to do that very quickly. Right. So they can just come up as to have their creative. can get them up and running for an LTO in a matter of less than a week and they can get their LTO done in two weeks and we’ll print it for them. It’ll be in restaurant, you know, shortly after and they’ll get their data from their restaurants and then they’ll say, okay, well. We want to do something a little bit different based on the data that we got. So let’s run another one. And, know, and we just continue to facilitate that process so that they could, you know, um kind of zero in on, you know, their, whatever they’re running those LTOs for, right? Whatever data they’re looking to get.
Kim (31:23): and helping in testing, know, testing is also.
Jeremy Julian (31:23): that time. Well, the fact that it’s fast, you guys give them the ability to experiment. It’s not a big long process where they’ve got to do so much work. so, um which really, I guess, leads me kind of to my last line of questioning. Kim, I’m going to start with you. You’re going to hear brands out there that say, pay-per-menus are dead. They’re too expensive. Everybody’s got a phone in their pocket. They’ve got a tablet that can do these things. And you guys have proven not only statistically, but just in life. And I actually have a brand that we do business with. who went all digital and quickly, even in their 10K filing said, we had to go back physical because you know what? Check averages were down. And so I’d love for you guys to talk about how and why physical menus and PLP are so critical to the casual dining experience to ensure that you not only drive the behavior that you guys already menu engineered that we talked about, but just in general, even with people having a phone in their pocket, it’s not optimal. for going out to eat. You don’t go out to eat to look at your phone. You go out to eat to experience food and friends and family and whatnot. So I’d love for you to talk about that.
Kim (32:28): I was gonna say you go out to eat so you don’t look at your phone.
Rafi Chehirian (32:31): You
Jeremy Julian (32:32): Yes, yes. Although I get really sad when I see people on a date and all they’re doing, you know, my wife and I were out for Valentine’s Day and I was sitting next to a couple and both of them were sitting on their phone. I’m like, ah! Look at each other and talk to each other. So sorry. Maybe my old, I’m an a grumpy old man now. Get off my yard, kids.
Kim (32:43): I thought it was gonna be… That’s when you just go, I don’t think that’s going to work.
Jeremy Julian (32:53): Yeah, exactly. This is gonna be your last Valentine’s Day together. But I’d love for you to talk about why digital is something that’s needed, but as a primary go-to-market, it’s not gonna benefit the brand the way that you might think it would.
Kim (33:10): No, I really think, like I said, we eat with our eyes and you want the ordering experience. It’s a very curated thing these days and there’s a lot of thought that goes behind it. I think dining is, dining in like the casual dining, fine dining space, uh it really is about connections. And when you also look at, I know, Cause there was that, you know, during COVID not to bring all that negativity up, but you know, everybody went to a very short, limited eight and a half by 11 that could actually fit on your phone type of menu. But that was, that was temporary based on the time, right? So as brands add items back, you think about a steak, you know, a casual steakhouse chain that has an eight page menu. No one wants to scroll through eight pages of menu items on their phone or their tablet. So, you know, the likelihood of you stopping and ordering something that either one, it’s the first thing that you came to that you wanted to. I mean, you just can’t quite control. I don’t think the experience and the order, how you want guests to interact with the menu if it’s not physically there. And we had done Um, you know, we had partnered with some brands and had done some tests and done some studies and the, the paper, the paper of the physical menu always delivered a higher check average than a digital menu. It just, it, the guests just interacts with it. You have photos, have imagery. Like I said, we eat with our eyes. So I think that that all comes into it. And I think also people get digitally fatigued.
Rafi Chehirian (35:01): you
Kim (35:04): You know, mean, you’re, you’re, you’re really going out to, should say that with our VP of tech on this call, you know, we get digital. m
Jeremy Julian (35:04): Yeah.
Rafi Chehirian (35:05): Stop. No, no, you know what it was uh Jeremy, back in the day during COVID, um Sandy’s CEO called me and he goes, hey, um you guys are working on digital menus, right? Because we have to just like everybody else, right? um And we had a considerable amount of print business, right? In this space and he’s like, hey, our printed menu is going away. This is important, right? As a company, we need to consider that. uh
Jeremy Julian (35:25): Yep.
Rafi Chehirian (35:38): I had to think a lot about that. didn’t know the answer at the time, but I didn’t think that they were, and I was proven right, which is great. I don’t look at it, it’s the best. Exactly. I said, you know, don’t think so. And the reason is, I look at stuff from a product perspective, I’m a product person, I make products, I’m not a marketing person. So the marketing stuff is very true, all the stuff.
Jeremy Julian (35:48): It’s always nice when your predictions come true and it keeps you on a job.
How People Actually Read a Menu
Rafi Chehirian (36:05): We with our eyes and you know, and this is your primary marketing tool when people walk into the door and that kind of thing but you know from a product perspective, I think that the user experience on a phone is much worse than a menu and and You’re forced to search for stuff instead of presented with things So if you look at it from the user experience perspective, like when somebody says oh, it’s on your phone and to Kim’s point if you have a 15 page menu you’re now in a search or you have to
Jeremy Julian (36:20): it quite quickly.
Rafi Chehirian (36:35): search after scroll, have to squint, you have reading glasses, whatever it is, user experience is terrible. And if that’s, if the tech works perfectly, forget about if the tech is not working. If you don’t have, you know, wifi or whatever, or somebody’s server glitched and now you’re not able to get the menu and somebody has to bring you a crappy little paper menu and say, well, here’s the stuff that we have. So from user experience perspective, I think that a printed menu, which is like this nice big thing that presents things to you rather than you having to go search for stuff. is a much better user experience and people really, you know, resonate with that user experience rather than the other one. And I feel like that’s why it’s one of the reasons, at least why I think they’re surviving. They’re going to continue to survive for a long time.
Kim (37:08): You I agree. And we’ve also seen where brands are actually adding more collateral back into the restaurant. know, 20, 2019 and before, you know, you might have, you’d have an LTO menu, lunch menu, dinner menu, all these other different types of points of collateral then coming. Out of 2020 going into 21, 22, everybody kind of was like, well, we’re going to use a reusable menu, but we’re just going to have one menu and see how it goes. Cause there’s also supply chain issues back then. And you really had to have the ability to turn on a dime if you needed to. But now we’ve seen kind of like, and nobody wanted to do promotions, right? So like, well, we don’t need to promote. And so what now, what I think, and you’ve probably seen it, Jeremy, and talk to a lot of people too. where it’s like, okay, well now my all day menu is now broken back out to I now have a dinner menu and I have a lunch menu. I’ve now reduced to beverage menu. We are gonna do promotions. So we do have an LTO. we’re kind of looking at the market and our best way to drive traffic into our restaurant, so to speak. And then more importantly, really having everything in there as a touch point, have a good guest experience. because you want that guest to come back. mean, it’s hard to upsell people if they’re only ordering in. we want, as I like to say, want butts in seats. So we want all the touch points that we can help when you get to a restaurant to have a good guest experience. To Raffy’s point, the menu makes ordering easy. It makes it a nice experience to go out. You’re not searching for stuff. right there. It’s being presented to you.
Jeremy Julian (38:47): Mm-hmm.
Kim (39:03): We’ve engineered it so we can take you on our own little item menu journey and hopefully make.
Jeremy Julian (39:08): and you’re highlighting the things that are going to make them happy that they’re going to, you’re going to be able to execute well and going to bring them back and are going to make you most profitable when done, done well. Uh, I love that. Rafi, talk to me a little bit about, we’re 37 minutes into our recording, 38 minutes into our recording and we’ve not talked about AI. AI, we’re in 2026 and I’m certain AI, you know, you and the CTO or I don’t remember VP technology, whatever your title is, I’m sure AI, everybody, your CEO is calling and saying, what is AI going to do for our business? I’d love for you to help our listeners understand how can AI help enhance what it is that they’re doing with your team to ensure that they’re getting the best results for those 500 menus that need to be out there. And how are you guys really even thinking about AI kind of coming into your world and either enhancing or even disrupting what it is that you do? Because it is one of those things that kind of like the internet, you know, I’ve been around, we’ve all been around long enough that remember days before the internet, it changed our world. And now I really believe AI is going to change. And I’d love for our listeners to. to hear how you guys are thinking about it.
Where AI Is Changing Menu Work
Rafi Chehirian (40:07): Sure, yeah. We do think about it a lot. uh So on the menu side of the business, I think we have some challenges that uh along the way, we’ve been at it for a decade, and along the way, we were able to make uh giant leaps on one side of the equation and just incremental gains on some of the other things in menu engineering that we know that AI is going to be able to solve. So as we look at what are the challenges that AI is going to help us with, one of the challenges really is proof and approval. The proof and approval process is something that remains manual. We look at our solution, intent, holistic solution. We don’t just stop with regenerated new menus. Now somebody somewhere has to look at them in 500 versions or 10,000 versions, however many they got, and try and figure out if they’re right. Someone has to prove them because if we print them and they’re not right, They end up in the store, then we have to reprint them. And it’s just this like friction that is unnecessary, right? And humans are not very good at this. I’ve done proof and approval myself. And you know, like your eyes blaze over after, you know, iteration three, and then everything could be wrong and you would be like, yeah, that’s right. So, you know, that remains a, a very kind of time consuming and really error prone process that we’re probably going to completely eliminate with AI, right?
Jeremy Julian (41:13): Mm-hmm.
Kim (41:21): You
Rafi Chehirian (41:32): We’re going to be able to tell what your menu data is on the way in looks like and what the outputs look like. AI will be able to do the proof and approval for you and say, yeah, this is right. you know, with confidence, move forward and print. This is something that takes people weeks at the end of a cycle. And it costs brands. uh When I say millions, I’m not exaggerating over the course of a year, just for proof and approval. You know, they bring in Some brands that we work with, and we work with some of the biggest brands out there and have hundreds of versions, and seasonally they’ll bring in three, four, $500,000 worth of temp labor just to do proof and approval.
Jeremy Julian (42:14): Yeah, which is insane, but it’s needed currently with humans and to your point, having AI to augment the human, know, cause there’s a lot of people, you know, AI is just gonna replace humans, but at end of the day, how do we make it easier for humans to do the work that needs to get done and ultimately accelerate what it is that we’re trying to do anyway?
Rafi Chehirian (42:33): Yeah, that’s one. Another area where AI has a massive impact, and we partner with a great company that actually solves this problem, is in franchise pricing. Franchisees turn to corporate and say, I’m an owner-operator. I don’t know how much this stuff should cost for me to make the most amount of money. Right.
Jeremy Julian (42:57): Yeah, because I don’t really care. It’s just as long as people buy it and they can make money at the end of the day, right?
Pricing, and Whether the Eggs Should Be $5 or $6
Rafi Chehirian (43:02): Exactly. Should the eggs be $5, $6? Am I getting the most out of it? Am I overcharging? I don’t know what to do here. Help, right? um So, you know, AI has a lot to do with regional pricing and depending on what part of the country you’re at, that plays a big part into how you should price your items, right? Whether there’s a shrimp shortage or chicken shortage or whatever the case may be, right? um So things cost differently everywhere in the country and if you’re a national brand and you have many different locations spread out across the country. Chicken cannot cost the same in all your restaurants and what should it cost? So AI is very good at consolidating regional data and figuring out and optimizing what your price should be based on historical data, based on current market conditions, those kinds of things. So it does a much better job than humans.
Jeremy Julian (43:51): Yeah, that used to be a team of data analysts doing that for hours a day of this is supposed to be 950 versus 975 versus, you know, 995 in certain stores. It does. Yep.
Rafi Chehirian (43:59): Exactly. And that matters. Matters a lot, right? Whether it’s 950 or 975, it matters a lot, right? Because times however much you sell, right? Or don’t sell because of oh the $20 difference. That matters a lot. So AI is really good at stuff like that. Take tons of data and synthesize optimal output. So that’s another area where we’re seeing a lot of.
Kim (44:22): And that used to be.
Jeremy Julian (44:24): Yep, no. And again, going back to that whole augmenting the human, because somebody needs to still make the decision to your point, but it’s now getting them the data versus a full team of data analysts that would be doing that in the past. Kim, how do people engage? you know, we’re at 40 some minutes into this show, and I’m, again, I know we could sit and talk forever about, you know, menu nerding out and all of those things. But if I’m sitting here and I’m like, you know what, I got 40 units, I got 100 units, I got 200 units, and I’m not using your guys as team. What does the engagement look like? How do they get in touch? Where do they find out about how to get to the place that some of these brands that you guys are talking about that are so effective and just making really killer decisions and saving people time, saving people money um and really enhancing their experience. How do they engage? What does that look like? And what can they expect from your team?
How to Reach the Team
Kim (45:10): I mean, they can definitely reach out to us. There’s obviously dintech.com. So they can always reach out to us that way. We can also give you contact information if you want to include it to, you know, reach out to myself or to members of our team. But we do have a coordinated team of people who have do nothing but live in the dining space. So have touched every aspect of it so can help you, you know, plan and execute. Um, your entire, you know, menu process. And like I said, really always kind of considered ourselves to be, you know, a partner. I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in marketing departments of some of our major brands and really trying to understand their workflow, their pain points, um, what their marketing and menu initiatives are, and then really putting together a workflow and a plan that helps them meet those objectives. So.
Rafi Chehirian (46:00): Yeah.
Kim (46:09): a very much of like a partnering relationship. uh
Jeremy Julian (46:14): Yeah, which that’s the part I love so much is that you guys aren’t just the tech behind creating menus. You’re, let me work with you to understand where you guys are trying to go and how can I help you get there based on the experience that you guys have across, you know, thousands and thousands of restaurants. And what have you seen work? What have you seen not work? And where do they want to go? What have you seen work? And now you guys collaborate and come together to be able to solve that.
Kim (46:35): Yeah, because the collaboration and really understanding what the the brands and you know objectives are I really think give us a Because the technology is awesome But the technology is only as good as us putting a plan into place to drive engagement drive traffic put butts in seats and and have that guest come back Let them to order the Philly cheesesteak and we want to up
Jeremy Julian (46:58): and get them to order that Philly cheesesteak I was talking about earlier, right?
Rafi Chehirian (47:00): and
Jeremy Julian (47:04): and the margarita.
Kim (47:06): With onion rings, because we can charge more for those. So we want to be able to upsell the guests once they get into the restaurant and do that. I just, it’s just very much a collaborative, you know, we’re just, we’re just like a partnering, a partnering team. You know, we really view ourselves an extension of, of marketing departments and really, you know, if you give us the ball, we will take it and deliver it, you know, at the end and.
Jeremy Julian (47:08): Yes. uh
Kim (47:35): let you be able to track, you know, track all the way through. just really, like I said, partnering, understanding where a brand wants to go, getting them the best roadmap to get there and putting technology to it so we can do it quickly and accurately.
Jeremy Julian (47:54): Well, I love what you guys are doing. I love the education I’ve gotten because now I’m going to watch you guys try to upsell me those onion rings next time I go into a place and I’m like, oh, those look so darn good because we do eat with our eyes and we do order with our eyes. But now I’ve got a little bit of the inside baseball. Maybe I’ll make wiser choices, but chances are not because you guys are one step ahead of me and thousands of menu prints be ahead of me to understand how to get me to get the orders right. So thank you guys for creating that. Thank you guys for coming out and educating our listeners, guys.
Rafi Chehirian (47:58): you
Jeremy Julian (48:23): um As I said at the onset to our listeners guys, we know you guys have got lots of choices, so things are hanging out. Please go check out the team at Dynetech and if you’re not already working with them, please check them out and engage. I’m certain they’ll get on the phone with you and even if you don’t work with them right away, they’ll kind of help you work through what it is that you guys are looking for. uh Kim and Rafi, thank you guys so much and to our listeners, make it a great day.
Kim (48:45): All right, thank you so much, and thanks.
Rafi Chehirian (48:45): Thank you, Jeremy.
