GOLDEN Colo. Boston Market began testing several lunch-focused menu items this week, including sandwiches, salads, fried foods and a “flavor bar” of different sauces and salsas.
While the brand does not have plans for unit growth this year, it’s aiming for aggressive sales increases by bolstering its menu for the lunch daypart, said chief executive Lane Cardwell.
“Boston Market was created as a dinner-only concept, and we’ve never really had a lunch menu,” Cardwell said. “The joke was always that we had dinner for lunch, and this is going to be lunch for lunch. ... We’re confident that the food will be well-received, and the real test for us is to execute it quickly and consistently.”
Six sandwiches and five salads are being tested at Boston Market locations in Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio, Cardwell said. Among the new menu items are a turkey BLT, a roasted-chicken pesto sandwich and a Mediterranean vegetable sandwich, as well as a Mediterranean chicken salad, an Asian salad and a Southwest Santa Fe salad.
“We really tackled the big things customers were looking for,” Cardwell said, referring to the months of customer research Boston Market conducted. “Current guests wanted salads and sandwiches so that it wouldn’t be chicken, chicken, chicken for lunch. They wanted vibrant flavors, and they indicated that sweet-potato fries could be a signature for us, with some other fried products to go with it.”
Boston Market has installed fryers in some of its restaurants in Raleigh, N.C., where the company is testing regular French fries and sweet-potato fries, as well as fried chicken tenders.
“We’d always had an aversion to fried food, but our guests seek it out and embrace it,” Cardwell said. “So why make them seek [fried food] somewhere else?”
The Raleigh locations also are testing a "flavor bar," where guests can take their food and augment it with six different sauces and salsas for dressing and dipping, as well as flour tortillas for wrapping meals.
Boston Market began supporting the Feb. 1 rollout of the test items with a big media push starting Jan. 25, and it will buy 30 weeks of national cable television ads.
“We’ve spent the past six months getting ready for the last couple weeks,” Cardwell said. “We’re getting great feedback from these tests.”
The sandwiches, salads, fried foods and flavor bar were meant not only to break into a non-core daypart for Boston Market, but also to be more portable and more suitable to hot summer months, Cardwell said. Prices for the items fall within Boston Market’s normal price structure of $5 to $6 for adult entrees.
All of Boston Market’s more than 520 rotisserie chicken restaurants are company-owned.
Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].