For an iconic brand celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, Big Boy Restaurants International is packing a lot of news and development into a couple of months.
Earlier this week, Warren, Mich.-based Big Boy said its fast-casual better-burger prototype, @burger, had closed its only location after being open for about a year in Ann Arbor, Mich. But the brand won’t spend too much time in the near future considering what went wrong, said chief executive Keith Sirois, because it’s launching a new menu systemwide this month.
The new menu will address the need to engineer value in a time of skyrocketing commodity prices by giving guests the flexibility to bundle items throughout the day, Sirois said. He added that, even though @burger is shuttered for now, several of its well-received menu items are included in Big Boy’s new slate of offerings, and the chain still is working toward growth with smaller-footprint stores like the 100-seat prototype it opened late last year near Grand Rapids, Mich.
Sirois, who previously led Checkers Drive-In Restaurants, spoke with Nation’s Restaurant News about how the mostly franchised 138-unit chain’s new menu will position it for success now and in the future.
What do you think contributed to @burger not working out?
With @burger, we got it mostly right. People received the food well, and the guest service was recognized as good. We’ll go back and do a post-mortem and see what we missed, but we just didn’t generate the traffic consistently. I don’t know if it’s because people are in and out of a college town, but when the [University of Michigan students] left, business dropped in half. We didn’t project that happening. … We may revisit it in the future.
Will some of @burger’s aspects reappear in the Big Boy system?
You’ll see us incorporate some menu items from @burger, because it was a really great albeit expensive R&D lab. We’re launching our next iteration of the menu in mid- to late July, and it’ll have some things born at @burger, like the “build your burger” option.
What else about the forthcoming new menu can Big Boy guests anticipate?
We’re going to have what we call the Blockbuster Breakfast. I’d liken it to a Grand Slam Breakfast at Denny’s. We’ve had our Blockbuster option at our new prototype in the Grand Rapids, Mich., area, and it’s been very well-received. It’ll let you build your own bundle, with three to five breakfast items for lower prices. We already have a build-your-own-omelet option on the menu, and now we’ll add the build-your-own-burger piece.
How are you going to market the new menu to drive traffic? Advertising low prices brings people in, but it’s hard to get good margins on that.
We’re not really going to be promoting low price points through media. Our menu itself will have the value sections and some callouts that are obvious values, but in our advertising we’ll promote our high-quality menu items, not necessarily high-value price points.
Commodity costs are driving the need to raise prices slightly. We’ve seen just about everything go up. When oil is up, corn goes up, and chicken costs are 65 percent corn. We’ve ridden it for as long as we could, but it’s all through the roof. We did raise prices on coffee when that cost about doubled, but there really was no resistance at all. We’ll keep our focus on value, but we’ll achieve that through bundling on the menu.
You mentioned before that customers went along with higher prices for coffee because your staff and managers were transparent about what went into the increases.
When we talk to people about corn prices and how they impact our industry, for example, or how even packaging is affected by petroleum prices, it’s easy for folks to understand and we don’t come off as greedy corporate folks. I’ve seen some restaurants educate customers through trivia questions on placemats and cocktail napkins, asking them how much they think restaurants make on every dollar they bring in. We’ll look at doing something like that in the future, and for now we’ll make sure our servers can talk to guests [about what’s behind prices going up slightly].
If you look at our 75-year history — I recently was looking at an industry article from 1986, and if you covered the date it could have been written today — we’ve been dealing with the same ups and downs in business. Through all these recessions in the life of Big Boy, we’re still an exciting brand.
Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].
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