CHICAGO — Convenience stores looking for a bump in sales have a solution staring them right in the face.
Actually, it’s staring their customers right in the face: the menu board.
“The menu board is your No. 1 communicator in the store for communicating food services,” says Howland Blackiston, principal with King-Casey, Westport, Conn., which works to improve the business results of foodservice industries.
There’s a science in developing menu boards, and Blackiston’s company works with big names—Dairy Queen, Starbucks, Krispy Krunchy Chicken and Subway, to name a few—in maximizing their power. The strategy begins with what’s on the menu and segues into the design of the board itself.
“The truth is not many c-stores are doing their foodservice strategies and communications with the same rigor that the brands they’re competing against, which are the QSRs [quick-service restaurant] and some fast casuals, have been doing for years,” he says. “There’s something really important that can be learned from the fast-casual and quick-serve restaurant chains.”
Optimization Trilogy
That education includes menu tiers, design, content, pricing structure and more. At King-Casey, these factors are determined by analytics gathered via online research with customers.
King-Casey promotes its menu board optimization trilogy, which features the following:
- Consumer research analytics: Predesign research helps identify how customers use menu boards and what needs improving. Post-optimization research tests and validates the effectiveness of the new optimization strategies.
- Financial data analytics use point-of-sale data to optimize the board’s layout, product positioning, pricing elasticity and menu-mix optimization. It also provides the opportunity to build a ticket by suggesting a complementary item for a food or beverage.
- Communication analytics evaluate the effectiveness of the menu board’s branding, colors, images, layout, legibility, navigation and typography.
Set Menu First
The strategy of the menu itself, however, must be developed, or redeveloped, before strategy into the menu board begins, Blackiston says.
A menu strategy is a plan for the food and beverage products a retailer sells, Blackiston says. All products sold are listed and prioritized. “They’re not all equally important,” he says. “Some are higher margin, some are better sellers—the core of your business or what you’re known for—so they become important.”
The first step is categorizing sandwiches, pizzas, beverages, etc., into a strategic priority. The poor sellers might become candidates for elimination, he says.
“Everybody likes to add things to the menu, but nobody seems to ever want to take anything off, and that’s a universal problem,” he says.
“Our research tells us consumers would rather order from a picture.”
There are different ways to cut items, Blackiston adds.
“You can make a gut reaction and say, ‘Well this one’s only 0.1% of sales. Let’s get rid of it.’ But maybe you have so many that have built up that they’re all doing kind of good, and you may want to get into more strategic research to find out the least number of products you could have on the menu to satisfy the vast majority of customers.”
When considering eliminating items from a menu board, also consider moving those less-popular items into a “secret menu” category, perhaps available only on a loyalty app, says Wade Neumeister, creative director of the services team for Malvern, Pa.-based Scala. Scala is part of the Stratacache family of companies, which works with c-stores on technology solutions, including signage.
This is a way to keep items alive, he says. “It kind of becomes this little secret society of, ‘Oh, this is the way to get that sauce they won’t usually put out.’ It makes it fun,” Neumeister says.
Leave Off LTOs
Michelle Weckstein, director of food and beverage brands for Bainbridge, Ga.-based Southwest Georgia Oil Co. Inc.'s SunStop c-store chain, recommends keeping limited-time-only items (LTOs) off menu boards.
- Southwest Georgia Oil is No. 91 on CSP’s 2022 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by number of company-owned retail outlets.
“We used to rotate them, but we found it made people almost lose concentration as the board would flip over too quickly,” she says. “So, we now promote LTOs on other signs.”
Signs for a lunch promotion might be on a fountain machine while signs for a breakfast promotion will be at the coffee bar. “And, of course, on the fuel pumps and front doors,” she adds.
After a menu is finalized, the menu board needs to reflect the strategy most important to a c-store’s brand, Blackiston says.
A big opportunity for many c-store retailers is lunch. The shift in daypart sales, in particular the dip breakfast suffered due to the pandemic, might have retailers revisiting how to boost sales post-breakfast.
To do this, Blackiston says, retailers can embrace digital menu boards if they can afford it (“Digital is an expensive proposition,” he says), enabling them to easily change menus every few hours. If retailers can’t go the digital route, they still face the issue of breakfast versus lunch and not bombarding customers with images of items from a different daypart.
“If it’s below 50 degrees, make the menu’s LTO section coffee. If it’s above 90 degrees, push ice drinks and ice coffee.”
Several years ago, McDonald’s implemented flipping over or switching out panels in menu boards from breakfast to lunch, he says.
“But that presented problems: They’d forget to do it, signs would get broken,” Blackiston says. “Now it’s all digital, and at 7 in the morning, the majority of stuff you’re going to see is about their egg breakfast products.”
One way to soften the transition from breakfast to lunch, which is easier with a digital menu board, is to leave a few more-popular breakfast items on the board at lunch, Neumeister says. “Maybe you have a surplus of breakfast sandwiches left over,” he says. “We can create hybrid models of the menu, a blend of breakfast into lunch.”
In addition, consider the weather when transitioning from breakfast to lunch.
“If it’s below 50 degrees, make the menu’s LTO section coffee. If it’s above 90 degrees, push ice drinks and ice coffee. There are simple things to do to keep the menu feeling fresh and dynamic. We don’t want people to go in and look at the same menu every day.”
Blackiston says that those still with mechanical menu boards can flip panels for lunchtime or design a stagnant menu board that through savvy graphic design “highlights lunch as something special.”
This could involve dividing the board into different dayparts.
‘Only Way To Go’
Blackiston says many brands feel they don’t look “with it” if they’re not digital because of the halo effect of the modernity of a digital board versus something printed on white paper stock.
“Digital is the only way to go,” Weckstein says. “You need to have that flexibility [with digital] so you can change your pricing or even your offer slightly based on what [food] you’re able to get. For example, there have been times we haven’t been able to get dinner rolls, so you better take them off the menu. Digital allows you to do that.”
SunStop, which offers prepared foods at 35 of its 80 locations, also freshens up its menu during the day, Weckstein says. For example, variations on chicken are offered throughout the day, and suggested pairings and wording are tweaked depending on the daypart.
Related Strategic Moves
Apart from menu boards, there are other things c-stores can do to improve overall messaging. These are smaller, coordinated strategic moves that can be made throughout a store, such as staged messaging from one customer zone (beverage, cafe, cooler, shopping, dine-in or others) to the next, or messaging in the drive-thru line, Blackiston says.
If a retailer has an immediate need to increase lunch sales, Blackiston says, c-stores also can “strategically develop other communications along the customer path to purchase,” which King-Casey refers to as Cozy Zones, also known as zone merchandising.
“Maybe at the front door there’s a poster with one or two of the store’s lunch favorites—appetizing images—and maybe an image with a beverage so you can get the ticket up, and then an image with the beverage and a side,” Blackiston says.
“Everybody likes to add things to the menu, but nobody seems to ever want to take anything off, and that’s a universal problem.”
If a c-store has a good breakfast crowd, hang a poster on the exit door that encourages them to return for lunch, Blackiston says.
C-stores that view the lunch daypart as the most strategically important should make that clear on the menu, he says. “You can make it clear in the design—it’s front and center—what we call ‘the hot spot.’ That’s where people look first.
“Maybe there’s a difference in the panel colors, so that one panel stands out more than the others,” he adds. “Maybe the pictures are bigger with a couple of great shots of sandwiches, or soup and a sandwich. Maybe develop a strategy, have a pick-two type of thing, like Panera does half a sandwich and a bowl of soup.”
And in all these scenarios, Blackiston says, pictures are key.
“Our research tells us consumers would rather order from a picture,” he says. “They like it. It makes it easier.”
Tips on Building Better Menu Board
- Keep it simple and legible with an easy-to-read font; avoid anything fancy and avoid graphics; decrease clutter, both visually and with fewer words.
- Focus on the quickest items people are there for. Resist the urge to include every menu item in detail. If you have a combination with chicken, side and beverage, there’s no need to also list the chicken pieces as individual offerings.
- Use lots of pictures, which people like to order from.
- Test the menu for customers who are color blind and have other visual impairments. Test the background color; a pure white versus an off-white background can increase legibility.
- Make sure the type is large enough: One inch in text type for every 10 feet away from the board.
- Put menu items into logical groupings: entrees, sides, desserts; and promote bundling with a main entree, side and drink.
- Design your board with the flow in which people order food, starting with main items on the left, moving to desserts on the far right.
- Highlight hero items in a shaded box, using bold type.