McDonald's Corporation

New Tastes Menu ensures variety

The teal-colored menu boards don’t dominate, but they still draw the eye, offering new dining options for consumers.

That’s exactly the effect McDonald’s set out to create with its New Tastes Menu program, a massive effort to give its U.S. customers more meal choices.

“This program is designed to establish McDonald’s as a place where you can find new tastes,” says Tom Ryan, executive vice president of U.S. marketing and chief concept officer for the chain. “That’s important because a large portion of the consumer segment is interested in choice, variety and new taste.”

Before McDonald’s felt free to launch its New Tastes Menu concept in February 2001, some key enablers had to be in place.

One was the Made For You system, an operating platform that allows a lot more production flexibility in the stores. Now, Ryan explains, “we make products to order and can manage a much greater amount of complexity than with our old platform.

“We also needed a maniacal focus on the consumer,” he continues. “Taking ideas to market quickly is the penchant of this leadership team under U.S. president Mike Roberts. With those enablers in place, we could bring this program to life.”

According to Ryan, “The New Tastes Menu is a platform that is not defined by products. I believe we received this MenuMasters Award because we made a national branding statement with this platform about choice and variety at McDonald’s.”

Chuck Sparrer is a McDonald’s franchisee with 14 restaurants in the Salt Lake City area and a 15th under construction. He opened his first unit in 1975. “When I came on board, we were just talking about drive-thru and breakfast, so that was a long time ago.”

With the New Tastes Menu, Sparrer says, his operators got involved very early in testing products for the program.

Last September Sparrer’s outlets used the New Tastes menu board section to feature a German theme tying in with the area’s Oktoberfest celebration. “We offered a Von Muenster burger, which was built on a Quarter Pounder platform with onions and Muenster cheese. It went over really well,” he says.

According to Sparrer, the new menu items spark return business. “When the customers walk out of McDonald’s, they may crave the taste they just experienced and want to come back.

“In a recent meeting here, we talked about some new tastes in salad and maybe even in the parfait arena that we might run within our market,” he adds. “This would be supplemental to the national program.”

According to Ryan, every McDonald’s in the United States now has the New Tastes Menu.

“We started with four items but are trying to manage them down to two,” he explains. “Fewer products give us a tighter advertising focus. We typically offer a main-entrée kind of product and then either a dessert or a breakfast product.”

Ryan says individual franchisees can retain products for a while, but only if the entire marketplace and its common advertising move in that direction.

McDonald’s, since the program’s inception, has rotated numerous products through the New Tastes Menu. Some of them are common to a region, like the lobster roll in New England. Some items may have a foreign national theme, like the Von Muenster burger that Sparrer’s restaurants offered in Salt Lake City.

“Our management teams in the field can pick their own New Tastes Menu products from a library of approved flavors,” Ryan notes. “This gives them the flexibility to target audiences in their markets.”

The first time McDonald’s did a nationally aligned New Tastes Menu program was during the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in February.

“Our products were the same everywhere during that time frame,” says Ryan, who described the Olympics as a great experience for the chain, which operated outlets in the athletes’ village and the main media center. “We featured a Chicken Parmesan sandwich and a Cheddar Bacon Sausage McMuffin.”

Alex Conti, senior director of menu development for McDonald’s, says, “We’re always looking at consumer trends and dayparts to see what people are looking for.”

Toward the end of 2001 and continuing into 2002, Conti points out, “We began blending national with local support behind the New Tastes Menu. There is still local flexibility, but during key periods we have national time frames. You saw that during the Winter Olympics.”

Another recent national thrust for the New Tastes Menu was the early March introduction of Chicken Select Strips, a main entrée in all U.S. restaurants.

Before joining the hamburger chain, Ryan was senior vice president of business development at Long John Silver’s. At McDonald’s he leads a team responsible for developing innovative brand strategies and overseeing them from concept to marketplace.

Never one to stand still, Ryan, along with his team, undoubtedly has more ideas up his sleeve. Asked for some hints about future menu features, he responded, “My favorite closing line is always ‘stay tuned.’ ”