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By
Amy Spector
Rollout: June 2005 Company:California Pizza Kitchen Inc. Headquarters: Los Angeles Units:190; 159 company-owned, 31 franchises or licensees, including one LA Food Show restaurant and five company-owned CPK ASAP sites Region:United States and Asia Description: Height: 10 inches for a full serving — half portion available also Weight: 32 ounces for a full servingMake up of the dish: shredded Napa cabbage, shredded grilled chicken breast, julienned cucumbers, edamame, fried won ton strips, peanuts, julienned carrots, shredded red cabbage and scallions tossed with cilantro-lime dressing and Thai peanut dressing and topped with fried rice noodles Developers: Larry Flax, co-founder and co-chief executive Crunch time at Los Angeles-based California Pizza Kitchen lately has been more than an expression to rally the troops to work. The phrase might well be a way to order the chain’s latest sales-boosting menu item, the Thai Crunch Salad. The Thai Crunch Salad has been on the menu since June 2005 and is a mix of two cabbages, crispy rice noodles, shredded grilled chicken breast, fried won ton strips, cucumbers, carrots, peanuts, two dressings and shelled edamame, or green soybeans. “There’s a lot of crunch in that salad,” says Brian Sullivan, CPK senior vice president of culinary development. Appropriately enough for a product of ethnically diverse Los Angeles, the Thai Crunch Salad traces its roots to two items created for LA Food Show, the restaurant that CPK co-founders and co-chief executives Larry Flax and Richard Rosenfield opened in 2003 in Manhattan Beach, Calif. “We’ve taken a lot from that [LA Food Show] for CPK,” Flax says. Although the menus at the two brands remain separate, Flax has created some hybrid items for the company’s 190 restaurants, such as CPK’s Thai Crunch Salad, which pulls elements from LA Food Show’s Three Crunch Chinese Chicken and Cabo San Lucas salads. Flax describes the inspiration, explaining: “I have these two salads, and I can’t move either of them over to CPK. Number one, I already have an Asian chicken salad [at CPK]; and, number two, I have a Southwestern salad — the BBQ Chicken Chopped.” The Three Crunch Chinese Chicken Salad and the Cabo San Lucas were “created to fill the need” when the second concept pulled its menu together, Flax says. The primary inspiration behind the Thai Crunch Salad, however, is its name, Flax says. “I love the word ‘crunch’ in a salad, which led to Thai Crunch. We were literally inventing the salad for the name,” he says, suggesting that this is his first menu item to take that development course. CPK reports no outlay for research and development in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Instead, it tests ideas at two or three CPK restaurants, as well as with LA Food Show customers, Sullivan and Flax say. “LA Food Show proved to be a pretty good test site, and it’s next to our No. 1 CPK,” he says. “We’ve got 12,000 square feet [at LA Food Show] doing $10 million [in annual sales]. It’s amazing.” To get dishes like the Thai Crunch from an idea in his head to an item on the menu, Flax turns to Sullivan. “Brian is my go-to guy,” Flax says. “He is really very talented.” “We have a [ballot] we give to people when we do test items to rate the item from one to five. It has to score fours across the board to get on the menu,” Flax explains, noting that the Thai Crunch Salad “scored as high as anything we’ve ever tested.” “It’s a crowd pleaser of a dish,” says Merrill Shindler, senior editor of the Southern California Zagat Survey. “It’s like catnip for grown-ups. It’s crunchy, a little sweet, a little spicy — everything you like in Thai food.” Sullivan claims that little changed with that salad from conception to execution, noting that he and Flax have streamlined the creative process during his 18 years with CPK. “There was a bit of internal debate over the red cabbage,” he says. CPK’s training team did encounter a few bumps along the rollout road with the salad’s cilantro-lime dressing, a new item which pantry cooks prepare daily on site, Sullivan says. Trainers showed the cooks how to prepare the dressing properly and how much to use, as test results indicated the kitchen was using the two dressings too sparingly. CPK outsources production of the salad’s second dressing, the peanut sauce, an ingredient that is used on several stations of the cooking line, the executives say. Executives at the chain declined to state the salad’s unit economics, such as food cost, labor cost or number of salads sold per day, citing the company’s need for confidentiality as a publicly traded entity. But Flax and Sullivan agree that the salad, which sells for $11.49 for the full portion and $7.49 for a half-sized version, continues to be a strong seller for the company. Analysts who follow CPK have chimed in about the salad’s ability to move the sales needle. In a 2005 research report, Andrew Barish, an analyst with Banc of America Securities, states that CPK’s “menu rolled out in June has been very well received, with the new Thai Crunch Salad being particularly popular.” Sullivan expects the Thai Crunch salad to have a long life on the CPK menu, which he and Flax update twice annually. Flax says he plans to add more Asian flavors to the menu, but for now his creative juices are flowing in a different direction for the June 2006 menu debut: a Greek pizza.
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