Menu Development | By Marc Halperin
Few quick-service menu categories have been freshened up in recent years to the degree salads have.
Once upon a time—apart, perhaps, from Wendy’s stalwart salad bar—the pickings were pretty slim: an iceberg-lettuce- onion-and-sliced-tomato offering here, maybe a basic Cobb there, but overall, the options seemed more tossed-off than turned on.
Now, chains from Arby’s to McDonald’s to Subway have pre-prepared salad offerings boasting high-quality ingredients ranging from fine romaine lettuces and baby spinach to grilled, diced white-breast chicken to ripe cherry tomatoes, fresh fruit, and real bacon.
The innovation and progress in this category among major chains has been impressive. The question is, could chains be doing more to differentiate their salad products, thereby lending themselves a decisive competitive edge among time-starved consumers who want to eat healthy on the run?
The answer, of course, is yes. And the good news, from a menu-development standpoint, is that engineering a new salad seldom requires reinventing the meal. The judicious addition of one or two exciting new toppings, flavorings, dustings, or dressings can do the job nicely. Factor in some fried wonton chips, sun-dried tomatoes, glazed walnuts, spicy almonds, pomegranate seeds, or crumbled real bleu cheese, and whatever you had on your plate a moment ago is now transformed. Innovation in this particular category needn’t be excessively challenging from an operations standpoint or complicated from a sourcing perspective.
J Kenyon, a man who knows his way around a salad, has a few ideas, and they’re worth a listen. For more than two decades, he created untold dozens of them in his capacity as executive chef at Greens Restaurant, a local institution on the waterfront at Fort Mason in San Francisco. During that time, America’s salad fixation has grown geometrically: The Association for Dressings and Sauces, based in Atlanta, reports that salad consumption is running at an all-time high, with 73 percent of U.S. households regularly serving salad and lettuce sales topping $1 billion.