Experimentation + failure + record keeping = profit

It’s the incremental progress on the search for the One Big Thing that builds a foundation and a profitable menu.


I have never been a proponent of the One Big Thing philosophy. You know, the idea that you can strike it rich if you just find the one right product to carry you to Valhalla in a golden chariot. It’s nice to stumble across the occasional Big Mac or Jalapeño Popper, but the idea that they will lube your Maserati for all eternity is silly. Even line extensions can only take you so far—the eating public has a clear and documented tendency to get jaded with the same old same.

This is paradoxical considering the basic conservatism of the human stomach. Evolutionary biologists will explain this neatly: We are curious, questing animals, whose expansion as a species depended on a willingness to try new food sources. Yet those old trusted sources with which we were raised will always trump anything new we discover, for they formed the definition of food in our young minds. Philosophers, on the other hand, will point out that this is simply the culinary expression of the paradox of the many and the few, where multiplicity within defined categories is more aesthetic than real.

From the more simple perspective of a lifelong galley slave, cooking the same crap over and over is boring as hell, even when it’s really good crap.

The idea of reliance on a holy grail is, besides unrealistic, lazy. Progress tends to be made by increments, and the increments are based on a firm foundation of failure and its analysis. Try something; it doesn’t quite work, make a little adjustment, make another adjustment, look at the cost, tweak it again, run it through a production test, run it through a service test, run it through a market test, throw it on the scrap heap and start over. And keep detailed records of the whole thing, because the next item to go through the process might be your latest loser’s first cousin, and it might pay the bills by itself for a month or two.

Now you might think that a curmudgeonly old operations guy is trying to throw bricks at marketers. Ops people, as you probably know, will tell you that their counterparts on the other side of the divide spend too much time bareheaded in the desert sun. When they start to see a vision of that one big strike dancing pixilated in their heads, they load their digital mules and head off in search of the Lost Dutchman Minestrone.

Well, it ain’t so. This may sound like treason, but I’ve found that Ops people are the ones you are more likely to find believing in a single-item savior. And there is a simple reason for it: Ops people resist change. You give me a kitchen with a set menu and a bunch of problems and I’ll iron them out and get it ticking in a form you can replicate across the continent—and then you want to change my inventory? You want me to buy a chain broiler, and put it where, exactly? And rather than institutionalizing these aggravations, we should find one big home-run item that everybody loves and stay with it forever. It’s bad enough training new hires—when you keep changing stuff I have to retrain the old ones.

Marketers, on the other hand, will tell you that constant innovation is the only way to keep energy flowing through the brand (they really talk like that. Drives Ops people crazy). They are the ones who scour the menus of the competition, look at the food magazines, mine the sales data, and occasionally even go out to eat. And so they watch the public’s tastes evolve, and the good (and the lucky) ones sometimes anticipate where the public will go. Their speculations are delivered to the Ops folks to become, however grudgingly, reality. And when it’s done right, it all works.

Some years back we were hired to add some items to the menu of a chain that had 85 units or so. Getting stuff on the menu and accepted by the franchisees was at times a struggle, partially because they were new to the formal development process, but largely because the process was under the supervision of the Ops side, which minutely scrutinized every detail of every ingredient in every recipe. Now they have a corporate chef and a test kitchen that reports to the VP of marketing, like most big chains. And 600 units.

In a smaller context, the independent has to be both Ops and Marketing, and so the tension that leads to good execution in a large structure is internalized, leading to minor psychoses and frequent Manhattans. The solution, however, is similar: create a process for development that ensures regular experimentation, permits an occasional failure (and keeps its memory around as a lesson), and that will—on the eternal quest for the One Big Thing—bring you to lots of profitable little ones.