Buffalo Wild Wings
Menu Engineering / Recipe & Product Development / Innovation Strategy
A MenuMasters Award for the Great American Sports Bar
142
savory
recipes52
beverage
recipes8X
CONSUMER
PREFERENCE“An opportunity for innovation.”
The Opportunity.
How do you go from chasing the herd to leading the stampede? Fresh off a landmark acquisition by Inspire Brands in 2018, and with a new brand strategy in place, Buffalo Wild Wings appeared poised to regain its throne.
But in reality, we were much farther from delivering on our vision of being the “Great American Sports Bar.” Laboring with a value-engineered offering, increasingly clichéd compared to competitors, the menu had stagnated.
B-Dubs had lost touch with its sports bar roots and needed to reconnect with its customer and identity. Working in a rapidly changing marketplace, we had to combine consumer and culinary insight to deliver a cut-through F&B strategy, to anchor the new brand identity and put distance between B-Dubs and the struggling Casual Dining segment.
Our Activites.
A new breed of sports bar guest, and a new competitive landscape. We conducted deep research into the top sports bars in major cities across the US as well as contemporary concepts catering to sports watching occasions, analyzing hundreds of menus.
“What we found was a new breed of customer: ”
What we found was a new breed of customer: With the same love of sports, authenticity, and camaraderie; alloyed with a new desire for the adventure and social aspects of experiential dining.
In order to win our guest, we would need to evolve our offering to bridge the gap between the sports bar institutions of old and the emerging new guard of beer-centric dining and “eatertainment.”
The outcome.
We began by engineering the menu to eliminate low-selling items while maximizing space on the menu and BOH for future innovation. To deliver on the new “bar-first" positioning, we completely overhauled the menu with a new construct and platforms that left old Casual Dining approaches behind. We brought this vision to life in the kitchen with the development of new recipes and techniques. These balanced B-Dubs' heritage while pushing the brand forward through contemporary ingredients combinations, craft and freshness cues.
“This vision would become a new north star for F&B at Buffalo Wild Wings”
This vision would become a new north star for F&B at Buffalo Wild Wings and lead to multi-year pipeline of new product innovation.
With a new F&B road-map firmly in place and a product development pipeline stacked with game-changing new product platforms, Buffalo Wild Wings is launching 20+ new core menu items in 2020. Early results show overwhelmingly positive consumer feedback and item sales in test are outperforming ambitious KPI targets.
Vice President of Brand Menu & Culinary, Jamie Carawan called the project the “most ambitious innovation project that Buffalo Wild Wings has ever embarked on.”
A MenuMasters Award for the Great America Sports Bar.
In 2020 Buffalo Wild Wings was awarded the Nation’s Restaurant News 2020 MenuMasters Award for the Best Menu Revamp.
