Keeping it Simple
Simplifying Menus in the Age of Ghost Kitchens is the Recipe for Digital Dominance
Thirty ingredients. Five sandwiches. Six steps. Want to fulfill orders for the virtual breakfast sandwich concept Crack’t? That’s all you need to know. Crack’t is one of hundreds of virtual brands storming Doordash, Grubhub, and UberEats. The virtual restaurant partner and owner of Crack’t, NextBite developed a recipe for pumping out these brands hinged on three factors: repeatability, marketing, and optimization. The shop slinging “The Hangover Helper” and “The Yee Haw” for breakfast can be explained by looking at each of these axes.
First: repeatability. NextBite’s model depends on what are called fulfillment kitchens to cook the food for delivery pick up. These kitchens usually use excess capacity in existing restaurants. They have the tools, they have the employees and can make a few extra thousand by cranking out calorie bombs. Crack’t needs to replicable across kitchens from Georgia to California. Ingredients must be mainstream and processes simple enough for the least skilled worker in the chain. In execution, this means that Crack’t offerings are made up of only thirty SKUs (ingredients) that are orderable from two major American purveyors - US Foods and Sysco. Fulfillment kitchens tap order on this shopping cart and then head over to the Shopify to purchase the logo stickers to slap onto the product.
Assembly is the same story. NextBite provides a graphic that may as well have come from one of that iPhone game CookingFever, where kids cook and assemble virtual fast food. This “Build Chart” elicits one obvious thought - couldn’t a robot just do this? Looking closer at the sandwich assembly procedures and that question turns to a comment. A robot could definitely do this. The procedures are less than seven steps and consist of “cook eggs”, “slice bagel”, “spread sauce” or some version of that.
Urban Dictionary here: the word “Cracked” is an internet gaming word for insanely good. This evidences the second layer of NextBite’s strategy: marketing. Dollars and thought do seem to have been applied to the Crack’t website. The pictures are high quality, the logo is appealing, and the site is generally visually enticing. In the name too, NextBite is making it clear that brand matters. Brand that appeals to young people likely to order “The Hangover Helper”. Product isn’t the emphasis, but marketing is. A major miss is the lack of a strong social presence. Crack’t doesn’t have Instagram or TikTok - seems like an oversight from a company trying to get into Gen-Z’s wallets.
Looking at the Crack’t page on Doordash, one thing immediately stands out. The numbers are weird. Sandwiches cost $10.80 or $13.20, french toast sticks cost $7.70, and delivery closes at 5:40pm. $XX.99 is no more. NextBite is trying to optimize every part of their operation. They concluded that these prices and operating hours are by some metric most likely to produce the highest margins, and so that’s how they do them. Is it new? Yes. Is it confusing? Yes. Will it last? We’ll see.