Why restaurant chains are releasing so many new menu items

Restaurants have been loading their menus with new items lately.

This week’s episode of the Restaurant Business podcast A Deeper Dive is all about menu development, and specifically why so many restaurant chains are turning to limited-time offers to get customers in the door. RB Senior Menu Editor Pat Cobe joins me to talk about that this week. 

Here’s a statistic: There were nearly 26,000 limited-time offers in the restaurant industry last year, according to Technomic. That was up 46% from 2022 and 53% from 2019. And, apparently, that hasn’t slowed down this year. 

In short, restaurants have broken out of their pandemic-fueled restrictions on new menu development in a really big way.  

The reason is simple: Necessity. Restaurants have struggled to generate traffic the past couple of years and were leery of going too deep into a value war. 

But there is little evidence that all this development is pulling in more customers. And there are real risks when it doesn’t do that. 

We’re talking about new menu items on A Deeper Dive so please check it out.