Three Chain CMOs Just Described the Modern Menu at the Restaurant Leadership Conference. None of Them Mentioned Software.

On April 24, 2026, Restaurant Business reported on a panel at Informa's Restaurant Leadership Conference in Phoenix. Three chain CMOs (Joel Bulger of WOWorks, Cathy Chavenet of Paris Baguette, and Katie Love of Sonny's BBQ) sat on stage and described how they are protecting margins as costs rise and consumers push back on price hikes.

Read the recap once and it looks like a marketing best practices session. Read it twice and something else becomes obvious. Every one of their seven takeaways describes a capability a static, printed menu cannot deliver. None of them said the words "digital menu." All of them were describing one.

Here is what they actually said, and what each takeaway is really telling operators.

1. "Focus on items that are simple to execute"

Katie Love at Sonny's BBQ pointed out that operationally complex menu items quietly erode profit through extra labor and SKU bloat, and that poorly executed complex dishes turn off guests who will not return. Simplicity, she argued, is a margin lever.

This is true. It is also impossible to enforce on a printed menu without a reprint cycle. The operators who actually live this discipline are the ones who can pull underperforming items off the menu in an afternoon, watch what happens to mix and margin, and adjust again the following week. On paper, simplicity is a value statement. In software, it is an operating practice.

2. "Cross utilize to the max"

The strongest line in the panel came from Cathy Chavenet at Paris Baguette. The team takes the cake scraps left over from frosting larger cakes, layers them with fruit and cream, and sells the result as a $3 "cake cup." A waste reduction story and an SKU expansion story in one move.

The principle behind it is what every operator should be holding on to: never bring in an ingredient for a single menu item. Make every SKU work across multiple platforms.

That principle requires a menu where each ingredient is tagged and queryable. If your menu is a printed document, the cross utilization happens informally in the chef's head, gets remembered for the dishes that exist, and gets forgotten when a new item is being designed. If your menu is structured data, every ingredient carries a list of every dish it appears in, and creating a new "cake cup" is an obvious move because the system already knew the scraps existed.

3. "Curated picks fixed the line speed problem"

Joel Bulger at WOWorks described the build your own bowl problem at concepts like Frutta Bowls and Saladworks. New customers freeze at the counter with ten people in line behind them. The fix was "chef favorites": curated, pre designed bowls that account for roughly 12 percent of orders.

Bulger called this "ease of ordering," which he flagged as a less obvious source of value. He is right, and he is also describing menu merchandising. The chef favorites are not new dishes. They are existing ingredients arranged into a recommended path that reduces decision friction.

A printed menu has one merchandising surface: paper. A digital menu has many. You can surface chef favorites at the top of the build your own flow, push them harder during peak hours when the line backs up, and quietly de emphasize them off peak when guests want to explore. None of that is possible on a static printed menu. All of it is standard for a menu that lives as software.

4. "We raised the price by $1 and got zero complaints"

Sonny's tested $10.99 protein plates as an LTO. They performed well. When the promotion ended and the plates came off, customers pushed back hard enough that Sonny's brought them back at $12. As Love put it, no one called out the dollar increase, and the plates are now performing better than before.

This is pricing optimization in real time, and it works only if the cost of changing a price is close to zero. If a price change requires a reprint cycle, you do it once a year and pray the new price is right. If a price change requires three taps in a control panel, you can test, learn, and adjust on a weekly basis. The same protein plate can be $10.99 during a promotion, $12 in steady state, and $13.50 on a holiday weekend, and the menu reflects each price the moment the operator decides.

That is how Luckin Coffee runs 31,000 stores. It is also how the smartest mid market operators will run their next decade.

5. "Value means different things on premise vs off premise"

This was the most quietly important point in the panel. Love and Chavenet both made it. At Sonny's, the in store value comes from Southern hospitality and the smell of smoke. For takeout and delivery, the value is speed, accuracy, and food quality. At Paris Baguette, the in store value is the visual immersion of fresh pastries in glass cases, photography, and messaging.

Two different value propositions. Two different customer mental models. Two different ideal menu presentations.

A single printed menu (or a single PDF behind a QR code) cannot serve both. The dish that is a hero in store may need to be repositioned, photographed differently, or even hidden on a delivery surface where a guest is comparison shopping against four other restaurants on Swiggy. The reverse is also true. The signature delivery item may not be the one you want to lead with on a leisurely Friday night dine in.

This is a daypart and channel merchandising problem, and it is the single highest leverage move most mid market restaurants are not currently making.

6. "Beverages are profit centers, but they have to be on trend"

WOWorks added a virtual dirty soda brand to its portfolio. Paris Baguette runs seasonal LTOs that weave through food and beverage (this summer is blueberries, surfacing across pastries, cakes, latte, lemonade, and matcha). Sonny's launched non alcoholic cocktails for Gen Z customers that the chain previously was not capturing.

What every one of these moves has in common is speed. A virtual brand launches in weeks. A blueberry summer LTO needs to coordinate across eight or ten SKUs at once and disappear cleanly when the season ends. A non alcoholic cocktail line targeting Gen Z needs to test, fail fast, and iterate.

These are not menu content decisions. They are menu velocity decisions. The chains that can move at this tempo will keep finding the high margin pockets the panel was describing. The ones that cannot will keep watching their beverage attach rate slip.

7. "Tell your story"

The closing point from all three CMOs was the most underrated. Brag. Surface the quality of the ingredients, the hand crafted techniques, the named pitmaster, the origin of a recipe. As Love put it, "make people feel good about the money they are spending in your restaurant."

This is the part where printed menus fail most visibly. A printed menu gives you maybe one line of italic text per dish. That line has to do all the storytelling work. A digital menu gives you photos, sourcing notes, technique callouts, prep time displays, and pitmaster credits surfaced exactly when the guest is hovering over the dish. The story is not crammed into a single italic phrase. It is layered into the moment of decision.

What every operator should take away

Strip the takeaways down and the through line is unmistakable. Three CMOs from very different concepts, on stage at the largest restaurant industry conference of the spring, just described seven distinct ways their menus drive profitability in 2026. Every one of those ways assumes a menu that can flex.

Cross utilize an ingredient. Surface curated picks at the right moment. Reprice in real time. Run different value stories on premise and off premise. Launch a virtual brand. Run a coordinated seasonal LTO across food and beverage. Tell the story behind every dish at the moment of decision.

You can do all seven on a printed menu in theory. You cannot do them in practice without an annual reprint budget and a marketing team large enough to coordinate the whole thing manually.

Or you can run a menu that lives as data. Every dish tagged. Every ingredient queryable. Every price adjustable. Every surface (in store, delivery, takeout, daypart specific) merchandised independently from the same control panel. Every story attached to the dish, visible at the moment the guest is choosing.

That is the gap. The CMOs at WOWorks, Paris Baguette, and Sonny's BBQ have the marketing teams to brute force their way around it. Most operators do not. They need a digital menu platform that turns these seven principles into the default, not the special project.

That is what Menuthere was built for. Not to replace the chef's intuition or the marketing team's storytelling. To give every operator the same menu agility the panelists at the Restaurant Leadership Conference were quietly describing on stage.

The CMOs called it margin discipline, cross utilization, and ease of ordering. They could have called it what it actually is. The menu has become software.

Sources: Restaurant Business / Nation's Restaurant News coverage of the Restaurant Leadership Conference panel (April 24, 2026), featuring Joel Bulger (WOWorks), Cathy Chavenet (Paris Baguette), and Katie Love (Sonny's BBQ).