It’s important to understand where the Plain White Shake lives,” Andy Dismore says, “because it lives within a menu of other items. We’ve been able to create some really killer food.”
He showed his hand at using the word “killer,” which is more usually associated with video games and guitar riffs than with family dining. More specifically, he showed his hand as the senior director of product innovation for Denny’s, who also happens to have wooed the support of a popular young rock band called the Plain White T’s. What he wooed them for was simple: to think up something that they themselves, as hip young kids, would like to eat at Denny’s at 3 a.m. after getting off stage from a show. The idea they came up with was simple, too: a milk shake.
The resulting Plain White Shake on Denny’s late-night menu isn’t exactly simple, though.
“The most popular shake we sell is Oreo, because the general population understands what that means right away,” says Michael Polydoroff, director of sales, promotion, and licensing and new-products marketing for the 1,543-unit Denny’s chain. Whereas the Plain White Shake, a more premium shake, “is just one of those things that people have to try first,” he says. “It’s so decadent that when people try it, they generally become a fan of it.”
Enough people have become fans that, since debuting last summer as a temporary offering, the Plain White Shake has migrated from Denny’s revolving Rockstar Menu to a slot on occasional menu inserts to a newly granted place on the chain’s core Allnighter Menu.
What band hasn’t been to Denny’s? The Plain White Shake and the strategically minded menus it has appeared on were born as part of an initiative to make 24-hour Denny’s restaurants more of a destination in the middle of the night. Business during the late-night segment, from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., had fallen 14 percent from the previous year. So starting last summer, the push was on to figure out how to get back on track. The thinking went something like this: Late-night traffic is generally made up of young people from 18 to 24 years old, young people generally like music, and the music that young people like is generally made by other young people who themselves sometimes go to Denny’s when the owls are out. “We sat around a table and music kept coming up,” Dismore says. “And the question got asked: What band hasn’t been to Denny’s?” The Plain White T’s certainly had. Hailing from Chicago but creatures of the road as a nationally touring act, the Plain White T’s are, as Polydoroff tells it, “one of these ‘emo’ bands, these emotional bands—rock n’ roll with a purpose, if you will.” Purpose is good; a recent Grammy and a feverish network of young fans are even better. To tap into that network, or at least to try, Dismore met with the Plain White T’s in a Denny’s kitchen in Malibu, Calif. Innovation without a net “This isn’t a poseur program,” Dismore says, again showing his hand with “poseur,” a savvy epithet reserved for the inauthentic or the uncool. “They’re actually in the kitchen with us making these things up.” The way it started was with the straightforward idea for a milk shake. As Dismore recalls, the band, which Denny’s had contacted via a music media marketing company called Filter, had wanted to make an “überchocolate thing,” and then maybe a peanut butter shake with Nutter Butter in it. “We’re huge dessert guys,” Plain White T’s singer Tom Higginson once said in an interview with ITEM: Plain White ShakeROLLOUT: August 2008COMPANY: Denny’s Inc.HEADQUARTERS: Spartanburg, S.C.UNITS: 1,543DESCRIPTION: made with vanilla ice cream, milk, cheesecake, white-chocolate syrup, whipped cream and white-chocolate chipsPRICE: $3.79-$4, depending on locationDEVELOPERS: Andy Dismore, Denny’s senior director of product innovation, and the Plain White T’s “I brought every conceivable thing I thought they would want to play with,” Dismore says, for the two-hour session he had booked with the band. “We had cut-up candy bars, nuts, syrups. It was innovation without a net.” The idea to do a plain white shake—as per the band’s name—was an idea that Dismore proposed after a little while, and it stuck. “What I said was: Anybody can make a milk shake, so you really have to put your stamp on it,” he says. The fruit of their labor was the Plain White Shake, which features vanilla ice cream, whole milk, a crustless cheese-cake and a proprietary white-chocolate syrup, all topped with whipped cream and white-chocolate chips. The crust of the cheesecake, Dismore insists, must be avoided to keep the shake white. The Plain White Shake was enough to please music critic Anthony Miccio, who wrote about it for the highly read and usually very wry music website Idolator.com. After a night spent sampling much on Denny’s Rockstar Menu, Miccio called the Plain White Shake “my favorite item of the evening, even with the presence of white chocolate.” He made special mention of his dislike for white chocolate elsewhere in his tasting notes, but in the Plain White Shake at least, it seems to have been just what he wanted late at night
