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Marble Slab, Maggie Moo’s change pricing to boost salesMarble Slab, Maggie Moo’s change pricing to boost sales

Sister ice cream concepts address declining customer satisfaction, sales

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

February 18, 2014

2 Min Read
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Sister ice cream concepts Marble Slab Creamery and Maggie Moo’s have shifted their pricing structure to allow for unlimited mix-ins at a fixed price.

To help boost sales, the company asked franchisees of the more than 500 Marble Slab Creamery and Maggie Moo’s units to reduce their prices to between $2.99 and $5.99, depending on the size, for a treat with unlimited mix-ins. At the same time, the company trained staff to modulate the amount of each mix-in depending on how many were ordered: The more mix-ins, the less of each one was to be used.

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The new structure was quietly rolled out in January and will be promoted starting in March.

The change was in response to declining transaction counts at the chains, according to Allison Lauenstein, vice president of ice cream brands for Global Franchise Group, which franchises the two ice cream concepts, as well as Great American Cookies and Pretzelmaker.

“We started to do some pricing research a little over a year ago, and what we found was that our prices were extremely high compared to our competitors for comparable products,” Lauenstein said. She added that consumers felt that the chains’ “value proposition was out of whack.”

Previously, Marble Slab Creamery and Maggie Moo’s allowed customers to mix just one item into an ice cream order at no extra charge and charged an additional 69 cents to 79 cents added for every extra mix-in. The result was sticker shock at the cash register that reduced customer satisfaction, according to Lauenstein.

The new pricing had been tested previously at 15 units, and Lauenstein said the result was a 15-percent increase in transactions at a food cost similar to the one under the previous pricing structure, along with improved customer satisfaction.

“It changed the conversation with the customer,” Lauenstein said. “It immediately allowed us to get at that value proposition, which was broken.”

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary

About the Author

Bret Thorn

Senior Food Editor, Nation's Restaurant News

Senior Food & Beverage Editor

Bret Thorn is senior food & beverage editor for Nation’s Restaurant News and Restaurant Hospitality for Informa’s Restaurants and Food Group, with responsibility for spotting and reporting on food and beverage trends across the country for both publications as well as guiding overall F&B coverage. 

He is the host of a podcast, In the Kitchen with Bret Thorn, which features interviews with chefs, food & beverage authorities and other experts in foodservice operations.

From 2005 to 2008 he also wrote the Kitchen Dish column for The New York Sun, covering restaurant openings and chefs’ career moves in New York City.

He joined Nation’s Restaurant News in 1999 after spending about five years in Thailand, where he wrote articles about business, banking and finance as well as restaurant reviews and food columns for Manager magazine and Asia Times newspaper. He joined Restaurant Hospitality’s staff in 2016 while retaining his position at NRN. 

A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., with a bachelor’s degree in history, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Thorn also studied traditional French cooking at Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. He spent his junior year of college in China, studying Chinese language, history and culture for a semester each at Nanjing University and Beijing University. While in Beijing, he also worked for ABC News during the protests and ultimate crackdown in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Thorn’s monthly column in Nation’s Restaurant News won the 2006 Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award for best staff-written editorial or opinion column.

He served as president of the International Foodservice Editorial Council, or IFEC, in 2005.

Thorn wrote the entry on comfort food in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, 2nd edition, published in 2012. He also wrote a history of plated desserts for the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, published in 2015.

He was inducted into the Disciples d’Escoffier in 2014.

A Colorado native originally from Denver, Thorn lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Bret Thorn’s areas of expertise include food and beverage trends in restaurants, French cuisine, the cuisines of Asia in general and Thailand in particular, restaurant operations and service trends. 

Bret Thorn’s Experience: 

Nation’s Restaurant News, food & beverage editor, 1999-Present
New York Sun, columnist, 2005-2008 
Asia Times, sub editor, 1995-1997
Manager magazine, senior editor and restaurant critic, 1992-1997
ABC News, runner, May-July, 1989

Education:
Tufts University, BA in history, 1990
Peking University, studied Chinese language, spring, 1989
Nanjing University, studied Chinese language and culture, fall, 1988 
Le Cordon Bleu Ecole de Cuisine, Cértificat Elémentaire, 1986

Email: [email protected]

Social Media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bret-thorn-468b663/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bret.thorn.52
Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
Instagram: @foodwriterdiary

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