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Menu Tracker: New items from Pizza Hut, Panera, and SubwayMenu Tracker: New items from Pizza Hut, Panera, and Subway

Plus innovation at &Pizza, Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar, Better Buzz Coffee Roasters, Buffalo’s Café, Crisp & Green, Gong Cha, Häagen-Dazs, Honeygrow, Insomnia Cookies, Juice it Up!, Main Event, Marble Slab Creamery , Marco’s Pizza, Native Grill & Wings, Nick the Greek, Ninety Nine Restaurant & Pub, Potbelly, Qdoba, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers & Brews, 16 Handles, Sunny Street Cafe, Taco Cabana, Taziki’s Mediterranean Cafe, Topgolf, and Velvet Taco

Bret Thorn, Senior Food Editor

June 21, 2024

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Pizza Hut is returning to its thin-crust roots with a somewhat trending pie type: Chicago tavern-style. Perhaps not as well-known as that city’s deep-dish pizza, tavern-style is more widely consumed there, because you just can’t eat deep-dish that often. 

Marco’s Pizza has new spicy pizza, among other chile-spiked items.

Subway has new lightish, less expansive savory snacks that it’s calling Dippers, and Panera has a new beverage line.

Better Buzz Coffee Roasters, a smallish chain (24 units) out of San Diego, has a new line of energy drinks, and there are also new beverages at Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar, Buffalo’s Café, Gong Cha, Häagen-Dazs, Juice it Up!, Main Event, Native Grill & Wings, Ninety Nine Restaurant & Pub, Potbelly, Taco Cabana, and Topgolf.

Summer just started with a bang, so the lineup of new beverages shouldn’t be much of a shocker, but keep an eye out in the mocktail space. There’s a lot going on in the world of soft drinks dressed up as cocktails: Put sugar on the rim, charge $3 more.

What else? &Pizza has a new dessert, Insomnia Cookies has a new ice cream (and also cookies), Marble Slab Creamery is swirling existing flavors together for a colorful treat, Nick the Greek is enrobing its tart yogurt in chocolate, and 16 Handles is making fun of the fact that McDonald’s soft-serve machines are so frequently broken by offering a frozen yogurt it says tastes like French fries.

Crisp & Green has wraps, Qdoba has a spicy new steak, Red Robin has a giant Olympics-themed burger, Taziki’s has a lamb burger, Honeygrow is reprising its summertime crab stir-fry, Sunny Street Café has a bunch of new pancakes, and Velvet Taco’s Weekly Taco Feature is made with mushrooms and asparagus.

 

Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected] 

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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