1 Year Menu Refresh

Hey Happy Thursday, I’m here at the cafe drinking some sample coffees from Makeworth in Washington USA. They had a coffee from Colombian producer Luis Calderon that blew my socks off and gave me some energy to write a blog. Tasted like straight kiwi lemonade. Listening to midwest emo band remo drive with the door open on this beautiful not hot November FL day! (Oh god this blog took so long) I want to talk about our menu refresh, and ditch this like ten page long original blog I had been writing on it. I just want to talk about what we changed and why. Hopefully this isn’t quite as long, but I’m obsessed with thinking about menus! I gotta write this! So it’ll be a little long : )

Feeling the need for change

So December 2022 was our first real stress test, where we had hours of lines and bigger orders with families in town. We got a lot of feedback all at once on how people were receiving the menu, the common questions and what else they wanted. When we had families in, we had a greater variety of people too. In January right after, we had a really slow month! So I had a lot of time to think about those problems and blame them for the dead time.

In late February we went to NYC for my Fiances birthday, and I bought a little sketchpad to take note of popular cafes menus and what did or didn’t work. I was originally inspired back in 2021 by the flags at Methodical Coffee in South Carolina, and cafes like “Variety” in NYC that did volume with a really simple menu, but today 2 years later I knew that wasn’t Tetherball. When we opened I was thinking of other Florida cafes like Trilogy in Deland FL, that served a small community with a simple specialty menu, but their culture was more fitting than ours was for that kind of menu. We had kids, we had families, and we had greater jax traveling just for us to try something amazing. So we could do better.

Here are some photos of our first menu, Methodical in SC, Variety in NYC, and Trilogy in FL. You can see the inspiration.

Killing stuff that didn’t work

Let me just precede this whole section by saying, it has to work instantly. If you’re explaining why a drink is good to someone you’re fighting an uphill battle. It’s like explaining why a joke is funny. Unfortunately you don’t know your audience very well until you open your shop doors and have them open for awhile, you have no culture! That’s my opinion anyway, and that’s why this took awhile and then changed a lot when it did. Let’s get into it.

The only original idea that truly really went away was the “Go Fish.” My thought process on that one was a big sweet tea drink for the good ol’ boys. It actually worked pretty well, we had plenty of dudes in guy harvey shirts ordering this one. The problem was we had people asking every day if “that one is any good” and “what’s a sweet tea latte? Does that have coffee.” the concept of a tea-latte seemed impossible for most people, despite us having a matcha latte, and a chai latte on the menu. They assumed it was bad and would joke about it. It was pretty harmless. Just an iced tea with milk and sugar, something not at all weird for hot tea. After enough jabs we killed it.

The kids drink “snickerdoodle milk tea” should have worked because parents like ordering kids milk. This was that with sugar, like a vanilla bean frappe, which is a popular coffee free drink at starbucks. Weirdly not a lot of parents knew what a snickerdoodle was, and the name was just too long for kids. It made ordering a little tough. If it’s not an easy win, parents won’t take a guess on a kids drink. Weirdly this later became popular with adults as basically a cheap milkshake, and took a long time to make and decorate with whip/cookies. so we were getting seriously bottlenecked on bar during rushes by this $4 kids drink. So we killed it.

The kids drink “cherry lime fruit tea” failed because it was a long name, and it had the word tea. It did okay, but mostly for adults that didn’t want coffee. There’s this weird idea where people think tea either has less caffeine or no caffeine, but also that it’s not for kids. Kids don’t like tea, it’s too mature I guess; Which meant if people did order it for kids they were often sharing it with them half heartedly or splitting it up between kids who couldn’t be expected to finish an iced tea. This is my assessment after a year of selling this drink. So we killed it.

We spent the first year running a lot of seasonal drinks and specials. We had one specials menu with 5 very complicated drinks and lost money on it. We had one or two specials that outpaced our regular menu by miles. We grew an audience just for those launches, and lost people when we took specials away, but we took away at least one important thing from every season. We learned what did and didn’t work for our culture, what was too complicated and what was too simple. How to name drinks and how to sell them. If nothing else, having a seasonal menu gave us some great feedback.

Reworking! Using “Florida-Core” as a guideline

Remember the fruit tea? We did lemonade with key west lemon juice over the summer and discovered that was a big win for kids, we also had people making lots of half tea half lemonade drinks. Our most popular one was a half lemonade half hibiscus tea. It had a similar taste to our cherry lime fruit tea, it looked and tasted even better with no artificial colors or sweeteners. So we added it as “pink lemonade” and included a couple slices of fresh lemon. Now it looked and tasted more fresh, and authentic to FL produce as a state known for citrus and hibiscus!

Now for the snickerdoodle. When visiting south Florida a couple times this year up the east and west coast, I noticed that iced horchata was a really popular thing. It was pretty similar in taste to our snickerdoodle milk tea, and was often made non dairy with rice or almonds. So we decided to do an almond milk, caramel vanilla cinnamon iced drink with no whip. Then call that an “Iced Horchata” and it’s been alright! Even if someone doesn’t know what it is, it’s authentic to FL so it’s something we can be passionate about explaining. The taste has been a real winner too!

Then we added two new syrups, one to pair with our now house-made non dairy milk and one to solve the issue of honey in iced lattes.

The skinny (skim milk) lavender iced latte is a common cafe phenomenon, in my opinion this is because floral flavors go well with low fat drinks. When you add sugar to black coffee it tastes kind of gross because it’s unbalanced, but with cream it works. floral syrups like rose or lavender work a little better with black coffee by filling in that olfactory situation. Since we now made oat milk in house and didn’t add much fat, we were putting out a ton of drinks that could use a perfect syrup pairing, I wanted lavender, but i wasn’t a fan of just a floral flavor because it can easily taste fake, even if you’re soaking buds like we were. A “blueberry lavender” with two FL native crops combined solved that issue; This is a little less thin and sugar sweet than just lavender, the blueberry adds a nice aftertaste.

People love honey iced lattes in Florida, it’s hot and we have awesome local honey, but they don’t work! Even if you add honey to your espresso shot and melt it in, you’re often losing some of that honey and dirtying your shot glass. So we made a syrup for that using organic raw brown sugar and local honey. “Brown Sugar Honey!” This is such a honey forward syrup that when someone asks for honey in their latte, we say yes and give them this, it works fine. Unless they really do need just plain honey, we can do that too. I should also mention here that most of the honey syrups cafes use are just corn syrup, and I really don’t like those, but I understand the need for a quick honey, and that’s what this is.

Finally we added a really strange and maybe overcomplicated drink, that we love.

This summer our most popular item period was a crushed ice, honey brown sugar espresso, with coconut condensed milk. It was a solid drink but way too strong for most people at just 6oz. We kept having people ask for a splash of milk. Despite how popular it was a lot of people felt it needed something, so we invented a super deluxe version, the total coconut bomb “Coco Shake!” This is that summer drink, topped with coconut mousse / milk / foam? Whatever it is, it’s coconut cream we chill over night, take the fat from, and whip it with water and vanilla to make a thick sweet top for the crushed espresso that screams coconut. It’s awesome, it balances the whole thing, and it’s already finding it’s audience.

Embracing stuff that had worked

There were a few things we were putting in a little frame on the counter, instead of on the main menu. Those included specials, syrups, and food. This is because we didn’t want to commit! We wanted new syrups! We wanted new food! As part of the season! But if people didn’t see it on the main menu, they didn’t see it! So we put those up there and ditched the frame. We do still have one of each pastry on display in a glass dome, but they’re also on the board.

There were a few things people were asking for so often that they may as well have been on the menu, like cortados and americanos. The problem was we didn’t have any to-go cups smaller than a 12oz, which made for a ridiculously tiny and hard to pour 4oz cortado. It also made for a very watery americano, since people would get at minimum a 12oz. So we added an 8oz hot cup for americanos, which now had a better body. This also made it easier to pour and measure cortados (just fill the 8oz cup halfway), and added a very small drip coffee option (since our smallest batch brew is 32oz, we previously could do at most two 12oz drips per batch, now we could do up to 4, 8oz!)

We started doing cappuccinos with skim milk, as we really embraced the “dry” now old-school foamy capp. Since skim milk separates, if it’s steamed well you can have a thick couple inches of velvety foam on top, with a thin latte texture below. We began in 2022 doing this style and thinking about capps in a textural way, and we can do a “traditional” 6oz if you ask, but people in FL have responded warmly to our style and we’re gonna stick with it!

People also frequently asked for water cups and kids milk cups. So we added those to our retail fridge along with apple juice and gatorade. They do pretty well, especially water. We were basically giving them away for free before so this is a nice compromise.

Pictures of drinks

In a perfect world we’d have photos of every drink available on a takeaway card and outside menu, on our website too! Percect neat and bright photos! We’ll get there! But thinking outside the box, a little illustration can go a long way.

We have cartoon drawings for each of our seasonal specials. For example, a jack-o-lantern for our PSL. This is something we started to be eye catching on the little specials frame by the register. We decided to blow them up for the main menu too. These draw attention and are fun, but they can also serve to direct demographics to an item or describe that item. For example the lumberjack Fall special is targeting guys who like black cold brew but want a little treat, so it’s got a coold guy with a beard and glasses. This has worked really well. (I once pitched an article on the rise of this specific demographic to barista magazine, when nitro cold brew was big; They sent me a shirt but did not publish it haha.) The Toffee Butter winter special is a little piece of candy, to let people know “hey this just tastes like candy” haha.

Adding a Fridge & Oven!

This was our biggest hurdle in doing a menu with savory options, we wanted to heat food up and store backup food cold. So we needed more fridge space and an oven. We brought in some electrician contractors for 30 minutes to test all our outlets and they told us where we could plug everything in without popping any breakers or running new power. Fridges don’t pull much power but ovens do. We put the fridge where we wanted out in the lobby as a retail fridge no problem, even though it was on the same circuit as all our laptop plugs for tables. We put the oven where we wanted on bar, then had to run an extension cord under the counter to the next outlet over.

I bought a single glass-door retail fridge new for about 1k with a warranty, pretty straightforward.

Ovens man, what a can of worms haha. I did not want to pay 15k for a turbo chef, I did not want to buy one used for 2-3k and have something proprietary, that no one would work on if it broke. I did not want to buy a small toaster oven or air fryer for $150 that wasn’t commercial. I remember when I was a barista I was like “what’s the difference?” The difference is it’s designed for heavy use and heavy cleaning, two things you should or hopefully will be doing!

Our roaster suggested a convection oven, something small we’d leave on all day. I read some reviews online and in coffee business owner groups, and they did not review well. People said they’d burn out in a couple of months. SO I went to the manufacturer website and read some warranties. they suggest an on time of 4-5 hours, so I bought the best reviewed counter top oven at that $3-500 price point and leave it on 7am-1pm at 450. So far it’s been 3 months, it doesn’t give off much heat and it’s held up great.

Adding “FOOD”

So we wanted a savory option. This could be it’s own whole blog but in short we didn’t want to do any prep on bar so it had to be ready to rip, or at least heat up! We didn’t want to do daily deliveries because we didn’t have that level of volume yet. Meaning no avocado toast, no croissants, no croissant sandwhiches!

So we looked around and talked to people, and someone who had a food truck in our lot was doing empanadas for lunch / dinner. We already had a relationship and they weren’t doing breakfast, so it worked great. they’re par baked every other day and we finish them in our over in a couple minutes. We have a meat option and a veggie option, empanadas are big in FL culture, win win!

So we now had sweets, savory stuff, and healthy stuff. We kept doing granola now with yogurt or milk for here or to go, in little deli containers with wooden spoons. It was good for a long time and didn’t require any baking or cooking since we bought the actual granola clusters from an organic wholesale site.

Condensing a full sized menu

So we moved specials and food from our counter, to our main menu board. Then added a few new items. Suddenly our menu was three times the size it once was. Our original flags took a full day to put together by hand and struggled to convey the most minimal info, doing those again was not going to work.

I learned from our specials menu that bite sized information was working really well. So I started thinking about categories. This both broke up our information and forced me to pick a couple of drinks at most in each style. This also naturally made me think about how the information was being navigated visually, and how to have a small homerun list in each section. Four black coffees, three milk based drinks, four teas, three kids drinks, etc. Bam bam bam.

I was doing a lot of underlining, bold lettering, italics, font changes to make this all read well. But It was a mess. I ended up putting the categories in to boxes, inspired by our roaster Valor’s menu with rounded corners, something we were already doing a lot as a part of our brand. They also had a really big menu for a coffee shop, but not in a way that felt ridiculous. In comparison to a shop with 20 specialty lattes, they felt really intentional.

We don’t have exactly the same categories, and generally go more basic and bold but you can see the comparison. I designed it myself in photoshop then went back and forth with a couple different sign makers. Ultimately I had the board printed on thin pvc at a local place, and then had the paper printed at staples, and used super strong magnets / white hooks from amazon. fun project!

Breaking down this menu in detail

First was “COFFEE” & “+MILK” which were inspired by super simple neon menus done at All Day in Miami, and Dayglow in LA.** Two cafe’s I’d had really stellar experiences at, that use a few words to describe their black basics, and +/&MILK for all their milk based drink. These menus don’t help provide much deeper info unless you’re in the know, but they looked sleek and build intrigue. As headers, I think they do an awesome job for us, but we need subheaders.

For “COFFEE” we now have hot drip and cold brew (our basic hot and cold coffee, which are batch brew and yes cold brew, unintentionally the same as allday now that I’m looking at). We also do espresso (17g in, about 2oz out) and americano (8oz) for others who specifically request them.

For “MILK” we now have a 4oz cortado, a 12/16oz dry capp, and a 12/16oz latte. Our espresso drinks are all two sizes, since we do two shot sizes. We use 17g baskets, and have two recipes for 17g & 19g in, with about a traditional “double” and “triple” out.

We have whole, skim, organic unsweet almond, and oat milk made in house. We also have half & half, and heavy cream but we do not steam those ideally haha. We started making oat milk because we can buy organic gluten free oats, reduce waste, and save money. People also often have a favorite brand that they wish you had instead, so this squashes that question with a solid “we make it, it’s great.” When I first got in to coffee soy milk was big, but we never get asked for that or coconut milk, oat/almond work great for our area as alt options.

Below are some photos from All Day in Miami, Dayglow in LA, and Dayglow in Chicago.

From there we decided on “TEA” and “KIDS TEMP” directly below. Tea was hard to boil down, but I wanted a short menu people could actually use to order tea and not have to ask for a list. If I had to pick four every day teas over ice, I thought a southern black that could be sweet/unsweet, and a zingy tangy FL hibiscus rooibos red would be great, along with matcha and chai lattes. Just like coffee we have a larger tea list for those who ask, but those would encompass the common every day orders into a few simple words. We make our chai, and we use real matcha from japan. Kids temp was of course going to have hot chocolate, with the above mentioned horchata and lemonade. Three easy wins!

At the bottom we have “SYRUPS”! I don’t want to cook anything in house with a hot plate, so we don’t do chocolate/caramel/white chocolate. We use Hollander, mainly because they are transparent about their chocolate, and they make a caramel without corn syrup, stuff that’s rare in the cafe syrup world.

We do make a vanilla, and sugar free vanilla with monk fruit. As mentioned above we now also do brown sugar honey and blueberry lavender. Basically we buy three flavors and make three flavors, then have 2 or 3 more for the seasonals. We use organic raw cane sugar and brown sugar as a base. They add a nice depth of flavor in addition to the natural ingredients. We use a kitchen aid immersion blender and a strainer for pretty much everything.

We could open and close some day and realize we only did EVERY DAY LATTE’s. As my first coffee mentor once said, “sell someone a vanilla latte, don’t sell them a latte then ask about vanilla.” Meaning we have this list of fully composed in-your-face drinks, & so someone is more likely to ask for one of these with oat milk and no whip, then ask for a latte with all the included ingredients one by one. That’s how we like it. Keeps it easy, get’s someone a great & beautiful drink we’ve practiced, and upsells a little bit or forces them to specify when they want to dial it back.

All three drinks come with whole milk, house whipped cream, and toppings (vanilla wafers, chocolate chips, teddy grahams). This might not sound revolutionary, but there are specialty shops opening all the time without drink specials, and 90% of them don’t do whipped cream. From my perspective if we’re going maximalist from the get go, we should do some really great whip and make it look huge and exciting. Get this iconic look going for all our drinks so you know what’s in there and it looks fun!

Speaking of fun, lastly we have ODDBALLS! These are great drinks that don’t easily fit in to the above categories. They’re showcases of what we can do, and authentic to FL culture with native ingredients.

The “Sunrise Soda” is keylime juice, simple syrup, house seltzer water, and espresso. We combine these in a way that keeps it all cold and doesn’t make it explode, but does leave a nice cascade effect and a clear pallet. I first had this drink at Condensa in Atlanta but it was warm on top, and I’ve had a few weird “espresso tonic”s since, but the key to me is good citrus and a little simple. Before we opened I brought my neighbors a lot of bad acidic drinks until they gave this one the thumbs up, and I learned a lot from their disgusted faces, but in retrospect even if you love this drink you have to be an acidity nut haha.

The “Coco shake” had a ton of iterations. The first one I sold was a summer special with just crushed ice, espresso, brown sugar, honey, and coconut condensed milk. People loved the Idea so we sold a ton, but those same people would often order it, realize it was too strong or too small, and then ask for cream or throw it away. We had a few die hard fans so I wanted to work on a version for the full menu.

So I needed to make the coco bigger and keep it non dairy. I tried a few different alt milks but it lost the texture when you added them, it basically became an iced latte. So I started making a coconut mousse with coco milk powdered sugar and xantham gum. It was good but the texture was now more like a milkshake. I went through a half dozen more iterations because I wanted that original texture and more natural sweetness. Eventually we found a really great coconut cream that we could chill over night, separate the fat, and whip that with a little coconut water and powdered sugar. It just tasted like fresh coconut and had an awesome fluffy texture. This thing now required us to prepare coconut condensed milk, a brown sugar honey syrup, and a coconut mousse separately. All for one drink, which would normally feel like a huge waste of resources. But I love the drink, and for now we’re keeping it.

I won’t go in to FOOD or SEASONAL stuff in this blog : )

Making the actual, physical board

Without exaggerations I’d now drawn almost a full notebook of menu sketches over 5 months. So the next step was to put it in photoshop and apply our brand guide to make it beautiful. Then conceptualize it for a physical board by measuring the space and pitching that to some sign makers. The sign makers mainly need to know the dimensions and how you want to hang it up. So they understand the scale and materials they’ll need. In our case we also had blank spaces to tack on paper, so we needed to make sure we had enough blank space to perfectly fit the poster sizes our local print shop offered.

I would not recommend a maker that focuses on speed like “fast signs” because they’ll quote you before seriously working with you on a project. What they want to do is get you in the door with a high price before you have a chance to shop around. This rule of “get two quotes” should just be something you do everywhere in business. Without getting in to details, I went to a couple of chain shops and then to one shop a regular recommended and got a better experience for a third of the price.

Other thoughts, Ditching prices.

The new menu has really worked, it makes our options feel more full and is really exciting for newcomers. We do a pretty even amount of all our drinks, they’re all unique and fantastic, they feel authentic to our shop, it rocks. On release our business saw a 30% increase immediately and it allowed us to start staffing daily during peak hours. The future is looking bright, and it feels great to have executed on this idea that took about 6 months to put to action.

PS. We ditched prices on the board to allow it to breathe and flow without further detail. It’s hard to say how this has effected people, maybe they secretly think we’re really cheap or expensive now. What I do know is that we’ve only been asked once or twice so it’s seemingly been a non-issue. We’re fortunate to be in an area where people aren’t super price conscious so I’m sure that’s also a contributing factor.

PSS. This is probably the longest blog I’ve written. Now that I’m not committed to doing this weekly I’m just doing it for fun, so I can take my time writing and rewriting paragraphs. I’d like to write a book eventually and so thinking about how to make huge blocks readable is part of the fun : ) - Elias