Inside the Brand: A Conversation with Mellow Mushroom

What does it take to keep a restaurant brand consistent while still giving franchisees the flexibility to connect with their local communities?

In our latest Inside the Brand conversation, we sat down with Sage Martin from Mellow Mushroom to talk about the realities of franchise marketing and what it takes to create a strong, consistent guest experience across locations.

Sage shares her perspective on how corporate teams and franchisees stay aligned, how Mellow Mushroom balances brand standards with local creativity, and the role menus, print and in-store materials continue to play in bringing the brand to life.
We also look ahead at what’s changing in restaurant marketing and what Sage is most excited about for the future.

Watch the full Inside the Brand conversation with Sage:

The Transcript:

Sage Martin, Mellow Mushroom – Tell us about yourself!

 Well, a little about me. So, I live in Atlanta, Georgia, where we are headquartered. We only have the one headquarters, which is kind of fun because our company feels really like a family, which is great. We all work together in the same building and travel together. Mellow Mushroom was founded in Atlanta, Georgia in 1974. We’ve been around for almost 50 or over 50 years, so we celebrated 50 years a couple years ago which is really cool. We did a really fun campaign around it! We are a pizza company, but we also do salads, sandwiches, calzones.

The focus of our menu is pizza, but I think any type of guest can come to our restaurant and feel satisfied with like what they get off our menu – A huge part of our business. And that does take up a lot of what I do, but menus are so intricate, so there’s so much that goes into them and all the details.

If one period is off on all of your menus, you have to reprint – so that is a lot of the big things that I focus on, but I also work with our packaging and the design of our packaging.

How does your corporate team and franchisees stay aligned?

I think one of the key things to a great corporate and franchisee relationship is communication. We are in constant communication with our franchisees whether it’s through systemwide webinars that we hold where we’re going over menu tech ops initiatives that are coming out throughout the year. We also post articles on our intranet which we launched our intranet in 2022 because there was a gap in the way that we were communicating with our franchisees because we sent out bi-weekly newsletters. Then those newsletters would get lost in emails, so the information would kind of just disappear.

Now we have this intranet where we’re able to post articles, where for example with menu rollouts we post everything that’s new that’s coming out on the menu so that they know what to expect when they come and order their menus like two months later. We also post training videos on there so our training team will do videos of them creating new food items and then post it so that stores can always access that whenever they want to go back and like refresh on how to make something, for example.

I think that is a great way that we’re always in communication with our franchisees. And then we also really appreciate feedback from our franchisees. We send out surveys to them throughout the year asking them what went wrong with this or what went right with certain promotions that we’re do.

We have a committee of franchisees. There’s a certain criteria that they are able to get on this committee, but the leadership team meets with them throughout the year and they’re able to voice any concerns or issues that they have within the system. Also, the leadership team is able to consult with them on any like upcoming initiatives that we may have coming up. They get a gut check before we launch the system to say, “Hey, what do you guys think about these new sandwiches that we’re testing?”.

They get to taste them, look at the recipes, and the menus to make sure that the rest of the system will actually like what we’re about to do with these.

With all the franchisees that you do have, how do you keep the brand consistent while still giving the flexibility to market locally?

We really encourage our franchisees to market locally and one of those ways that we do that is we have a program where they’re able to send in requests for any like local assets that they would need. Whether it’s print, like they want to do a box topper marketing a happy hour that they have, or poster marketing, or even social assets and even billboards if they want to do that.

They send in that request and then our creative team gets it and then we use our in-house graphic design team to create those assets for them. We’ll do whatever they ask essentially to a to a point, but we want to make sure that those assets also have or stay within our brand guidelines. Using our in-house team, we’re able to make sure that those assets have our fonts, our colors, our patterns, etc. And then, of course, we send it to them, we let them approve it, and then if they’re like, “Yeah, I love this.” Then, we’ll just send them the art files, and they can print it.

That’s a really great way to monitor what they’re doing locally, but we’re able to help them in any way that we can because of course they don’t have their own marketing team, so we’re that for them. We also have a portal where they can access anything quickly that they need – Our logo, our colors, our patterns, and even some like menu food photography because our stores they have their own Instagram accounts that they run themselves. If they want to promote the Buffalo Chicken Pizza that’s on our menu randomly on a Tuesday, they could have they or they have access to the professional food photography that we have and they can just put that on their Instagram account.

We want to give our franchises as much access to the things that we use in our systemwide marketing as we can so that they feel like they can they don’t have to run everything through us. They can market whatever they want just using, you know, everything that fits into our guidelines. I just give so much kudos to our design team. They’re incredible. And the art that they’re able to create while also making food exciting and pretty to look at, which I think takes a special kind of talent.

One of my favorite things about working on menu and with our design team is that I’m able to watch them take the all the information I give them and create a piece of art with our menus. I think it’s also makes the guest experience with our menu so exciting and fun because we do reprint them every six months. You get to see something new every six months, not only with the food in our menu, but the art itself of the menu.

What role does print play in your marketing from menus to instore materials? What are the most important print materials for that guest experience do you feel?

Definitely menus, obviously I think that’s a big one but then also table tents is a huge one for us and we switch our table tents out constantly. We have basically three sides of a table tent where we’re able to market items that either are new to the system and we want to bring extra awareness to the guests so they know like, “oh I want to order that!” or something that’s like an LTO that we can’t necessarily reprint the menu for that one item.

We are able to market it on a table tent where for a month – I’ll give you an example. We are promoting a St. Patrick’s Day drink for the month of March and it’s only for one month – it’s one price point. We’re able to print a table tent so guests know ,“Oh I can buy that” for this one month. It’s in your face. It gives you a menu description, a picture of the drink. I think that is one of the best ways to market literally to a guest like right in front of their face. And we’ve seen evidence of sales increases of those specific items that are printed on table tents, which is great. We love that!

When the guest sees that menu and restaurant, how important is that to the brand experience, the guest experience? What do you hope that they take away from that?

I think the menu is a huge representation of your brand because that’s like one of the first things that a guest looks at when they come into a menu besides the restaurant itself.

 We always want the guest experience to be as seamless and easy as possible. And when you have a well-executed, easy to read, easy flow of a menu then your guest experience will be great.

You don’t want the guests to have all these questions while reading your menu. We want them to be able to understand everything. We actually are launching a new menu in April that’s a more like durable and sturdy menu, but we’re also combining our beverage menu and our core menu so that we’re not giving out all these separate menus that maybe a server accidentally forgets to give them the beverage menu or something like that. Now, it’s all in one place and it’s in an order flow, too. Obviously, you order drinks first when you come to a restaurant. It comes with drinks first and then you get your appetizers or what we call munchies and then pizzas and like the back is like dessert and everything like that.

I’m excited for this menu to launch and I can’t wait to see what guest feedback is because the guest was definitely in mind when we were creating this menu. I think when you have a great menu, you’re going to have a great guest experience.