Chicken Sandwiches Are Getting All Dressed Up To Attract Consumers to Restaurants
The NPD Group and Datassential Team Up To Find What New Products Are Enticing Consumers

PORT WASHINGTON, NEW YORK February 1, 2008 – These are tough times for many restaurants, but not for a staple of many restaurant menus: the chicken sandwich. It is the fastest growing food offering at American eateries, and is now appearing on more menus than ever before, according to The NPD Group, Inc., leading consumer and retail information provider and Datassential.

Consumer demand for healthier food is one reason. The other is a striking effort by restaurant operators to dress up their tried-and-true poultry offerings with fancy helpings of everything from chipotle sauce to asiago cheese to ciabatta bread.

“When the restaurant industry is faced with challenges, like it is at the moment, it’s essential to know what consumers are flocking to and it’s usually a new product,” said Michele Schmal, vice president of product management in foodservice, The NPD Group.

Americans ate about 3.7 billion servings of chicken sandwiches at restaurants in the year ending November 2007, up 8 percent from the year before. But restaurants aren’t offering just traditional chicken sandwiches.

“Now more than ever, restaurants are following the mandate of distinctive flavors. With chicken sandwiches, for example, specialty cheeses are becoming the norm. And it's happening in all industry segments,” says Jack Li, Relevance Strategist of Datassential.

Cheese accompanied more chicken sandwiches in 2007 than two years ago. While staples like Swiss, mozzarella, cheddar and provolone are popular, unique cheeses like pepperjack, feta and asiago are growing at double digit rates. For example, restaurants menuing asiago grew by 93 percent between 2005 and 2007.

The same is true for unique sauces like buffalo, pesto and chipotle which have also grown at double-digit rates. The percent of restaurants menuing chipotle, for example, grew by 96 percent between 2005 and 2007. Meantime, innovative breads like focaccia, ciabatta and panini appear on more menus than ever before. Offerings of chicken panini sandwiches are up 35 percent since 2006.

These trends emerged in a new joint effort between NPD and Datassential aimed at analyzing restaurant menu offerings and consumption of those offerings.

“Having the combination of consumption data and menu trends gives restaurant operators a competitive edge and provides more texture on what new products are emerging and are successful,” said Schmal.

“This union of CREST and MenuTrends data just makes so much sense. Now you can get the whole picture -- what restaurants are menuing and what consumers are ordering in a single, simple package,” added Mr. Li, of Datassential.

NPD’s CREST™ service collects consumption information on 35,000 consumers each month. Datassential MenuTrends™ collects data from over 5,500 menus and 600,000 current dishes. Success in the restaurant industry often stems from new product offerings and the power of this new, combined information provides a greater context for restaurant operators to invest in and position new products.

About The NPD Group, Inc.The NPD Group is the leading provider of reliable and comprehensive consumer and retail information for a wide range of industries. Today, more than 1,600 manufacturers, retailers, and service companies rely on NPD to help them drive critical business decisions at the global, national, and local market levels. NPD helps our clients to identify new business opportunities and guide product development, marketing, sales, merchandising, and other functions. Information is available for the following industry sectors: automotive, beauty, commercial technology, consumer technology, entertainment, fashion, food and beverage, foodservice, home, office supplies, software, sports, toys, and wireless. For more information, contact us or visit http://www.npd.com/.

About Datassential Datassential is a full-service knowledge solutions provider for the food industry. The company offers a variety of services including menu analysis, market opportunity assessment, lead qualification, and volumetrics. Datassential has compiled and operates the industry's largest database of over 500,000 foodservice operators, each of which has been personally contacted and profiled by a Datassential representative. The company also operates MenuTrends DIRECT, the world's largest menu database featuring over 5,700 restaurants.

For more information:
•Cristina Hilsenrath
Cristina_hilsenrath@npd.com
516-382-4849

•Molly Brown
Molly_Brown@npd.com
847-692-1829