Legendary Banh Mi Chain Modernizes its Menu, Drives Bottom-line Growth

Lee’s Sandwiches is legendary in fast food circles. In the 1980’s, the company pioneered the Vietnamese-style deli movement first from its fleet of catering trucks, and later from its more than 50 retail locations in states across the US. Lee’s Sandwiches got its start serving up Banh Mi in San Jose, California, however the company soon expanded its menu to include Euro-style sandwiches; fresh baked baguettes and croissants; an extensive line of drinks including Lee’s Coffee; as well as desserts.

Over time the menu grew considerably and ultimately became visually challenging. The downside of such an extensive menu was that it tempted customers with so many options thus adding additional time to the ordering process. This slowed the flow of customers through the restaurant and ultimately impacted the restaurant’s efficiency and speed of service. Lee’s Sandwiches turned to c3ms media to make the leap to digital. But ’going digital’ meant much more than just digitizing its static menu boards – it afforded the opportunity to reevaluate the menu as a whole and refine the way Lee’s Sandwiches welcomes and serves its customers.

Lee’s Sandwiches chose to implement digital menu boards in one of its new concept locations in Dublin, California. After an extensive re-working and “visual simplification” of the menu, the Dublin location now serves customers more efficiently than before and plans are underway to roll-out digital menu boards in other locations.

Key Facts

Industry: Dining

Location: Dublin, CA

Integrator: c3ms media

Project: Lee's Sandwiches

Installation

• Impressive six-screen menu board in portrait orientation
• One separate screen located near the queue, used to display various marketing materials and social media feeds
• Total of seven Philips BDL 4660EL 46-inch screens powered by BrightSign XD232 digital signage media players
• Content is managed and updated using BrightSign Network

Challenges

• Extensive menu made it difficult for customers to decide, and made them slow to order
• Sought a more effective way to manage inventory, spoilage and grill space
• Needed the flexibility to display different menu items at different times of the day

The Solution

• Digital menu board implementation forced Lee’s Sandwiches to change the way they do business
• Updating menus provided the opportunity to eliminate poorly selling menu items, as well as items that negatively impacted efficiency and profitability
• Six screens are synchronized using dayparting to rotate between breakfast and afternoon menus

Benefits

• Refined menu has increased in-restaurant efficiency and profitability
• Menu imagery and organization streamlined the ordering process to move customers through quickly
• BrightSign Network makes it easy to update the menu continually – easy to add new items and eliminate any items that aren’t selling well
• Installation is future-proofed: in the future it will be possible to enable local control to integrate with the point-of-sale system to change prices or screens to push perishable goods at the end of the day
• Dayparting with morning and afternoon display options effectively doubled the amount of available menu board space available