Taziki's Mediterranean Café
Menu Evolution
Bringing modern Greek to Southern streets.
Background.
Taziki’s Mediterranean Café is a Greek-inspired fast casual concept dedicated to serving fresh, delicious, approachable, and healthy Mediterranean fare to its communities across the South. Since the first store in 1998, Taziki’s has evolved its offering many times in an attempt to cater to Southern guests' tastes – and along the way, the concept began to lose track of its culinary identity. So, in 2021, Taziki’s partnered with TCE to position the brand for future expansion with a more clear, feasible, desirable, and executable menu strategy.
The challenge.
With multiple menu iterations across the franchise system, Taziki’s offering had ballooned into a complicated melting pot of Southern, Greek, and broadly Mediterranean flavors and forms. This broad offering risked confusing guests and was difficult to execute consistently across units.
The insight.
Turns out that Taziki’s many loyal guests aren’t upset with the “lack” of authenticity in cuisine — in fact, it’s a big part of the reason they love the brand. Taziki’s legacy of creativity and mashups turned out to be core to the proposition. Applying the fresh, bold flavors of the Mediterranean to approachable, familiar forms was a recipe for success.
Our activities.
Working with the Taziki’s team, TCE streamlined the Taziki’s menu to highlight its greatest hits, reduce BOH labor strain, and make room for new creative innovations. This included engineering and redesigning the menu itself, to reduce decision fatigue and make the ordering process more clear, and consolidating menu variability between units. From there, we developed the evolved recipes: intriguing new and optimized gyro pitas, salads, plates, sides, lemonades, and more – leaning into creative mashups and tweaks along the way.
Our results.
The new Taziki’s menu design and food & beverage offering, featuring items like the Athens Cobb Salad, Harissa Chicken Pita, and Baklava Cheesecake, has begun rolling out system-wide and will be ready to enjoy at most Taziki’s in Q4 2023.