Chili's CEO says $10.99 combo meal is secret to winning fast-casual dining

Fortune

Chili’s is winning the fast-casual war by prioritizing value and operational efficiency. In 2024, the company launched a $10.99 combo meal, which includes a large burger, a side, and a drink— plus unlimited chips and salsa.

Transcript

00:00the social team was seeing how people were posting their receipts online and complaining

00:04about fast food prices. So they'd be like, you know, I got this combo meal at wherever

00:07and it was $18 or it was $21. And this is ridiculous. And we're like, wait a second,

00:12we offer a 1099 meal, which has all the, all the things in a combo meal. Plus it has unlimited

00:16chips and salsa. Oh, and by the way, the quality and the abundance is much bigger, right? We don't

00:21serve a, you know, little baby patty. We serve a giant gourmet patty and on a really high quality

00:26bun and all those things. So we thought about like, how do we kind of tap into that insight?

00:30Cause that's a, it was very common. We see it everywhere and it was gaining ground. And so

00:34someone had the thought of like, what if we dressed our burgers and one of the famous fast

00:38food recipes. So it reminded you of that recipe, but it was much more elevated. It could really

00:43make that correct comparison between us and fast food. That's where the big smasher was

00:47invented. So that's a burger with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a brioche

00:52bun, but the size of that burger versus a Big Mac is more than double the size, right?

00:57So you're talking about all this for 1099, a much bigger burger. And what we believe to

01:02be is a high quality burger or higher quality burger. And that's really taken off.

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