The menu adoption curve: what food brands get wrong about trends

Episode notes

Gloria Reardon began her career in a field office at Pizza Hut during the launch of stuffed crust and worked her way through brand, insights, and marketing roles across Yum! Brands, Captain D's, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, and The Fresh Market. Along the way, she developed an appreciation for what research actually does inside an organization: not just answering questions, but feeding the creative, aligning cross-functional teams, and giving marketers the evidence they need to sell ideas both internally and to franchisees. In this episode of The Curiosity Current, Gloria explores the food trends she has tracked across her career, from the rise of functional beverages and botanical flavors post-COVID to the nostalgia wave that brought scratch cooking back into home kitchens. She explains how the menu adoption curve shapes where QSR brands can and cannot play, and why The Fresh Market operated differently as a specialty grocer with an appetite for earlier adoption. She also shares what it took to launch nitro cold brew at Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, walking through the intercept testing, focus groups, and communications research that helped the team find language consumers could actually