While she places atmosphere and convenience near the top of her list of reasons why she goes back again and again, a particular kind of service is what really draws her to make the bigger purchases.
On this breezy Spring evening, Andrea is standing at the counter, waiting to buy a quart of soup to go. She has already spent 10 minutes reading the descriptions of the soups: besides colorful and appealing names, a stand-up menu in front of each soup lists every single ingredient. By the time she orders, Andrea has scanned them all, looking for anything indicating milk or butter, because she is avoiding eating dairy products.
"Mmmm, that Emerald Cream of Broccoli sounds fantastic," she says. "But it's got cream in it, so tonight I'm going to go with the Southwest Potato and Chili."
Andrea started coming to the cafe because of the location, but she's stayed loyal because of the way they present their menu items. To her, "it's just so cool that I don't have to ask what's in everything! And then wonder if the servers are really taking the time to find out. That's one of the big reasons I love this place!"
The key service that's winning over Andrea and increasing numbers of people like her is one that doesn't involve better trained employees or more employee time. In fact, it can reduce the demand on existing employees, freeing them up to provide better customer service in other areas. And the information on the soup menus already exists: it's the recipe!
The trend that's driving this new service is one that's sweeping the nation in many other ways: people want to eat better, and they want to know that the food they're paying for is going to help them do that.
While it may be possible for some restaurants to never go transparent with their food ingredients, many others in urban areas with younger, educated, higher-income clientele are already facing a barrage of questions about ingredients, cooking methods, and even suppliers.
For a cafe or restaurant serving "home cooking" but using short-cut products, transparency is obviously not an option. But for many others, opening the recipe book to their customers is not only a winning service approach, it's yet another way to emphasize the appeal of their food.
For Eli and Maria, owners of Andrea's favorite soup cafe, the move to small individual menus for their products was painless.
"We've positioned our cafe as a place where people looking for quality can come and find exciting food that's also healthy," Eli says. "So we really cook from scratch, and we source quality ingredients."
"When Maria visited another cafe like ours in California, she noticed the individual menus, and we thought, 'Why not?' There's really no downside for us, because our employees were already trained to strictly follow the recipes."
Now, whenever Maria and Eli introduce a new soup, they use their subscription at Musthavemenus.com to create a colorful, enticing small menu that lists ingredients, the name of the soup, and even sometimes a little enticing tidbit about how it was created.
"The customers love it, bottom line," Eli declares. "And it's freed up our staff from the endless questions. We think transparency is the way to go."