How a multi-concept restaurant group reduced agency spend while cutting hundreds of hours out of menu updates.
About Fine Entertainment Group
Fine Entertainment Group is a multi-location hospitality company operating 13 venues — with growth plans in place. Spanning a range of distinct dining concepts, the group blends culinary ambition with sharp operational discipline. With each location carrying its own identity, keeping menus consistent, current, and on-brand is no small feat.
The Challenge
Before MustHaveMenus, Fine Entertainment Group's menu process ran through a tangle of design agencies, InDesign files, and cross-team email chains. Even a straightforward price adjustment required looping in multiple stakeholders — internal teams, external designers, and leadership reviewers — before a single change could go live. Updates that should have taken hours stretched into days.
Key friction points:
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Menu design fully dependent on a third-party agency with slow turnaround times
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Heavy back-and-forth between operations, culinary, and design vendors for every revision
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No centralized system to manage consistency across 13 distinct concepts and locations
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Peak seasons like the holidays became especially painful — high demand, no agility
Consolidation of Assets and Effort
MustHaveMenus replaced the patchwork by consolidating Fine Entertainment Group's entire menu operation into a single platform. Working across all 13 venues, the team rebuilt their print menu library from the ground up — and didn't stop there. Digital TV menus were introduced at the flagship location, and the platform was quickly extended to cover seasonal promotions, feature menus, recipe cards, and internal materials.
The scope varied widely by concept. Some locations needed a single clean menu; others ran six or seven active menus simultaneously. MustHaveMenus' flexible template library accommodated all of it — delivering brand consistency without forcing every concept into the same mold.
The Solution
Today, Jessica Kincaid — Operations Systems Analyst and the single point of ownership for menus across the entire group — manages the full menu lifecycle inside MustHaveMenus. Ownership, culinary leadership, and operations weigh in, and general managers review final versions, but the actual work of building, editing, and publishing menus lives entirely in one place.
Updates are made in real time and shared immediately for approval, eliminating the lag that defined the old agency workflow. The Item Library allows menu content to be reused and adapted across locations, and templates can be copied and customized to serve each concept without starting from scratch.
Solution elements:
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Brand templates for fast, consistent menu creation
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Item Library for reusing menu items and descriptions
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Template duplication across locations and concepts
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Real-time editing and approvals
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Selective use of POS integration
The Impact
The efficiency gains showed up fast. Full holiday menu rollouts — the kind that used to consume days of back-and-forth — now get done in a single day. Approval cycles that once required multiple rounds of agency revisions are now handled in a single real-time pass. And with one person able to manage everything centrally, the group can scale menu production across more locations without scaling the team.
Beyond speed, the platform gave Fine Entertainment Group something harder to quantify but equally valuable: the confidence to use menus as a revenue tool. Seasonal features, event-driven promotions, and limited-time offers are now built and deployed without hesitation — because the bottleneck is gone.
Operational improvements:
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Same-day execution for most menu updates
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Centralized control across all venues and concepts
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Faster approval cycles with real-time collaboration
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Scalable menu production without increasing workload
What's Next
With two additional venues on the horizon and a menu operation that no longer depends on external agencies, Fine Entertainment Group is positioned to grow without the growing pains. MustHaveMenus isn't just keeping pace with the business — it's built into how the business scales.