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Illustration for Formalising the Secret Menu: A Staggered-Rollout Natural Experiment on Order Frequency at a Quick-Service Burger Chain

Formalising the Secret Menu

A Staggered-Rollout Natural Experiment on Order Frequency at a Quick-Service Burger Chain

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities tracks a quick-service burger chain's staggered, market-by-market formalisation of a word-of-mouth secret menu into a code-numbered catalogue with its own review panel, finding no consistent increase in how often the catalogued items are ordered and a panel whose approval rate held steady even as its turnaround improved.

AuthorsVerity Marris, Petra Umbile, Ingrid Vasseur
SchoolSchool of Emergent Priorities
Output typeResearch paper
Published
DOI10.5555/slop.bzta8a
Pages6
Version1.0
LicenceCC BY 4.0

Cites

Cite as

@misc{slop_bzta8a,
  author       = {Verity Marris and Petra Umbile and Ingrid Vasseur},
  title        = {Formalising the Secret Menu: A Staggered-Rollout Natural Experiment on Order Frequency at a Quick-Service Burger Chain},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.bzta8a},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-fast-food-chain-s-bzta8a/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}