Menu Matters

Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Menu Matters, Consulting Agency, Santa Ana, CA.

09/15/2025

When I travel, I often travel alone so finding restaurants and bars that will feel comfortable for a solo diner is always a key objective. This past Friday, I had breakfast at . After I ordered my food, the waiter informed me that every solo diner is welcome to a complimentary glass of champagne. What a simple but lovely way to make a solo diner feel that it's more of an event to be celebrated rather than an unfortunate situation (which is often the case). It's not necessary for other bars and restaurants to do the same thing but as solo dining grows it's important to find ways to make these diners feel welcome, valued and taken care of. The team.of Balthazar did just that.

09/09/2025

At its heart, the food industry is a creative industry. Yes, it’s grounded in research and data, but it’s the chef-driven innovation that brings ideas to life. It’s one thing to know 70% of your guests want chicken and waffles—it’s another to turn that into miso-butter karaage chicken with honey-custard taiyaki waffles topped with sesame maple syrup.

That’s why we love hosting market immersions: they spark creativity, bring trends to life, and connect teams. Last week we took a client and their foodservice partner on a Mexican-focused immersion around Orange County, exploring family-owned fast casuals, gourmet markets with artisan Mexican products, and upscale concepts pushing the cuisine forward.

We tasted it all—crisp flautas and chimichangas, tender tongue tacos, sweet churro puffs, Zacatecan burritos, quince jam quesadillas on house tortillas, masa quekas, esquites with chipotle cream and lime, smoky carne asada w/ bacon and Portuguese sausage, striped bass and octopus ceviche, lamb merguez huaraches w/ zhoug and citrus labneh, cherrywood smoked chicken with plantains and roti, to name just a few dishes.

It’s all about being inspired by ingredients and flavor combos, hearing chefs’ processes, seeing how menu and experience connect, and building new concepts together to create a relevant, exciting pipeline.

A huge thanks to all the restaurants, managers, servers, and event teams who welcomed us with such hospitality—and to the clients, colleagues, and now friends who trusted us with their time. We left inspired, full, and we can’t wait for the next one.

08/19/2025

One of the latest social media trends is users making AI-generated versions of foods they wish existed: McDonald’s s’mores pies, “breakfast in bed” flavored Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, honey peach Toaster Strudels, Domino’s cookie dough lava cakes, mojito Sprite, Popeye’s marshmallow candied yams, etc. We created a few fun ones here, but you can see more user created options searching for phrase like “foods I wish existed.” While social media has its positives and negatives, one of the benefits is that it democratizes sharing ideas and content, which is an incredible source of anthropological information about what consumers are thinking, wanting, doing, etc. Don’t just limit yourself to top line data (“Apple mentions are up 50% on Instagram”), and instead dive into the content itself. What are consumers saying about your category or brand? (They can get VERY honest in the comments.) How are consumers using the foods and ingredients that matter to you? What are their pain points? How are they interacting with things in restaurants and their home kitchens? What type of language do they use? It’s an incredible source of inspiration.

07/29/2025

Five things Menu Matters VP Mike learned on a trip to Saskatoon to learn about lentils last week:

1. Every new lentil variety is bred naturally, with humans hand-crossing each one. It’s such tiny, exacting work that it takes 5 minutes for every plant, multiplied by the hundreds and sometimes thousands of plants they cross. The process is getting more advanced, though, with the team experimenting with tiny vacuums instead of tweezers and even using virtual reality goggles to easily gather information about an entire greenhouse; AI is able to show in the headset which plants are ready, for instance.

2. Uniquely, Canada has a final government certification process for new plant varieties, which adds about 2 years to the development process (which is already about 8-10 years long).

3. One thing that many consumers don’t appreciate is just how experimental farming still is, just on a larger and more advanced scale. Every farmer and their team is constantly making hundreds of decisions and pivoting based on each one: from which million-dollar equipment to invest in to when to tweak the combine settings (you will have a different setting in the morning, when there is dew in the fields, vs. the afternoon). Agriculture inherently breaks the nutrient ecosystem (when we eat something and p**p it out elsewhere, we’ve removed the nutrients from that field), so fertilizing becomes an entire decision matrix: what to use, what you have access to, what it means for the types of labels consumers want to see (regenerative, organic), pricing, run-off and waste, etc.

4. Lentils don’t require much rain (they aren’t irrigated at all). This year the farmers have had plenty of rain, to the point where they would prefer it stops. If it keeps raining, lentil plants will keep producing lentils and you’ll have a plant with lentils at different stages of development, which makes them hard to harvest and sort.

5. From Top Chef Canada winner I learned there is a world stuffed cabbage championship. He won the Americas championship judged by Chef Jacques Pepin this summer and heads to Limoges in November to compete in the world championships.

07/09/2025

A few more finds from the Summer Fancy Food Show included plenty of beverage innovation (Indian-inspired flavors, rethinking what water can be by including rice, milder kombucha), coffee (4-ingredient pecan milk, saffron creamer, coffee chews, coffee lemonade), America-themed products, products calling out chefs or being chef crafted, and a number of trends (Dubai chocolate everywhere, hot creamed honey, charred corn ribs). More on our LinkedIn.

07/07/2025

Some of our Fancy Food Show finds part one, featuring unique ingredients (noni berry, cascara, sacha inchi, golden berries, pitahaya, osmanthus, chrysanthemum, longan, soursop, baobab, mastic), a sense of place (Appalachia, a rocking chair, mountains and sea, the Atlantic Ocean, Peru, sun baking earthen pots in India, meadows, the West Indies, the Scottish highlands, Asheville), and function (low GI, calming, donations, removing the crust, less mess). Stay tuned for part two.

05/30/2025

Spending some quality time in New Orleans with my brother ahead of . And, as always, have enjoyed some great food and drinks. We started at with their Loaded Korean Hot Fries and Chikee-Parn Fries. Thursday morning, I barely made it to before the sky opened up. Thankfully, I warmed up with a delicious scone and some coffee. After holding up in my oh so comfy room at while it rained buckets for hours, I took a walk and ended up at where the food was fantastic, the beverages absolutely too notch but the service was really the star!

05/14/2025

We’re so excited to launch the brand new look and feel of Menu Matters today. Thanks to for guiding us through this process and creating a brand identity that will hopefully last another decade. You can see it in action at the link in our bio.

01/18/2025

Maeve and Mike are on their way to the Specialty Food Association Winter Fancy Food Show in Vegas. It’s always one of Menu Matters’ favorite events for scouting themes that may impact the wider industry and trends that should be a part of your toolbox as you solve for consumer needs

Hope to see you there!!

01/14/2025

Our 2025 Consumer Need States are here! This is your chance to think about the big picture. What do consumers need right now? How can we create concepts, menu items, and products that speak to their core desires? How do we create ideas that resonate and matter?

Discover our 2025 Consumer Need State of the Year, find five ways to solve for that key consumer demand, and dive into the flavors and ingredients that can inspire your innovation efforts in the year ahead and beyond.

Check out menumatters2025trends.com or visit the link in the bio.

11/15/2024

Apps and martinis , lots of mole and huitlacoche quesadillas at , and Angostura-heavy AB Negatives with , , and is a pretty good Thursday.

10/27/2024

Had a great time learning about the at last week. While there are numerous spirits and liqueurs from Italy U.S. consumers are familiar with, there are many that may be brand new to them — or unique varieties from known producers that they have yet to try. We had some delicious cocktails and pairings — like a limoncello spritz with Meletti amaro — that can keep the cocktail menu interesting using ingredients that celebrate history and tradition.

Address

Santa Ana, CA
92701–92708, 92711, 92712, 92728, 92735, 92799

Website

http://menumatters.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Menu Matters posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Menu Matters:

Shortcuts

Featured

Ring and Ping Inc.
2239 South Grand Avenue

Want your business to be the top-listed Business in Santa Ana?