Eggs Up Grill revamps menu with help from Chrissy McKinney.
After 20 years at Denny's and marketing company Moroch, Chrissy McKinney is ready to put her experience at Eggs Up Grill to work as vice president of marketing and communications. Ms. McKinney will elevate the emerging brand and support its love of omelettes, she said.
“Marketing involves quite a few different things, and I have a lot of experience in each area,” McKinney says. “I wanted to go with a smaller brand because I saw great potential to take the brand to the next level.”
With 75 stores now open and approximately 100 contracts signed along the East Coast, the Better Breakfast brand's goal is to have 100 units available by the end of the year.
Chrissy McKinney, vice president of marketing and communications, is looking for more ways to use data at Eggs Up Grill.
McKinney has been in the industry since he was a teenager, working as a server and studying marketing in college. She wants to work with big brands and her first job at Moroch gave her 10 years of McDonald's marketing experience.
“I got to a point where I was like, 'I want to do more, I want to do national marketing, brand marketing, product marketing,'” she said. “Then she worked at Denny's for 11 years, looking for the next step in her career.”
She wanted her next step to be a smaller brand, and McKinney seemed like a local brand. As a regular customer of her Eggs Up in South Carolina, she contacted management. Their passion for her industry gave her confidence in her Eggs Up.
From a marketing standpoint, McKinney hopes to capitalize on the growing interest in the breakfast concept to take Eggs Up to the next level. To differentiate her brand from its competitors, she looked inward. Since she joined the company in December, McKinney has focused on menu innovation.
Founded in the southeastern United States, the menu focuses on local flavors, and McKinney hopes to maintain that as the brand expands into new regions. Partnering with financial strategists is part of menu innovation as product prices continue to fluctuate.
Local flavors are the foundation of Eggs Up Grill and are key to the brand's future growth.
Related: From IHOP to Eggs Up Grill, franchisees are finding success with breakfast.
McKinney is part of an effort to upgrade the brand's technology stack. She wants Eggs Up to be a data-driven concept, especially when it comes to seeing the impact of small changes in real time.
She's already been part of some changes, and McKinney isn't slowing down. By the end of the year, she hopes to help bring Eggs to up to 100 locations, and will continue to do so in 2025. To ensure that happens, McKinney and his team are building a “robust local marketing plan.” Engaging with your franchisees and keeping them in the loop is key to launching these marketing efforts.
“The opportunity to really make a difference is the biggest thing that really drew me to this brand,” McKinney said. “We can take on projects and make a difference for our franchise partners, who are mostly ordinary people.”
