Consumer Appeal

The hybrid dessert craze has customers lining up for the latest in sweet treats: a blend of two popular desserts into one. Adopting the trend will draw guests to your tables, and if you time it right – ideally just before it "hits" your area – you're more likely to be seen as an innovator than an imitator. Here are some hybrid dessert ideas that go beyond the cronut.

Chef Appeal

Chefs love flexing their creative muscles and impressing colleagues and customers. So much so, your chef should have no difficulty generating ideas for hybrid desserts – or names. A trending food – particularly one in the dessert category, where customers often rely on old standbys – needs an exciting moniker to announce it to your guests.

It’s All About the Name

Using the cronut as an example, it's impossible to say if it would have gained as much popularity as quickly as it did if Chef Dominique Ansel christened it "crodough" or "nutsaint" – but likely not. In that respect, your hybrid dessert's name is just as important as the item itself. So just as you give your chef the freedom to create your hybrid, give your staff – front and back of house – the creative latitude to name it. Choose the best submission and offer a simple prize, such as a meal on the house. Who knows? Their creation could catapult your restaurant into dessert stardom!

Generating Ideas

You likely have several potential hybrid desserts already on your dessert menu – you only need to consider them. To start, look at your current menu and combine what's already there; the desserts are already proven, and you have the ingredients on-hand, so there's almost no risk for potential loss involved.

For example, if your restaurant serves four basic desserts – chocolate soufflé, cherry cheesecake, ice cream and apple pie – you can instantly double that for eight potential hybrids: ice-cream cherry cheesecake, chocolate-soufflé flan (chocolate soufflé filling sandwiched between two thins flans), chocolate muffin doughnuts, cheesecake apple pie, ice cream soufflé, fried apple-pie crepes, cheesecake-cookie-cake and an array of dessert soups. You already have the ingredients, just combine them in new ways to start a desert frenzy of your own.