Article

Indian grocery cooking with digital signage menu boards

Indian grocer alerts shoppers to his fast food options with digital signage.

July 15, 2013

By Gary Wollenhaupt

Contributing Writer

As the costs of digital signage deployment fall, it's becoming easier for small business owners to deploy systems to boost their business. In Covina, Calif., Baloo Sangh turned to digital signage to overcome a customer perception problem at his restaurant and grocery, India Fresh.

The India Fresh Market carries a wide range of Indian food and spices, as well as DVDs, CDs and calling cards to cater to Sangh's Southeast Asian clientele. But he found that few people knew that the adjacent quick-service restaurant also served a full menu of Indian treats, like Gobi Paratha, a cauliflower-stuffed flatbread, or Aloo Tikki Chaat, spiced potato patties.

"I wanted to tell people about the food, they don't know that we sell food also here," Sangh said in a phone interview. "They think we just sell groceries, so it's helping me with that."

He turned to Covina, Calif.-based MEDIAPRO Inc. for a digital marketing strategy. MEDIAPRO designed digital menu boards to promote the restaurant and the grocery to patrons.

The menu boards feature high-resolution photos of the food, and an animated character of an indigenous Indian woman wearing traditional attire. The character bids viewers "Namaste," an ancient Sanskrit greeting that means "I bow" or translated to English means, "be well."

MEDIAPRO helped Sangh develop a marketing strategy to solve his communications problems.

"He saw the menu boards as a way to modernize his storefront, cross-pollinate the two businesses, and drive more sales by featuring India Fresh products in a highly appealing way," said Ben Wheeler, marketing director for MEDIAPRO. "The visual aspect of selling Indian food on digital menu board allows India Fresh to show the finished highly enticing product in high definition before the incredibly aesthetic products are made on the prep table."

The India Fresh deployment consists of two screens and three media players, according to Wheeler.

"Their system is not networked so the content is loaded locally onto the media player that's attached directly to the screen," Wheeler said.

The menu boards graphically tell the story of what the restaurant and grocery has to offer, cross-selling to people who visit one business but may not know about the other. MEDIAPRO's in-house design team created the content for the India Fresh signage.

"It's giving a picture of what we have inside because from the outside it's hard to tell what we have, when people look at the pictures they come in," Sangh said.

Jeremy Peters, CEO of MEDIAPRO, said it is unusual for a small business like India Fresh to deploy a digital signage system.

"They are getting the hang of this new technology, and are getting more excited by the day," he said.

Sangh is seeing improved restaurant traffic and expects more growth.

"It will definitely help me," he said.

Learn more about digital signage menu boards.