Shake Shack's 90/10 Menu Rule Drives Global Licensing Hits

Shake Shack runs 703 stores across 20 countries on a strict menu split: 90% core items — the Shack Burger, the crinkle-cut fries — and roughly 10% regional innovations developed with licensing partners. That 10%, according to the company's own global licensing president, is where the chain's biggest recent sales wins came from.

The clearest case is the Dubai Shake. Shake Shack's licensing partner in the United Arab Emirates flagged the region's obsession with Dubai chocolate — the chocolate-pistachio-toasted phyllo confection — before it went viral in the U.S. Shake Shack built its own version, launched it first in the Middle East, and then rolled it to the American market in April 2025, first in select cities, then nationally.

"Many of our menu items work in one market or a few, but some work everywhere," said Michael Kark, Shake Shack's president of global licensing. "The Dubai Shake got picked up everywhere because of the virality. It was such a cool collab with our local partners, and then it just took off."

What does this change for menu development?

The model inverts the traditional top-down LTO pipeline. Instead of the U.S. culinary team exporting items to licensed markets, Shake Shack treats international partners as a sourcing and testing network. Local partners surface flavors with proven regional demand, which cuts the risk premium on new-item development before a domestic rollout.

The process is fieldwork-heavy. Kark said the culinary team travels to partner markets and eats in local restaurants to understand what will travel and what will not.

"We take so much from talking to locals about what is nostalgic to them, what separates their cuisine from other parts of the world, and then we create a canvas to start from," Kark said.

What sells where — and the Korean reversal

The results cut both ways, and Shake Shack tracks them precisely.

• The Fish Shack sandwich began as a fish-and-chips-style item in Hong Kong and spread to franchising partners across Asia, where seafood demand is strong. It has never appeared on the U.S. menu.
• The Uji Matcha Shake sells only in Kyoto, Japan, and uses a premium matcha the company says cannot even be procured in the United States — a sourcing constraint, not a marketing choice, that keeps the item market-exclusive.
• The Korean fried chicken sandwich flopped in Korea on its first run, but the Korean-inspired menu became a major U.S. hit when it launched there in 2021 and returned multiple times. Shake Shack's Korean partners then re-ran the item at home, and Kark said it became their most successful LTO the second time around.

That sequence — an item failing in its inspiration market, succeeding in the U.S., then winning in the original market on retry — shows how a domestic rollout can de-risk an international one, not just the reverse.

Consistency as the platform

The 90% core menu is what makes the 10% affordable to experiment with. The same Shack Burger and crinkle-cut fries run in the U.S., Dubai, Korea and beyond, which holds training, supply chain and food-cost complexity down while partners localize at the margin.

"Whenever you go to any of our Shacks in the world, you should be able to close your eyes and be in the first Shake Shack in Madison Square Park," Kark said. "[The core menu] makes up about 90% of our menu and then the other 10% or so are the thoughtful elements that will make our international partners blush a little bit when we tell them what we're going to work on together."

With the Dubai Shake proving a partner-sourced item can go national in the U.S. within a year, expect Shake Shack to keep mining its 20-country licensing network for the next import rather than developing it in New York.