Region’s leading provider of restaurant menus joins forces with 36-year-old specialty printing company in Greer

Greer, SC, October 12, 2010:  CBS Distribution, Inc. of Greer has acquired Menu Works, a 16-year-old Greenville company providing graphic design, printing and marketing services to independent restaurants nationwide. The combined operation has 27 employees.

Menu Works will operate as a division of CBS Distribution, alongside the Creative DataProducts and Lazerdox divisions. Creative Data Products helps businesses and non-profits build brand loyalty through membership cards, key tags and personalized mailings of plastic postcards.

“The combined operations make a great fit,” said Pete Glennon, founder and president of CBS Distribution. “Both firms have in-house design, printing and marketing capabilities. And CBS has several products that can be added to what Menu Works presently sells.”

Menu Works, founded by a Clemson graduate student, was acquired in 1994 by Walter Ezell, who oversaw its development into the region’s leading menu specialist, supplying menus to more than 2,000 independent restaurants nationwide. Because of the company’s strong penetration into the Mexican restaurant market, more than a third of its staff are native speakers of Spanish.

Menu Works provides menu design, food photography, printing and menu covers. “As menu specialists, we know how to highlight the most profitable items on a menu, and help the restaurant operation build their profits,” said Ezell, who has joined the combined operation as product development specialist.

“The big chains have continued to increase market share at the expense of independent restaurants,” Glennon said. “We offer independents the marketing tools to fight back. Here at the new Menu Works, we have proven expertise in effective search engine optimization to drive people to a website. And our personalized direct mail marketing with die-cut wallet-sized discount cards has produced up to five times the return rate compared with traditional paper postcard mailings. We look forward to using these types of solutions to help our restaurant clients build their businesses.”

Menu Works has just completed the move to CBS Distribution’s expanded facility on Sunbelt Business Park Drive in Greer. In-house production capabilities include offset, 4-color digital, lamination, die-cutting and bindery.

CBS Distribution was founded in Greenville, S.C., in 1974 as a forms and label design and printing company. In the past decade, the company began manufacturing plastic cards, and now sells direct and through resellers in all 50 states and internationally.