P.F. Chang’s China Bistro

Emerging from the kitchen bronzed in sweet ginger soy sauce, piping hot from the salamander, it rests on a bed of freshly sauteed spinach and baby corn. The fish is meltingly tender and so luxuriously rich that every bite makes my eyes roll up in my head.

Selected by: Mark Crowell
Principal culinologist, Culinex,
a Seattle-based consulting company,
Formerly director of food product
development for Starbuck’s

Check out the entire list of Clean Plate Award winners. 

"We're a value brand -- our customers are the type of people who would stop to pick a penny up on the street, and we wanted to honor that," says Tom Koeningberg, CMO of CiCi's Pizza. That was the reasoning behind the highly successful Penny Picker Upper promotion that the Coppell, Texas-based chain ran for six weeks last March.

CiCi's managers dropped one million specially stickered pennies around their 650 units nationwide-pennies that that could be redeemed for everything from a free drink to a free meal. The added kicker: every penny redeemed would be donated at face value to Big Brothers Big Sisters Club of America-a fact well-documented in advertising, POS and other communications. 

Net-net, says Koeningberg, the promotion generated significant sales bumps, as well as brand awareness and a $26,000 check for Big Brothers Big Sisters. It also created one valuable realization for future promotions: "Managers really got into going out and depositing pennies, but that took them out of their stores too much."