About Tocumbo Ice Cream
Tocumbo leverages Omnivex’s Creative Services team to bring life to their Digital Menus
Tocumbo Mexican Ice Cream is a chain of restaurants in San Diego, California, specializing in Mexican ice cream and desserts. It takes its name from a small town in Mexico named, coincidentally, Tocumbo, considered to be Mexico’s ice cream capital, where 90% of the population are involved in making ice cream. With traditional flavors that may be new to many people, from Nopal (cactus!) to guanabana, or soursop, and many, many more. Omar Ramirez and his family opened Tocumbo in 2004, and now operate four locations around San Diego.
The Scope
When Omar approached Omnivex about deploying a Moxie solution for the menus in his restaurants, he already had a digital signage solution in place, but felt it was missing something. He remembered seeing a Moxie solution at Digital Signage Expo that impressed him, and contacted Omnivex.
Omar takes great pride in his brand representation, and wanted his digital menus to really make an impact when people walked into his restaurants. He wanted everyone to know they were walking into a best-in-class establishment.
After a brief conversation with the creative team at Omnivex, a design brief was formed and Tocumbo’s menu redesign was underway.
The Solution
Tocumbo provided our creative team a large number of quality images of their menu items and social media postings – let’s just say the pictures left us trying to figure out how to convince everyone this was a project we really needed to complete onsite.
Their social media game is on point, and they’ve created quite a fun brand presence on Instagram. We wanted to convey the same fun, polished look onsite for their menus, something that complemented each restaurant's decor, which matched the bright and vibrant social media vibe. Omar also wanted some motion graphic animations created that would take over the entire screen, as a screen saver but also as a fun pop-up display.
The restaurants have one of two screen layouts, each controlled by one player – 4 or 6 screens, in two sets of either 2 by 1 or 3 by 1, with the screens wrapping around a corner. Two layouts needed to be designed – one for the restaurants with the 3840 pixel by 1080 pixel layouts, and one for the restaurants with the 5760 pixel by 1080 pixel layouts
After a few rounds of design concepts and feedback, a look was decided upon and the menu boards were created in Moxie. Each section of the menu was laid out, with each menu item, description and price data-bound to the Moxie DataPipe, allowing Tocumbo to add/remove or change menu items and prices as they see fit, with changes instantly displaying on the menu boards.
Once the layouts were created, they were inserted into a Moxie Playlist, and set to display for a specified length of time. Embedded inside this playlist was another playlist designed to play one full-screen video after a set time, then display the menu screens again.
The videos were created using 3D renders of Tocumbo’s logo, particle effects representing ice cream sprinkles being poured out, and motion graphics highlighting the company’s products, with each video conveying a sense of fun and excitement. Each video plays full screen for anywhere from 5 seconds to 15 seconds, then the playlist displays the menus again for 10 minutes.
The Results
The results were exactly what Omar was looking for –professionally designed screens with video that ably represent the Tocumbo brand and encompasses what the restaurant is all about. He's extremely happy with his switch to Omnivex Moxie, and is planning on implementing new videos and content through the years to highlight holidays and promotional items.
