However often you change your food menus, whether it’s every 6 months or more frequently, there are nearly always new challenges to consider before going ahead and pressing the print button. As we know, these can include anything from environmental and economic to local factors that need to be taken into account to ensure that your menu works most effectively for your business. Following some straightforward processes at the planning stages will help you to produce a winning menu for you and your customers.
Planning
To be on time with your new menu launch, the easiest method is to work backwards from your launch date to give yourself enough time to pull all aspects of your menu together (a critical path). There will always be unforeseen circumstances that will make the deadlines through this process difficult to achieve, so try and build in some padding around your key milestone dates to account for such issues and to make sure you’ll still be ready for launch!
Costs and profit margins
Making money is obviously a key priority any time you’re thinking about changing the contents of your menu, but before you decide to add anything new, this is the time to do a full review of your existing menu.
Most of today’s POS systems have extensive reporting features that can give you a full picture of how your menu is performing. In particular, overall profitability should be the key that will help you identify if you’re achieving your financial targets. If you’re not, are there any particular dishes that are bringing your profit margins down or certain ingredients that have fluctuated in price and increased your costs? There will be some dishes that you are able to make a better profit from than others – the ideal is to create a range of affordable, quality products that delight customers and also give them great perceived value for money.
Best-sellers
There will be some dishes on your menu that will need to stay because of their popularity with a large number of your (regular) customers. From the customer’s perspective, it’s a huge disappointment when a favourite menu item has disappeared or worse still, had the dish’s quality downgraded in an obvious move to reduce costs. When it comes to adding new dishes, it’s worth asking yourself what they bring to your menu and how they meet your customers’ wants or needs. As part of your review, your best-selling dishes should remain in place when possible whilst you look to create a balanced menu of old favourites and new dishes.
Other important questions to ask yourself at the menu review stage:
Are there certain meals where there is more returned food wastage?
Is there a certain ingredient that is commonly left on the plate?
Are there any ways you can improve the quality of existing dishes?
Trends
At every menu review, there will be food and market trends that you could consider to have influence over your style of food. Can you easily incorporate these trends into your menu or are they irrelevant to your customers at the moment?
Sustainability and responsibility
These two themes continue to receive attention in the media as customers demand progress from businesses. Small steps can help to reassure customers of your dedication to improvement in these areas which can be as simple as labelling items on your menu, identifying where ingredients come from, whether they’re organic etc. and even communicating to customers the steps you are taking within your business towards recycling.
Since 2020, responsibility now requires even more consideration to be given to cleanliness and health and safety practices.
Reducing wastage
As part of wider regular checks on costs, looking at wastage – in particular kitchen wastage, is not only better for the environment but can also be a cost-saving exercise. Are there ingredients that can be used in multiple dishes? No orphan ingredients to be used. Do you have the flexibility to create a changing specials menu that can use up ingredients that may otherwise go to waste? Are you responsibly recycling your used cooking oil? Do you overproduce?
Take your learnings from lockdown…
2020’s enforced shutdown of hospitality businesses has made everyone re-evaluate the steps that can be taken to protect their business whilst also protecting customers. Have you considered the things that you can do differently from now on, such as to set yourself up to easily offer takeaways, online ordering etc.?
Our experienced team of development chefs at Infused Food have unrivalled expertise in all aspects of menu creation, development and review. Contact us to see how we can help you to deliver a fantastic food experience to your customers and at the same time improve your profitability.