There can be a high risk factor in rolling out a new menu, unless it’s for the right reasons or unavoidable. Poor or low sales are often a reason for changing a menu, so start with restaurant accounting analysis before making any drastic moves. There can be other reasons for a downturn in revenue, but start with the critical factor of understanding your bottom line.
If a menu is based on seasonality and provenance, it is perfectly normal to change your menu/or parts of it with the seasons, ie. about every 3 months or so. Presumably you will have built your business and advertised the fact that you utilise fresh local produce that is in season, and your happy band of customers know this and expect to see those changes. If this is one of your USP’s, you should not have a problem. Customers should, and would be coming to you for this very reason, looking forward to the new season’s changes. But remember to keep your website and promotional material up to date.
Tip: Use this opportunity to add a slight price increase. Customers are unlikely to notice a few cents increase, but they would notice a full dollar!
Never knee jerk – just because a new competitor comes on the scene, offering nearly identical menu dishes, whether similarly priced or cheaper. Monitor your competitor for 4-6 weeks if you can withhold the temptation, use ‘mystery diners’ to taste their food, and check out reviews on their restaurant. It could be that any surge of business for them is only temporary ‘as the new kid on the block’, and will soon settle down. If a downturn in your business becomes evident after that period of time, you may need to take action with your menu. Hopefully you have a regular customer’s database – chat with them when they come to your restaurant and try to establish if they have eaten there, and what they think, in a casual way. Your regular faces are important to you and a great help in discovering information about other eateries.
What would you do if your chef announces they are leaving? This could be another reason for thinking you should change your menu. Firstly, try to establish why they are leaving (the honest reasons). If they are genuinely moving out of the area, or moving for shorter and more sociable hours, there is no need to ‘fear’ that they will be taking your customers with them. You also need to establish that your chef has left his ‘recipe’ book and diagrams behind – ie. how the dish is made, presented and positioned on a plate, so that his successor can be sure of replicating the dish successfully. Ensure that you get a smooth hand over, preferably a couple of weeks for the new chef to bed in. Re-establish your stars on the menu – it is imperative that there is continuity on that front. Equally so, don’t let your chef convince you to change the menu, purely because they are ‘bored’ and feel that their creative juices are drying up. Listen to your chef by all means, but never take a winning dish off the menu.
Do not change your menu in a state of panic – your regular customers and your star purchasers will want to see continuity, and certainly do not raise prices. Ease the new chef in gradually, tell each and every customer about his/her arrival, and systematically introduce new dishes over a period of time – better as ‘specials’ to evaluate their potential as a new dish on the menu. Then and only then, think about a menu change.
The only big reason for changing your menu dramatically at this stage would be to rid yourself of the ‘dogs’. Dishes that do not sell have no place on your menu, but hopefully you don’t have too many of those to worry about, or you have already dispensed with them. If you do roll out new additions to your menu, make sure you are geared up for them, and that they appear when you have said they would. If you have ‘hyped up’ your customers for the arrival of a new chef and new dishes, don’t disappoint them, they will only be disgruntled. Always have practice runs on the new menu additions, to establish the onus upon equipment, the cost of production and the cost of labour to produce the dish.
There are many factors that could cause you to change your menu engineering, but the main criteria is not to be forced into making changes too soon. A few other potential problems are:
- Your suppliers no longer produce the quality you want for the same price, or the quality has diminished
- Certain items have become non-cost effective, due to market prices increasing overall
- Labour required to produce the dish is too heavily weighted
- Heavy usage of certain equipment is proving non-cost effective and causing an inordinate amount of repair/renewal bills.
Regular checks on your costings and your weekly sales reports will alert you to potentially dangerous problems. Use your accounting and restaurant bookkeeping service to its full potential, this valuable source of data output will show your up and down times sales-wise, your best sellers, your poor sellers and those in between that have a life, but are not performing to their full potential. Use this information weekly and across a one month period, to ascertain your future planning. It is the key to running a successful operation. If you are a new restaurant, this pattern is vital in the opening months and should be continued throughout the life of your business.
CFO Business Growth Solutions, LLC provides Nationwide Restaurant Accounting, Restaurant Bookkeeping Services, Menu Engineering, POS Business Intelligence, Menu Writing and CFO Restaurant Consulting Services. For more information go to http://www.cforas.com
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