Menu development...the what, the why, the how and the when!
Menu development is a critical aspect of running any successful restaurant. A menu is not just a list of items to be prepared and served for your hungry guests, but is an essential tool for conveying the restaurant's style, concept, and brand…whilst also either driving profit or reducing cost!
We asked our consulting team to share some of their wisdom on this particularly hot topic…
Developing your menu can be quite the undertaking…how do you know when it's time to make such a change?
Any menu development should be led first from a business goal. And primarily that would either be to drive sales, or reduce or stabilise costs.
If we focus on the sales side, really the only ways you can grow sales is to either:
Attract new customers
Increase the frequency of visit of your customers
Increase the spend or tab or average transaction value of the customers when they come in.
Generally with any new development aimed at increasing sales, it's important to understand what the goal specifically in each of those three areas is going to be? So examples of these could be, introducing a Christmas sandwich to the menu which is aimed at generating new visits over a specific period of time (and customers who wouldn’t normally buy from you…). Alternatively if you’re looking to increase frequency of visit, you would want to look at adding different sides, or salads, or even kids meals. The more controlled variety on your menu, the more you are able to tempt repeat business during a working week.
“Taking a product led approach to menu development can often result in rushed and unplanned processes…”
What are the most common pitfalls you see when people are trying to develop their menu?
Being product led, as opposed to business goal led is the most common mistake we see being made when it comes to menu development.
To make a new menu or new menu item work, you do really need a marketing message behind it. How are you going to drive it? How are you going to use it to get to the business goal…? Taking a product led approach to menu development can often result in rushed and unplanned processes involving poor marketing and general execution issues!
The other one we see happening a lot is undertaking development without having cost and operations in mind all the way through….there is nothing worse than getting down the road with a particular product to then find out your costing isn’t going to work or your supply chain isn’t going to support it…additionally its all well and good having a great costing product, but what happens if its a complete nightmare to execute regularly?!
If we’re talking about cost control…obviously you can cut the size, you can cut portions, you could replace ingredients with cheaper ingredients and things like that, but actually what you end up doing is devaluing your item which can often be transparent and quite noticeable.
Often, it's better to just start from scratch and say ‘You know what, I want to make a dish that hits this price point. I don't want to take a dish that's not hitting a price point and try to make it work’...which is usually an impossible task to get right...
We call it ‘death by 1000 cuts’ … if you have a whole menu of things, and you take five grams of salt out of everything, or if you sell burgers and you’re going from eight to seven and a half oz of beef or going from 50 grams to 40 grams of cheese…Not one of those decisions is really going to make any major cost differences but by the time you've done it all, what you're left with is usually an inferior product. And that's chasing something that you'll never win. Instead, set your target, and build things that work to that target as opposed to going above and then trying to scale back.
So you’ve done all the hard work…how do you ensure a successful roll out of your new menu?!
Essentially any successful launch needs to be, in some way, good for the customer, good for the business and good for the staff. If you can define how it will be all of those things and get buy-in from the team you will be in a very good position to roll something out.
Bearing in mind it can’t be something generic…the common one we see a lot, that doesn't work, is the idea that ‘It's good for the staff because if we make more money, then they get paid more’...that's very conceptual and often doesn't really end up being the case…
But a good example of how to pitch a new product or menu (and bearing in mind this is a very simple example here) is ‘we've got this new product which is good for the customer because it's really delicious, and it's good for the business because it's actually 5% cheaper and better than the product before, and for the staff it removes an annoying production step, or the prep is easier etc’...if you nail this, whilst making sure it's well planned out in terms of training and practice time etc. then you will guarantee staff buy in.
Marketing is equally important, but can be the most challenging for an under-resourced restaurateur. Unfortunately you can have a great product that seems to check all the right boxes, but if you haven't communicated it well enough, it can very easily die a quiet death…
“Overall, your approach should be - define a business goal, move on to menu engineering and then look at product development”
And so who should be leading all of this…?
This kind of thing in small businesses is very often driven by the owners or founders… because generally speaking that's how the business is started in the first place…they have some sort of idea or a menu and build from there. So any kind of menu change typically starts with the top.
Any final words of wisdom to share?
Where most of these things start is more along the lines of menu engineering and menu design as opposed to product development.
If we focus back on the importance of recency, frequency and monetary value of your menu offering…Everything on the menu has to be doing a job. Sometimes what you need to be doing is looking at the menu as a whole, look at how it performs, and see if you have enough products to be ticking each of those boxes properly…and if they're being executed well.
McDonalds are the all time champs at this! They have a menu that drives you towards up-sells constantly, it has meals, it has things for every different type of visitor. They have their day parts covered, it's very clear when you go into a McDonald's, what you should be doing…it's not confusing at all!
Recently LEON are also great examples of a very well designed menu. There's something for if you want to be indulgent, if you want to be indulgent but healthy, if you want to be really healthy, if you want something small, something big…they tick all the boxes and lay it out very nicely.