Organization

Customer hand-held and menu board organization is an art, or is it something more technical?  This section discusses the importance of food item categories and placement on menus, along with several resources a restaurant owner can use to create profit-minded menus.  In our opinion, not enough thought goes into profitability when organizing a menu.

 

Up-Selling

This section is tied closely to Menu Organization.  What is up-selling?  Is it getting your customers to add items to their order?  Yes, that’s part of it but its also steering your customers to the higher profit items. It's your staff being on the same “profitability” page as you are on revenue generation.  The information  provided in this section can have a significant impact on your sales.

 

Eat-in / Take-Out

Restaurants that make it easy for a customer to order, pick-up and consume the food off-site have a greater reach into the market (your community).  If you are planning to scale your restaurant business to other locations, trying to attract new investors, or interested in selling your business, we present one set of numbers that will play a big role in profit potential and ultimately the interest level. 

 

BULK FOOD ORDERS

This section discusses various methods of selling bulk food. In our experience, lack of careful planning and pricing configurations can cost a business dearly when selling items in bulk. Also, once you start selling bulk food items, your customers may respond favorably and that could lead to other things, like catering and pre-packaged food possibilities. 

 

MEAL KITS and cold cases

This section discusses packaging issues and kitchen advantages of providing meal kits and prewrapped foods. If you do prepackaged food in cold cases, we discuss what additional inspections you may need beyond the typical restaurant version. 

 

BEVERAGES and Desserts

Beverages can be high-profit margin menu items. In this section, we discuss including beverages as part of food orders (specials), offering free refills vs sizes, displaying the beverages you offer, pricing strategies, containers (plastic vs. paper vs. glass), types of containers, popular brands and the equipment needed.  We also discuss bottled vs. tap beer, menu simplicity and POS considerations. Additionally, what type of desserts you offer can have a big impact of food cost and profitability.