Tips for choosing a menu for delivery food sales that beginners should know! Let the shop sell well and deliver directly to customers on time.

For beginners or restaurants that have never done delivery before and need to start doing delivery during the lockdown according to Covid measures, today MHA has tricks for choosing a delivery menu so that the shop sells well, can cook and deliver food on time and create satisfaction for customers until they become regulars of our shop. Starting with

1. Put yourself in the consumer's shoes. If it were you, how often would you order this menu? 

Many restaurants must have made mistakes because they thought their menu looked delicious and customers would definitely order again. But that is just our perspective, because we have to promote our own food anyway. Try to let go of that feeling for a while. Try to think that if we were the customers, how would we decide to choose food? For what reason? What are the conditions for ordering food? Try to think of 5-10 menus that you are confident are the most delicious. Then see which menus are easy to deliver. Then test with people around you first to see which menus are worth ordering and which of our menus are likely to be ordered frequently.

2. Limit the menu in the restaurant. The more menus there are, the more disruption the back-office kitchen system will have.

Imagine 20 boxes of food with 20 different menus. Each box has different details, including ingredients, seasonings, etc. When we just started, our team was small. Let's imagine that if a customer orders 10 different boxes, how long will it take to create the complete menu before it is sent to the rider and delivered to the customer? It's different from eating at the restaurant, where we can gradually serve the customers.

Sample images from Zen @Lineman store

Therefore, we should limit the menu at the shop, not to have too many varieties. Focus on bringing 1 ingredient to expand the menu into a variety of similar dishes, such as grilled salmon with salt, which can be used to make another menu as grilled salmon with soy sauce, pork yakisoba can be expanded into chicken yakisoba, seafood yakisoba, or vegetarian yakisoba. This will reduce the steps in preparing each ingredient, deliver it to customers faster, and also reduce the workload of kitchen staff.

Sample images from Zen @Lineman store

And if you want to increase sales per bill, you can organize a promotional food set or in the delivery app, we can create an add-on item for that menu that can be eaten together or it can be a snack, such as grilled salmon with salt. You can add on items such as wakame seaweed, miso soup, steamed eggs, takoyaki, gyoza, etc. Or you can bring a drink menu such as iced green tea, mineral water, coke, sprite, etc. Or in the case that customers order via Line directly from our shop, when the customer orders the desired menu, before closing the sale, we can offer a snack menu or a drink that can be eaten together, such as "Would you like some karaage chicken to eat as a snack? There is a promotion now for a discount of ...." Don't forget to brief the admin staff in this part well.

Want to design a menu to win over customers? Find a signature menu for your restaurant that looks delicious from the moment you see the menu sign. We recommend a free online course on how to design a menu to win over customers and generate income like a pro. Suitable for restaurant owners who want to create new menus or want to adjust your existing menu to become a best-selling menu for your restaurant. 3. Must be delivered within 30 minutes. This is important because if it were a customer, they would definitely want to eat hot food without having to reheat it. Including the issue of food safety, always keep in mind that customers expect good quality food, even if it is a delivery. The food must be hot. When opening the box, it is still hot, like eating food that has just come out of the oven. In addition to cooking, the packaging must also be good. Some food boxes cannot retain heat. Suitable for short trips, such as buying from a shop to take home or to work. However, for delivery, the box must be strong because it must be stacked with other food boxes. And must retain the heat temperature for a certain period of time. The packaging of food must not spill or make a mess, especially food that can flow. It must not spill out and mix with other food in the same box. Additional must be put in a bag and the bag must be tied neatly before packing in the box again. It is recommended to invest in quality packaging that is strong and can retain heat well in order to maintain the quality of the food so that it reaches the customer's hands at its best. If you have some capital, make a shop sticker and put it on the packaging. Or if you have enough capital, order packaging that is your own for your shop. It is considered marketing using packaging. More : Study about packaging at Choose Delivery Packaging that is Convenient for the Shop and Comfortable for the Customer and How to Create Branding through Food Packaging, Add Value, Create Difference, and Make Customers Remember Our Shop. 4. Conduct testing before opening a real store. If everything is planned, try testing it for 2-3 days first. Start with acquaintances. You can do a full test, which means receiving the full menu that you can make from acquaintances, relatives, or friends. And see how long it takes you, from the order-taking process, cooking, to delivery to customers. Try delivering yourself or hire a motorcycle taxi first. Then see if, in the worst case, there are too many orders, you can’t make it in time, and the delivery is delayed until the food is all gone. If the food is already cold, is the taste of the food we made acceptable? How many minutes are delayed? Are there enough ingredients each day? Etc. Always remember that good food sales planning must be pessimistic first. Don’t be idealistic because this is business. Data from the store opening test will help us see the weaknesses of the store more. Use it to decide what elements to add to make the delivery food store as complete as possible, such as whether to add assistants or cut out some menus to make it ready in time. And you have to calculate whether this food sales test will make enough profit to sell in the long run if it actually sells. More : For more details, you can study this section from Food Delivery Success Strategy. Summary of interesting highlights from 3 experts at Smart Restaurant Plus.

Now let's take a look at a case study on choosing a delivery menu.

First case A shabu buffet restaurant, customers usually eat at the restaurant, never have delivery service. But when delivery is required, it is sold as a set meal. The set includes meat, vegetables, dipping sauce, and glass noodles. It is a small shabu set that can be boiled in a small pot. But when surveying customers, it was found that some customers do not have a stove or electric kettle. Therefore, there are limitations in bringing meat and vegetables to boil until cooked. Therefore, they cannot order a small shabu set often. Therefore, the restaurant added a dry roast duck noodle menu that can be eaten immediately. And a shabu menu that boils everything until cooked. Separate the soup and dipping sauce for customers to heat up in the microwave conveniently. As for the small shabu set, it targets customers who have a stove or electric kettle at home. The second case Made-to-order restaurant. Normally, customers will come to order food at the restaurant with about 20 menus to choose from. When it comes to delivery, we choose to take out the 10 best-selling single-dish menus in the restaurant that are suitable for delivery and can be made quickly as the recommended lunch menu. We sell them on the restaurant's delivery platform and social media, and add tom yum and clear soup menus to the dinner set for home delivery. The third case. A newbie wants to make steak menus to sell online. The owner of the shop is capable of making steak in many styles with side dishes. Therefore, he chose 5 steak menus: spicy chicken steak, black pepper pork steak, pork chop steak, beef steak, and salmon steak with side dishes of vegetable salad and French fries. He added additional menus to be French fries and tuna salad. After testing with a sample group, it was found that these 7 menus had the most orders and could be made in time if there were 35-50 orders per day. They could be delivered within 25 minutes within 25 kilometers from home. He also made a promotion to arrange a special price steak set. For newbies, he would like to study from experts and additional case studies on the MHA website as follows:

• 5 Tips! How to do Food Delivery to survive, make a profit, and not go into the red

• How to build a street food delivery brand of 'Kheang', successfully expanding to over 80 branches in 2 years

• Revealing the strategy for “selling well” on the Robinhood food app, with the idea of ​​not collecting GP, to meet the needs of small-scale restaurants

Photo credit:

• Lineman