Opening a restaurant in a good location does not necessarily mean it will sell well! Case study: Food Times Restaurant

Opening a restaurant in a good location does not mean that it will sell well! If your restaurant does not have a point to attract customers to enter the restaurant, the same as Food Times, a homemade Japanese restaurant. It is a small shop on Dinso Road, near Satri Witthaya School, which is a community area and a source of foreign tourists. However, there are few customers in the shop, or sometimes people think that it is a coffee shop.

From talking to Ms. Rungnapa Mangkornphit, the owner of Food Times, it was found that the problem encountered was the storefront, which was not outstanding or eye-catching enough to make people want to enter the store, even though the location of the store was in a good area and there were many menus to choose from at affordable prices. It was a waste of the opportunity to gain both regular and occasional customers, especially during the day when there were almost no customers in the store. Expert chefs from Makro HoReCa Academy came up with a plan to solve the problem within 48 hours. The summary of Food Times's problems is as follows:

Problems during the day when there are few customers
The advantage of Food Times is that it is located near a school and community, including a temple not far away. However, most customers tend to visit the restaurant in the evening because it is the end of school hours, unlike during the day when there are very few customers. The expert chef recommends that the restaurant do online marketing to increase channels for customers to access the restaurant, such as using Google My Business by pinning the restaurant to clearly know the location of the restaurant, making it easier for customers to find the restaurant, including creating Line@ to maintain the customer base. When there is a new menu or promotion, customers can communicate immediately. In addition, the expert chef recommends that the restaurant make boxed meals to supplement income during the day because the location of the restaurant is not far from offices and government agencies.

Therefore, designing a boxed lunch menu for banquets and seminars is an interesting thing, including designing a set of food for offering to monks, which also increases the chance of selling well. However, the shop itself must design a menu with a variety of food items and prices to give customers more choices, which the packaging is also important. If it is designed beautifully and meets the needs of use, such as arranging a package as a set of food offerings, it will create interest, helping to attract customers to want to order more food, or as a Take Away food set box with the shop's name prominently displayed, when customers buy it to take home, it is another way to promote the shop.

People walking past the shop can't tell what kind of shop it is.
Customers who enter the shop often misunderstand that Food Times is a cafe selling coffee, causing customers to walk out of the shop. Or some people do not dare to enter the shop because they cannot tell what the shop sells. From the Makro HoReCa Academy team that went to inspect the shop, it was found that Food Times lacked to create a distinctive feature of the shop, causing customers to not know that the shop actually sells Japanese food. Therefore, making the shop's shop stand out will help create a good image for the shop. Creating a Japanese atmosphere in the front and inside the shop by finding additional decorations in some important areas will make customers immediately understand that it sells Japanese food in particular.

The menu looks unprofessional.
Unfortunately, the menu of the restaurant is diverse and many dishes are interesting to order and try. However, the menu booklet makes the food look unappetizing, so customers order some familiar dishes. This can be solved by taking beautiful pictures of the new menu. The restaurant owner can take pictures by himself with his mobile phone. Just knowing some simple photography principles will allow him to create beautiful pictures of food, including placing pictures in the menu. Which menu is the highlight of the restaurant? There should be a picture in the booklet where it can be clearly seen. Most importantly, it must look delicious. And since Food Times is a tourist attraction for foreigners, making a menu in both Thai and English in the same book will help foreign customers feel confident that the price is not overpriced and will increase foreign customers because they can read the menu by themselves.

Are you ready to transform your store for the better? Watch the 48-hour mission
Food Times Shop Transformation from Makro Horeca Academy Expert Team Click to watch now.