Is there too much on the menu at the restaurant? Share how to cut the menu to increase sales?

Normally, every year a restaurant should evaluate the menu items in the restaurant to make adjustments or Revise. Changing the menu has a good effect in terms of helping to control costs and increasing sales for the restaurant. But what are the considerations in cutting out which menus and keeping which menus? Let's follow along.

The more menus, the higher the cost. Which restaurants are like this? The menu has 10 pages, each page has 10-20 dishes. Customers flip through and can't decide what to order. There are so many. In the end, they decide on Pad Krapow, Rad Na, and just order the same dishes. The remaining dishes and ingredients that need to be purchased and used are all costs that the business owner has to pay in order to wait to sell. This is the reason why the menu needs to be revised every year.

To cut out menus that don't sell well to save on raw material costs, take time to focus on menus that sell well and have good profits to sell more, or develop new menus to replace the ones that were cut out to stimulate interest among customers.

Which menu items should be cut? Sales statistics will tell us. The Revise process will be very easy if the restaurant uses a POS (Point Of Sale) machine because it will be able to pull sales data from the first day of the year until the last day to see how many orders each menu item has each day and each month. This is the reason why modern restaurants should use POS. But if they don't use a POS machine, they must set up a sales recording system, collect each day's order bills, record them in an Excel file or in a book. Whichever method is fine, but make sure that there is a record of each day's sales so that there will be information to use in revising the menu.

Just looking at sales is not enough. We need to look deeper into the costs before we can decide to cut back. It's not easy to just look at which menu items sell well and which ones don't and then immediately cut them out. Because sometimes

A menu that sells well may not be a profitable menu. A menu that is sold rarely may be a menu that makes us more profitable than a best-selling menu. Therefore, the most important thing to consider when deciding to cut out or keep a menu is to calculate the cost of food for each dish. Once the entrepreneur has the cost of food for each dish and each menu, and knows the sales statistics for each menu, they will move on to the next step.

Learn professional techniques for calculating food costs per plate in a free online course. Click here.

The final step uses the BCG Matrix formula. Now that we know the sales data and the cost data for each dish, we can categorize the food items using both data using the formula.

BCG Matrix Foods are divided into 4 groups as follows: 1. Cash Cow: high sales, low profits. It sounds good, but when you look at the sales figures, you will find that this group is the type that works hard for nothing. Sales are so good that the profit is so little. What you need to do with this group of menus is to consider the cost of raw materials. 2 Star High sales, high profits This is the restaurant's star menu, but that doesn't mean you don't need to do anything with this menu group. One fine day, this menu group may be moved to another group. What you need to do is: Maintain the standard and quality. Develop new menus in this category to maintain the customer base. Most importantly, bring the menus in this category to be recommended so that customers will order regularly.

3 Dogs Low Sales, Low Profits This group should consider whether to keep it or not. If it is found that the ingredients used in this menu category are specific ingredients that cannot be used in other menu categories, that menu should be cut out to reduce the cost burden and prevent waste. 4 Question Marks Low sales, high profits are a menu group that loses opportunities for the shop. Entrepreneurs must analyze and find the reason why customers do not order. Because if more people order this menu group, the shop will make more profit.

It's not finished yet, we have to adjust the menu book to make it look "Wow" as well. And this is the step of making a menu revision. Now that we have cut out the menu and know which menu categories the restaurant has lost the opportunity to make a profit from, the next thing that needs to be adjusted is the menu book layout. We should make a recommended menu page, a best-selling menu page, showing only the pictures of the menu that we want to sell so that they stand out and are clearly visible.

Including making promotional media to be posted in front of the store and placed on tables to attract customers to remember and be interested in ordering. And most importantly, it is essential to teach employees to promote sales. Click here to read other articles.

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