Boost Sales by a Hundred Thousand Each Month with Extra Menu Items

Have you ever noticed that when you eat at a restaurant, most like to cheer for you to buy snacks. That’s because most Thai people prefer to focus on their main menu items and not cheering for extra menu items will reduce sales opportunities for restaurants. In reality, a single customer can order main menu items along with extra menu items or snacks, but this depends on the techniques that restaurants employ to encourage customers to order extra menu items.

Strategies for Boosting Sales Using Extra Menu Items

The first thing that restaurants have to do is set their targets on which extra menu items they want to sell each month and the percentage of sales increase from extra menu items. For example, if a restaurant sold fried dumplings at 5% of all income, the sales target from selling fried dumplings can be increased to 10% or 5% more than before. Now that we have our target for which menu item to promote and how much we want to sell, the next step is planning work and processes to meet our target.

🚩 For example, we want to boost fried dumpling sales from 5% to 10%.
♦ The restaurant’s total sales in August is 100,000 baht.
♦ The total sales of fried dumplings is 5% or 5,000 baht.
🚩 In September, to have fried dumpling sales reach the upped target of 10%, we have to sell up to 10,000 baht worth of fried dumplings in September. This is an increase from August by 5,000 baht.
🚩 The price per plate of fried dumplings is 50 baht. So we have to sell 200 plates of fried dumplings per month or an average of 7 plates per day.

Now that we know our target numbers, we can plan our sales increase, for example:
1. We can create menu media to set on tables.
2. We can instruct employees to help each other cheer for the sales of a certain number of plates per day. To prevent buck-passing, we should set targets for every employee who takes orders.

This is just an example of a single menu item. If in each month the restaurant sets sales-boosting targets for beverages and desserts as well, the restaurant will earn additional revenues from three categories of extra menu items each month. Moreover, you can create set menu items for customers as another way to increase sales from extra menu items. For example, if customers prefer to order single-dish meals such as noodles along with just one glass of water, try creating best-value sets such as 1 Nam Tok noodles + 1 plate of fried dumplings + 1 glass of herbal tea. The restaurant should cheer for set menu items especially if the restaurant makes its own herbal tea, because the cost for herbal tea is quite low and can return a lot more profits than plain water. However, in create set menu items, you should choose items that are easy to prepare without a lot of steps, and the price per set should not be lower than the customer’s price per head. Doing so will create opportunities for increased spending per person per table.

One idea that I would like you to think about is that customers who enter your restaurants are opportunities for income. It is up to the techniques employed by each restaurant to make customers more willingly pay for more than just a single menu item. In any case, the cheering for every sale has to be primarily based on customer satisfaction.