How to Select Recommended Menu Items to Generate Profit for Your Restaurant

            One of the most important tools for a restaurant that will draw money from customers’ pockets is the menu. Believe it or not, a lot of restaurants still can’t use this tool efficiently, even though the right menu could actually generate profit for a restaurant if the restaurant knew how to manage the menu so it persuades customers to only select the items the restaurant wants to sell. We’re here to give you some advice in this article. What are you waiting for? Let’s take a look!

First, ask yourself this:  Have you ever gone to a restaurant, opened the menu and didn’t know what to order, even though the menu had ten pages full of options? In the end, you couldn’t decide and so chose your regular orders like phat kaphrao (stir-fried minced pork/chicken/seafood, basil leaves and chili), Thai-style omelette or tom yam (sour, spicy soup). This is a customer’s point of view. From the restaurant’s perspective, they just lost a chance to sell profitable items. Now go back and have a look at your own restaurant.  Is it the same?

            Planning and Choosing the Items for the Menu: For New Restaurants

A menu’s design is important. It has direct impact on sales, so you should plan it all out from the first to the last page.

If you want your menu to generate profit for your restaurant, you can learn how to design a menu, turn a dish you already offer into your restaurant’s best-selling dish and create a signature dish with our online course “Design Easy Menu Items to Earn Like a Pro”. Free sign up and free learning, click

Planning and Choosing the Items for the Menu: For Restaurants That Want to Improve Their Menu

            Every year, a restaurant should assess its menu items in order to make changes or revive it by cutting out some items, creating new dishes to replace them and shaking the cost to allow for better cost control and profit generation. This is the perfect time to improve your menu. Our advice is to use the BCG Matrix to manage it.

If you don’t know what his formula is or how to manage it, you can check out “Menu Engineering” and learn how to create a BCG Matrix to develop a menu that sells well and makes good profit to keep with your restaurant for a long time.

Analyze and find menu items that should be eliminated and then create even better ones.

The BCG Matrix fomula categorizes food into the following 4 groups:

1 Cash Cow: High sales, low profit.

2 Star:  High sales, high profit.

3 Dogs:  Low sales, low profit.

4 Question Marks: Low sales, high profit.

After categorizing food into these 4 groups, entrepreneurs will start to see what they have to do with each group. The group we recommend you pay special attention to when adding items to your menu is the star group with high sales and high profit and the question mark group with low sales and high profit. Then, what do you do? Let’s take a look at the next subject.

Arranging the Items on the Menu So Customers Only Choose Profitable Dishes

The menu page you need to have and give extra importance to is the recommended dishes page. This is the page that will boost your restaurant’s sales opportunities and profit, so emphasize the recommended dishes page. For the other pages, you can use same designing principles as the recommended dishes page. The arrangement and design strategies for the recommended dishes page are as follows:

1. The items you choose for the recommended dishes page should be more special than other pages in terms of the looks of the dishes, ingredients with a legend behind them, size/quantity, etc.
2. The items should be those that are available year-round and not ones that require seasonal, rare or special ingredients. Whenever you can’t find those ingredients, the menu items on this page will probably be covered with paper, which decreases your sales opportunities.

   

3. The majority of the items on this page should not take too long to make because if several tables order them at the same time and the items take 20 minutes to make, there’s a chance your kitchen will be overwhelmed.
4. You should offer an equal number of dishes from each station in your kitchen, such as frying, boiling, stir-frying, salad and grilling stations, to reduce the problem of too many orders for each station which can cause the food output to be slow.
5. 5. Offer a mix of medium- and high-price items so customers have options. Select items from the star (high sales, high profit) and question mark (low sales, high profit) groups. More importantly, consider the profit (baht per plate) because not all high-priced items mean high profit. For example, some dishes can sell for 250 baht with a 80-baht profit, but some dishes sell for 199 baht with a 99-baht profit. Which one would you choose to sell in this case? This is why it is very important to consider the cost.

   

6. Every item in this page should have a picture. As for presentation, you don’t have to make everything all neat. You can make the picture for any item you want to present especially bigger than the others and caption it with “Signature Menu” or some appetizing message like “Once in your life,” or “You’ve got to try it once in this lifetime.”
7. The recommended dishes don’t have to be limited to main dishes. Beverages or desserts can also be included in the recommended dishes page.
8. For restaurants that don’t have a lot of menu items to offer, switch from having a recommended dishes page to having a sets page. Group menu items to make saving sets that, after calculating the cost and selling price, are profitable.

And for the other pages, as we mentioned, you can use the same format as the recommended dishes page, especially the pictures that have a direct impact on decisions.  For anything you want to sell, make the pictures for them large and stand out in a way that makes them so appetizing that customers would have to order them.  Don’t forget to name them. Names are important. Some restaurants make up special names known only to the owner. If customers don’t know what the dish is and there’s no picture for it, they end up not ordering it.

So, if you want to give a dish a strange name, you need a picture for customers to look at. Font also has an effect. Make the font of any item you want to emphasize bold and stand out more than the other menu items. This is another way to mesmerizing customers into choosing the items. As for dishes that aren’t very profitable, such as water, etc., make them less noticable by using a small font and you don’t need to include their pictures.

Click to read other articles here:

• Limited Seating Capacity; How to Strategize to Boost Sales 
• Discounts for Better Profit! We Invite You to “Lean Your Whole Restaurant”; Reduce Chances for Financial Losses and Deficits 
• Meal Kits, a New Sales Opportunity for Restaurants 
• Save Costs, Create Cash Flow: A Restaurant’s Way to Survive