What should you do when you don’t care to eliminate menu items for fear of declining sales?
As one of the many questions and concerns of lots of restaurant owners when they discover that some of their menu items are not generating as much sales volume as they should and are becoming burdens due to their high costs such as in regularly purchasing ingredients for them every day, restaurant owners are afraid that eliminating their menu items will cause a drop in sales volume due to boredom and departures of customers resulting from fewer menu choices. For anyone facing this situation, we have some recommendations to offer.
Before all else, we would like to make a mention relating to the article.” “Does your restaurant have too many items on the menu? We’ll share with you how to trim the menu to boost your sales!”Normally, restaurants should already review their menu items every year in order to eliminate the ones that are not selling well in order to save on ingredient cost and prepare sales promotion strategies for menu items that sell well or that have the potential to generate a lot of profit, as well as to develop new menu items to replace those eliminated in order to create new sensations in customers.
That being said, a lot of people worry and think ahead that eliminating menu items will cause customers to order less due to fewer available options or that customers will disappear altogether. We would like to tell you right away that, for any decisions that you make, if you make them based on facts, you won’t have any cause for concern; instead, doing so will also help you make plans to increase your profits.
So, on whether or not you should eliminate a menu item, you should go back and take a look at your sales information to see how much of each menu item was sold each month and whether or not it is worth your investment. According to principles, if a menu item has a very low monthly order percentage, you should eliminate it. To have this sales information, your restaurant has to record its sales. If any restaurant uses a point-of-sale (POS) machine, things will be a lot easier, because it will be possible to print past sales data for immediate analysis.
We recommend looking back at the sales report for at least three months in order to determine which menu items should be eliminated. The first menu items to be eliminated should be those with sales figures below 5% per month, meaning that fewer than five customers out of 100 order them, because the data shows that customers still probably won’t order them frequently even if you retain them and that eliminating them won’t cause problems.
One benefit of eliminating unprofitable menu items from the restaurant is that, in addition to improving cost management, it helps customers focus more on the menu items that the restaurant wants to sell, thereby improving sales.
So, eliminating menu items does not naturally translate to a drop in sales. On the contrary, doing so can help the restaurant generate more, and we repeat, more profits from the remaining menu items, which will be those with good sales statistics, and the increase in profits will also come from cutting the cost of some of your ingredients.
Furthermore, eliminating menu items does not mean that you can’t introduce new ones. The restaurant can develop new menu items to replace those eliminated. The new menu items should be ones that are consistent with the restaurant’s concept and target groups, because the chances that menu items designed based on the restaurant’s concept and target groups will not sell are very low. The menu items that don’t sell well often are those invented based on the notion that they should sell, before any actual homework was done first.
Precautions for Inventing New Menu Items
- You should use ingredients and seasonings that are readily available and usable with other menu items, because highly-specific ingredients, in addition to increasing cost, might be unavailable at times, making it occasionally necessary for you to halt your sales.
- The menu items should not increase the work burden of the kitchen such as by requiring many preparation steps or a lot of time; otherwise, other menu items might be impacted.
In conclusion, restaurants have to practice menu engineering by analyzing which menu items sell well, which don’t and which need to be eliminated in order to plan sales-boosting tactics to meet targets, and restaurants should revise or create new menu items about every 4-6 months. You can learn more about menu engineering for free in the course “How to Design Captivating Menu Items for Generate Revenues Like a Pro” taught by Ajarn Tai Pornchai Nitmethawong. You can click to register and learn for free now.
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