3 Best Practices for Restaurant Menu Expansion

When it comes to expanding a restaurant’s menu, there are several important considerations to be taken into account. You need to know when to follow trends and when to ignore them, which new items will make the most bang for your buck and which will allow your restaurant to blossom into an ever more successful venture. Poorly thought out choices can have long-term business consequences. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when expanding your restaurant’s menu.

Be Discerning About the Menu Trends You Follow

Menu trends come and go on a regular basis, and not all are going to be a good fit for your brand. Choosing which are and which are not is a matter of assessing how well the trend fits with your overall brand image and appeals to your target demographic. If it fits with your overall brand strategy and is feasible to implement, go for it. Just remember that there’s no shame in letting a few of those trends pass on by, or in even trying to set a few trends yourself. Authenticity and individuality wins big in any business, but especially so in the restaurant industry. If you do decide to follow the trend, design what you offer around a quality experience for your guests, not the cost of implementation. There’s no sense in trying to do something specific if it’s not done right.

Allow Your Restaurant Menu to Evolve

While you don’t need to change your menu every time a new trend comes around, it is important to have flexibility and diversity built into what you offer. For example, there needs to be enough diversity in your menu that you’re not relying on just a few items to get you by in case of food shortages and price spikes.

Furthermore, your menu needs to be allowed to evolve. It could be that certain items or practices that worked ten years ago are no longer serving your restaurant business well today. Look for ways to be visionary with your brand image and discard those elements that no longer serve that purpose. If changes are made, strong leadership and communication skills are needed to ensure that team members, guests and franchisees are brought up to date and are on board with the new plan.

Listen to Your People. Look at Your Menu Data

It would be remiss to make menu changes without talking to your people and looking at your numbers. Your employees are your most reliable resource when it comes to decisions about menu expansion. They are on the ground with the guests daily, observing and serving their needs. The numbers will tell you what is most profitable to your business; your employees will tell you how your guests feel about what you offer, what impresses them the most and what they’d like to see more of. Some restaurants even go so far as to involve the guests’ decisions about new menu items directly. However you do it, utilize the people and information you have at hand to make the best determination for menu expansions.

Expanding your restaurant’s menu can be an exciting and profitable venture. If done well, the opportunity is there to attract new customers, increase sales and drive your brand’s overall expansion into the profitable restaurant business it is meant to be.

Potential Challenges to Restaurant Operators in 2014

Each year brings a new set of challenges to restaurant operators. While it’s impossible to predict every challenge a business might face, there are some that we can predict with a fair amount of certainty. Here’s the list of potential road bumps for 2014.

Health Care, Hourly Wages, and Garnering Valuable Knowledge Effect Restaurants

The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, popularly known as “Obamacare,” is set to take full effect in January, 2014. Most analysts are predicting that the act will create a two to four percent increase in costs to businesses with more than 50 employees. If your margin is more than 30 percent, this won’t have much effect, but since the foodservice industry’s average pretax profit is less than five percent, this could cause challenges and a focus on improving your profit margins is going to be critical to success.

The living wage debate flared up strongly in 2013, and is unlikely to go away any time soon. The odds that strikes, demonstrations, and discussions around increasing minimum wage will continue into 2014, is pretty good.

We have a ton of information at our disposal, but sorting what is valuable from what is not can be a major challenge. Vendors who can supply “Big Data” overviews and insights will surpass those who cannot garner such comprehensive information in 2014 and beyond. 

Restaurants must Deal with Increased Commodity Prices and New Consumer Trends

No one can predict how weather and climate change will affect growing conditions in 2014. Commodity prices are always an unpredictable, uncontrollable cost to restaurant operators. You can bet that the prices won’t be dropping though, so the best you can do is make certain that your controllable costs are optimized to give you the best leverage possible in the face of these uncertainties.

How diners are choosing and using foodservice is vastly different than it was even five years ago. There is a new set of expectations involving everything from what consumers want to see on the menu to which devices they can use to interact with your restaurant. Restaurant operators who wish to succeed in 2014 and beyond must keep a keen ear to these new trends and expectations and make regular judgment calls about whether or not to follow suit.

Building Leaders Rather than Employees for the New Age in Restaurants

You can’t predict your company’s future, but you can give it the best chance for success possible by hiring and developing people to be leaders rather than just employees. Picking people based on competencies that were valued ten years ago isn’t going to do much for you now or in the future. To best succeed in 2014, ask yourself what competencies are going to be needed now and in the future and start focusing on hiring and developing your employees into the leaders that they will need to be in this day and age.

Your company will have a better chance for success if you plan for contingencies and educate yourself to make the best choices for your business as possible. Being average is easy, but being awesome takes some work – so make a plan for how you are going to address upcoming challenges and get started now!

What Today’s Consumers Want: Personable, Human Experiences and a Reason to Give Loyalty

Technology can have a wonderfully effective application in the restaurant industry. In fact, we explored a few such applications in a recent post. However, before we get too excited about installing all the latest tech advances, it’s important to keep in mind that technology can also create an experience that is rather cold and impersonal for the consumer, which can actually end up inhibiting your relationship rather than building it.

People Want Personable Experiences, Not Cold Transactions

In fact, according to the Futures Company, 81% of today’s consumers say that companies are becoming too inhuman and impersonal when it comes to connecting with their customers. If you think for a moment about your standard interactions in the checkout line of any given store, you’ll see an obvious example of this in action. How often do you even make eye contact with your clerk, let alone make any personable conversation? Most of us are so busy answering the numerous questions we get from the credit or debit card machine in front of us that we barely even notice the person facilitating the exchange.

The important thing to recognize is that even though people appreciate the conveniences technology has to offer, they still want to make a human connection with the businesses they interact with.

Don’t Let Your Restaurant Fall Prey to ‘Transactional Coldness’

While the restaurant industry has some inherent guards against this phenomenon of ‘transactional coldness’ due to the fact that at least some level of personal interaction is generally required to take orders and deliver food, this effect can still creep in if you’re not on guard. Watch out for over-stressed or under-engaged staff slipping into robotic scripts, even on greetings and goodbyes.

Guests are also getting quite sensitive to being given a ‘sales pitch’ which can feel like you’re just trying to get more money out of them. Instead, upselling is best done only as a result to understanding the needs and expectations of the guest.

This need for a personal connection extends to employees as well. Staff wants to connect with supervisors on a personal level as well, and facilitating this connection drastically improves an employee’s sentiment about the business – which, in turn, facilitates the consumer experience at your establishment.

Technology and Good Old Fashioned Hospitality Should Co-Exist in the Restaurant

While technology can be useful on the levels of gathering better data about your consumers and staying connected with them when they aren’t physically in your establishment, it’s not a substitute for truly listening and learning about the people who are supporting your business. That goal can only be achieved by good old fashioned hospitality techniques such as knowing your customers by name, greeting them with eye contact, a warm handshake, and sincerely trying to make a personal connection with them.

The bottom line is that it is the quality of your interaction with your customer that makes or breaks your relationship with them. The ideal is to have a successful marriage between the conveniences of technology and the personable feeling of warm hospitality. Businesses that can make this marriage successful are then able to leverage the advantages of both worlds.