How to improve your restaurant's menu profitability

There’s never been a better time to conduct a thorough audit of your menu. At a time when you need to make every order count and there are profitability challenges on all fronts, making sure your menu is optimised for success should be the first goal of every hospitality business.

We’ve all heard of upsizing and downsizing but today’s biggest menu trend is best described as rightsizing.

It’s the process of rigorously assessing your menu to ensure every item is making a contribution your business, removing dishes that are a drain on your operations.

Menus should work for us, not the other way around. That means they should be lean, profitable and adaptable. Optimising your menu requires time and discipline but should be undertaken regularly to take into account changing business conditions.

Today’s point-of-sale systems are more advanced than ever. But many Chefs and business owners still prefer to work on instinct. Ignoring the data that’s at your fingertips is one of the more costly mistakes you can make.

Of course, there’s more to data than simply extracting it. While your sales figures might show a particular dish to be a good seller, unless you unpack the data fully to factor in your costs, you’ll never know if that dish provides a good, average or poor margin.

Not sure where to start? We’ve created a useful guide that shows you how to use point-of-sale data to engineer a more profitable menu. Download the PDF guide and the accompanying Excel template here.

Your venue might be famous for a certain dish but perhaps it isn’t the most profitable item on your menu. Can you find ways to improve the margin you make on that dish?

For example, a review of ingredients might turn up a more efficient way to produce that dish. An easy win here could be starting with a pre-prepared sauce base to build custom flavours with a minimum of effort and expense.

Another way of looking at things is to consider ways to better promote your most profitable menu items. That could be through a menu re-design that makes your most lucrative dishes more prominent.

It’s smart business to adjust your pricing when your costs increase.

With ongoing pressure on food costs, ingredient shortages, and other factors impacting your profitability and bottom line, it’s important to carefully consider your pricing strategy.

Could you charge a dollar or two more for your top dishes to improve the impact they have on your bottom line?

While price increases are never popular, your customers will be more understanding than ever of your need to maintain a reasonable margin in this challenging environment.

An optimised menu also benefits your back-of-house. Streamlining your food offering improves speed and efficiency, also helping you get the most out of new or inexperienced staff. This is vital while the pandemic affects the predictability of staffing and recruitment.

Optimising your menu makes good business sense. It gives you the chance to cull dishes that are costly to produce, aren't selling well or don’t stand up to the rigours of delivery.

The process will also help you identify your most profitable dishes and work out what to promote to maximise your bottom line.