Is your menu a roadblock to success?

Your food offering is what drives foot traffic into your venues. But is your menu helping or hindering your success?

Think about how often you’ve had to navigate messy menus with confusing titles and font sizes so small they require a magnifying glass to read.

As the first port of call, your menu should be easy to read and simple to understand. Bring in professionals to help you design a menu. Test the final version with your members and learn how menu engineering can help deliver the best results.

One common issue I often is that many menus are just too extensive.

I’ll say that again: many menus are too large to be profitable.

How so, you ask?

In a nutshell, the larger the menu, the more the prep that is required. When there is more prep required, it means more labour is needed to stock the menu.

Beware of the dreaded “out of stock” menu item, often caused by the lack of prep time. In many cases, this starts just 30 minutes before service.

It’s important to review your sales data. This can quickly identify items that sells versus what’s on the menu because “it has to be”. Fine-tuning your menu ensures each item sells evenly. This will greatly reduce unnecessary waste and labour.

Don’t get sentimental about your favourite menu item. If it isn’t performing, take it off the menu. Remember, you can always add specials to add variety to the menu. This can be adjusted daily, based on the staff you have available.

Most importantly, cost your menu correctly. Some menu pricings simply don’t make sense –high-cost items are sold too cheaply. If they are intended to be loss leaders, where’s the cost analysis to back that up?

Accurate costing, backed by double-checked portion control, will likely surprise you. Try this exercise: grab a handful of ingredients, roughly spoon the mash and overfill the chips. Weigh everything and add 10 per cent for variables and wastage. Is this the number you were expecting?

Labour is tight and expensive, droughts and floods are driving up costs, energy costs are rising, so costing has never been more critical. Your menu is the vehicle to service it correctly.

Here are some other practical tips when designing your menu:

• Skip trendy descriptions or words no one understands;
• Keep pricing simple and clear – use price anchoring to draw customers to higher prices;
• Make sure your starters sound appealing and your desserts appealing to tastebuds; and
• Train your staff to upsell – it can boost sales by 10-14 per cent.