HotOperator® Restaurant Menu Builder

Internet Use For Business Marketing

It would be great to think that when you build a web page for your business that people will automatically spend all day looking at it. But the reality is, most web sites get very little traffic. That’s mostly because people don’t use the web to look at web sites for companies unless there is something there that draws them in.

 According to a recent Nielsen report, people are on the web for social networks, blogs and to a large extent internet pornography. In fact 35.1% spend time in the “other” category of the study, which was where they put internet porn, but you get the idea. And the social networking and blogs was the second largest category.

 So what should be on your web site? If you have pictures of naked people, especially good looking naked people, it’s pretty easy to get traffic. But if you’re not in that business, you’ll have to work a little harder.

 Start with a blog and make it relevant. In this case relevance has to do with making articles about things that are of interest to your customers. If they are interesting ot you, all the better. Write about what you know, and about things you have a strong opinion about. And get a good writer to help you unless you happen to be a good writer. Your blog will be compared with everything else people read, so if you suck at writing, your blog will suck, too.

 Build your web site around the blog. Most everything else your guests are looking for are pretty easy to arrange. They want to know your hours, what’s new, where you are, stuff like that. Don’t make any of this difficult for people to find. And don’t fill your site with a lot of what you think is “cool” programming. Mostly that stuff is probably cool the first time you look at it, but by the second visit it’s just annoying.

 Finally, put up really nice photos. If you’re selling food, make them as stunning as possible. There are a lot of really great food photographers out there, hire one and have them lead you through the process. You only need about 8 photos for the whole site if they are done well. And if you have photos of your business, show photos with people in them (preferable good looking people).

 When you’re shooting photos of your restaurant, plan a party with people you know, and again, invite your best looking friends and customers. And don’t have them all be the same age, either. Buy them dinner and tell them that in exchange a photographer will be taking candid photos for your web site, and would it be OK to use them. It’s best to get a model release signed, but it isn’t essential. And you can use the photos on your Facebook page, in your blog and on your web site.

 If you’re lucky enough to have a business that has pretty girls in bikinis, you will get a lot of traffic almost be default. The trick here is to make your site look better than much of the low budget pornography out there. In this case, it is essential to have photos that look tasteful, so it’s not a bad idea to have a woman look at the images and comment on them (men are not good judges of this, trust me).

 Looking for ideas on blogging?

 Try some of these: 

http://smittenkitchen.com/

http://www.seriouseats.com/ 

http://www.foodblogs.com/

http://eater.com/

http://eatingla.blogspot.com/

 

 

Names For Restaurant Products

What’s in a name?

 

Everything, that’s what. What your new product is called will have a huge impact on how well it will sell. In fact, it can be the difference between success and failure. And countless psychologists have tested and studied the impact of how people act around and think about food. Penn & Teller just recently did a documentary to debunk the notion that fast food chains are somehow using sinister techniques to keep people addicted to their food.

 

In one of the scenes, Penn & Teller met with Dr. Brian Wansik from Cornel University who used KFC products to make soup and then served it in really fancy dishes and told participants in a focus group that the products were made by a top chef. Dr. Wansik then asked what they thought about what they had just eaten. The result is just what you might expect. They all thought the soup was excellent, and of the highest quality ingredients.  Which of course is true: KFC uses great ingredients worthy of any white tablecloth restaurant, right? Sorry, that was sarcasm.

 

Here’s an experiment you can try: Bake a pie. You can even use a frozen pie if you like, but you will want to bake it fresh so it’s warm out of the oven when you serve it to your focus group.

 

Once the pie has cooled enough to cut, place slices on two different style plates. Then tell your focus group participants that one slice is regular apple pie a la mode. We’ll call that slice A. Next; tell these same people that the other pie sample is Grandma Lee’s Before The War Pie. Tell them that General Lee had a grandmother who made terrific apple pie. And wherever General Lee went, he always had that recipe with him and insisted that every baker who ever baked for him had to use that recipe. In fact, when he died, he had that recipe in his lapel pocket.

 

After you tell the story, allow your focus group to try both slices of pie and ask for their impression. What will happen next will surprise you. They will see a difference in the pies. But hold on, it gets better. Once you’re finished with the experiment, tell them the truth, that you made it all up and see what happens. They won’t believe you. They’ll stick to their initial view and insist that there is a vast difference between the two slices of pie. I know this, because I’ve done this very experiment and nearly got lynched. On second thought, maybe you should just take my word for it.

 

Here are some tips for naming and positioning your new product:

 

Use easy to say and read words that describe the product clearly.

 

Avoid clumsy language that may be hard to say or pronounce. Your customers, especially men, will avoid the items if they think for a moment they will look like a fool, especially a man in front of a woman.

 

Borrow, but don’t steal. It’s OK to borrow a part of another name and build off of it but don’t blatantly steal it. It’s not flattery it’s theft.

 

Use group think: allow a lot of people to offer suggestions and then select the name.

 

Get a Thesaurus.

 

Free-associate your product with names of similar items and ingredients.

 

Ask an expert – especially if you’re naming an item with a foreign language. An expert can tell you if you’re embarrassing yourself.

 

Surf the web – both to get ideas and to search the name you’ve just come up with.

 

KISS – keep it simple stupid coined by Kelly Johnson, lead engineer at the Lockheed Skink Works really applies here.

 

Let your name be hijacked. Alex Wipperfurth in his book “The Brand Hijack” has some great advice about how to allow your customers to run away with your idea. And once your customers are engaged enough to take ownership of your product, you know you’ve hit a homerun!

 

Live with it for a while. When we named Poppers, the client hated it at first. But the name stuck and over time, they began to like it, especially as the brand and profits grew.

Call HotOperator and ask for Mark @ 1-800-316-3198 X332 or email us at mlaux@laux.com

Where to look for great new items for your restaurant

 

Now that you have a handle on your core business, here are some great places to start looking for new items.  On your menu matrix, you’ve identified a few items that are selling well and that have an above average profit. Take a look at a few of the items and notice if they are a stand-alone item or if they belong to a category. If the item is a stand-alone, you may consider making a category around that item.

 

As an example, let’s say you have a chicken burger on your menu that sells well and is profitable. As part of the example, let’s suppose the item is served like a hamburger, but it’s a whole muscle product. So you’ve got a grilled chicken breast on a bun with lettuce, tomato, cheddar cheese and mayo.

 

To help support this star, the natural place to look for a new item, or multiple items would be to look at other burger flavor profiles that might become chicken burgers. Maybe you have a BBQ burger on the menu that could become a BBQ chicken burger, etc.

 

The next place to look for a new product is in the appetizer section. But here’s a note of caution: do not, under any circumstances just make a bigger portion of an appetizer that sells well and call it an entrée. If you do, you may take away incremental sales that are important to the success and profitability of your restaurant. Appetizers are extremely important to your business because they are added on to a check in most instances. Also, you will want to look at items that are in between categories already. In other words, Outback couldn’t very well make a really huge Bloomin’ onion. No matter how big it is it’s just not an entrée.

 

That being said, if you have appetizers that are of a larger size, or are expensive, and are not shared items, they may be good candidates for repackaging as entrees. An example might be quesadillas. In most cases, quesadillas are not being eaten as appetizers anyway, so repackaging them as an entree only makes sense.

 

Next, ask your foodservice distributor for help. Assuming you have a primary vendor (which is another whole topic, but if you don’t now would be a good time to think about partnering up) they will have a host of specialists who can help you with developing new items for your restaurant. Just be careful not to launch too many items that come prepackaged from a food manufacturer, because if you do you run the risk of seeing your new potential stars on menus all over town.

 

Finally, go out to dinner.  The very best and most successful restaurant operators I work with are avid travelers and restaurant patrons. They go to the hot places in cities across the country paying attention to what other people are serving and what people are ordering. Here’s an assignment: Got out to dinner! Ask your customers where the hottest restaurants are in your local market, make a reservation, get a sitter if you need one, and go there. And then try everything that looks good. Much of what you see can be adapted to your concept.

People Want Something They Already Love In A New Form

People like what they already know they like, in a new form.

 

Burger King launched “New Ribs” this past spring. Did that mean ribs are new? Perhaps they’ve never heard of Famous Dave? No, wait, Dave is Famous, it’s even in the name of the restaurant, so they must have heard of him. So it couldn’t be that the ribs are new. McRib, that was Mc Donald’s take on the rib, and it was new, too. So they must mean something else.

 

How about this: the ribs were new to Burger King. How much you wanna bet that’s what they meant? And if you followed the ribs at Burger King, you’ll know it was pretty successful right up until they couldn’t keep up with demand.

 

The key to a great new introduction is to package what your customers already love in a new form, in this example ribs at Burger King. There are a number of ways to go about this, but for the most part, you need to make sure what you introduce makes sense for your business and your concept without sacrificing what you’re already selling. It does you absolutely no good to introduce a new item only to have it cannibalize your current success. The idea is to create new success and maintain your current popularity.

 

I worked with the fine folks at Wells’ Dairy, Blue Bunny for many years, and they told a story about how they had gone to visit Outback Steakhouse with an idea for a new dessert product. The CEO of Outback at the time came into the meeting and told the group from Blue Bunny before they started their presentation that if they did anything to hurt the Bloomin’ onion business that he would hunt them all down and kill them in the street like dogs. That might be an exaggeration, but the point is: he understood his business was centered not simply on great steaks, but also on the onion that brought in nearly five bucks with every table rotation.

 

So what’s your onion? What is it that your customers come to you for? If you can’t answer that question first, you’ll want to put off any new product effort until you can.

Introducing New Products In Your Business

Finding Your Core

 

Lewis Carroll wrote in “Alice in Wonderland”: If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Translating that to the food business, you could say: if you don’t know what you’re selling, any product will work. At the heart of any great brand there is a core product or service that is perfectly understood by both the seller and the buyer.  More to the point, a confused customer will almost never make a purchase. And, if you are trying to develop new products for your restaurant, you need to start with a fresh appreciation for what your customers are willing to buy from you most often and for more money.

 

As an essential first step, you need to do a little research. Since, as a restaurant operator, there isn’t anybody between you and the end consumer, you have a huge advantage if you are tracking your sales. You know what your customers bought, how much it cost you to make and what you sold it for.

 

If you don’t have a point of sale system, you’ll have to count tickets. But the first step to any new product development process is to see what’s selling now. Look for your top two or three items in each category and then look at how profitable they are. You’re going to want to introduce products that have the potential to make a higher than average plate contribution, otherwise your efforts may have a negative impact on your business. The idea behind any new product is to give your guests a reason to visit more often, and when they do, spend a little more money for the privilege.

 

Once you find your current stars, you will want to protect them. Yes, I said protect them. Not leverage them. Not extend them, but protect them. So your new items need to enhance your stars without competing with them. The star items on your menu are the current life force for your business. And the reason you’re introducing new items in the first place is at least partly to help existing items sell even better than they did before. Sure, you may get lucky and introduce a new item that becomes a star. But for the most part, you won’t. So make sure when you introduce a new item you can feel comfortable that your guests will continue to be excited with the items they already love at your restaurant.

 

People like what they already know they like, in a new form.

Restaurant New Product Ideas

Here are some simple rules for launching a new product.

 

Rule Number 1:  Protect your core. If your restaurant is already open, you will have core items in each category that make up the bulk of your sales. This can sometimes be spread out among a number of items or concentrated on just a few.  You need to find your core and protect it with your very life. Your core items are essential to your brand, and if you mess with your core, you may bring harm and misfortune to your whole business.

 

Rule Number 2: You cannot see the future. All you can do is project what you want to have happen with respect to new products. So let go of the outcome. Allow for happy accidents and experiment.

 

Rule Number 3: Not every product you launch will be a resounding success. In fact, it’s likely that most of the new products you launch will offer very limited success. Don’t get discouraged, as many of these items will help you sell more of your core. And that’s always a good thing.

 

Rule Number 4: What it’s called matters. Americans in general do not like to look stupid. And in all my years working with restaurants, there is one pattern that comes up again and again: many people will not buy what they cannot pronounce.  Keep this in mind when you start deciding what to name your new creation.

It's always good to have help!

Do It Yourself Restaurant Food Photography

I got a message from one of my very dear restaurant customers looking for advice on doing photography in-house.  Here are some tips on taking photos of food at your restaurant that I shared with her.

1. Set up the shot in front of an open window on a cloudy day.
2. Get a large, white sheet of cardboard and hold it up to the food on the opposite side of the window, but out of the picture. This is a bounce card, and it is used to reflect light into the picture to give it a more dimensional look and feel.
3. Shoot fairly close to the food with a relatively open aperture. In this way, the photo will go out of focus towards the back of the image, which is a side effect. But more importantly, the food will get a “cheese-cloth” look to it and will look more appetizing.
4. Remember, people eat with their eyes first, their nose second and their mouth only after the food passes the first two tests. If it doesn’t look right to you, it won’t look good to the customer – and when in doubt, go without.
   

Most importantly, if you can afford it, or even if you don't think you can afford it,  find a way to pay for a professional photographer. There is no substitute for a great photograph. Especially with food. Because everyone knows what good food looks like, and everyone is a critic.

And if you can't do that, search stock photography resources online. But make sure you get unlimited use. Otherwise you can only use the photo once. Plus, when you pick a photo, make sure your actual food will look like that when you serve it, and if it doesn't, crop the photo so it doesn't look too specific.

Or call me and I'll help you out directly. We have some excellent resources and maybe we can fit something into your budget.

1-800-316-3198 X332

For more information, check out this blog post: http://mattikaarts.com/blog/technique/food-photography-2/

Restaurant Menus: Pizza Menu Engineering

Pizza restaurants are different than other restaurants in two significant ways that affect how the menu should be engineered. This applies to both menu boards and hand-held menus. The first way they differ is the shared nature of the offering. So when you develop a product rationalization, you must take into account that the plate contribution from a pizza is generally divided.

Next, pizza tends to be the entire meal. And while people are ordering wings along with pizza, for the most part, once the pizza hits the table, everything else is so much background noise.

So your design and engineering task is to find ways of increasing check averages by developing new add on items, appetizers, wings, salads and even pasta.

Product Mix Report.

You don’t need the individual items – like how many tomatoes you sold – but rather finished plates out the door. I recommend 1-3 months if you have a point of service system; 1-3 weeks if counting tickets.

Food Cost

Before you get too far in the planning process, take a good look at your cost of goods. Not what you paid for food items in bulk, but figure out your current cost of finished goods out the door.

 

Selling Price

Simply the price you sold the pizza or pasta for. Armed with these three pieces of information, you will be able to get a better picture of what you “want” to sell.

Multiply the pizza sales by the number of people who generally eat them so you get a better read on the profit per person, or check average. Remember, pizza will look much more profitable compared to other items on its own if you don’t.

PHAN Your Menu

 

Positioning

Where on the menu something is positioned has a huge impact on how well it sells. Placing the pizza in a location that is at once easy to find and yet still a little out of the way is best. It’s like the milk in a grocery you want to position it so that the shopper has to look at a few other options before getting what they came for.

 

 

Highlighting

Put an emphasis on a few of your pasta items as well as appetizers to help them sell faster. Then teach cajole and beg your servers to push them.

 

Anchoring

Pizza restaurants are naturally anchored, in that pizza has a relatively high price point, so you don’t need to do much here. Just put the pasta in the best locations and watch them sell.

 

Numbers

Most restaurant operators are too cautious when it comes to pricing. The tendency is to use a price list for pizza items, which puts a lot of down-pressure on price. So tuck the prices into paragraphs and don’t be too fearful to get some push-back.

Restaurant Menu Design

So many times restaurant operators try to cut corners and save money on their menu. And in the end they pay much more in missed opportunities and lower customer appreciation reflected in lower check averages as a consequence of penny pinching up-front.

 

Excellent restaurant menu design will do a number of things to enhance your business.  Here are just a few:

 

Reduce complaints, restaurant patrons are much less likely to complain when they order from a well-designed restaurant menu.

 

Increased check averages, because great restaurant menu design will enhance the entire experience making your guests feel more comfortable spending money in your restaurant.

 

Happier customers, as your guests look at the menu, the will imagine the food tasting better, and in turn will have that perception when they get their food.

Why a Ford Pinto? It should be a reminder to everyone how bad design can impact a company. If Ford had continued to make cars like the Pinto, they would not be here today, but instead an ugly memory.

What to look for in great restaurant menu design.

Restaurant Menu Design is about balance. Balancing creativity with menu engineering, design and poetry, selling and entertaining. The best restaurant menu designs are well balanced and promote the restaurant in a way that helps the customer spend a little more, come in a little more and do it more often.

A great menu should look good in the restaurant. If you have a theme, the restaurant menu design should enhance that theme. If your restaurant is more upscale, the restaurant menu design needs to use more sophisticated and elegant type styles. If your restaurant is a family style restaurant, the restaurant menu design should reflect that.

Most of all, spend enough money to get expert help. This is essential to making sure you have a look that will enhance rather than detract from your food offering.

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