Smart takeaway menu maximizes profit

If your menu looks like a telephone book, there is a chaos in the kitchen for preparing that rarely ordered item in the menu, you have to keep too much stock and many different frozen ingredients, and all these have affected the quality of your food, it is time to revisit your menu.

A good menu should be designed to maximise your profit not to serve your pre-defined ideas of what should be in the menu of your takeaway. Here are some points to bear in mind when designing a takeaway menu.

1- Focus on what sells

You know what items sell more and you can also get the information from your pos system. These are the items that your customers like and are making you the most profit. Can you create other similar items that increase the average order of your existing customers and attract new customers?

2- Control the Cost

Review your menu and highlight the items that sell rarely. Again you can get accurate information from your POS system. Do these items need to be on your menu? Don’t forget that each item forces you to keep more materials that either takes valuable freezer space or may be perished and thrown away. Preparing these items also creates a distraction from the rolling process that makes the mainstream items. Simply said these are the items that are loss making and not valued by your customers either. Cutting these items will reduce your inventory and chaos in the kitchen and hence improve your profitability.

3- Focus on cooking from fresh

Having less items in your menu should allow you to reduce the number of ingredients and instead of many frozen items use fewer fresh ingredients, After all nothing beats the fresh food resulting in a reputation for quality food and increased sales of your take away items.

4- Add seasonal items

We all love to try different foods and departure from ordering the same fast food week after week. Be innovative and introduce seasonal items in your menu that can best serve your customers demands. Fortunately electronic menu such as the fastfoodsites.com menu system allow you to change your menu on the fly and is a relief from printed menus where you were bound by many thousands copies of your printed menu.

5- Focus on contribution and not profit margin

One common mistake is to focus on profit margin instead of contribution. For example an item may cost you £10 and you sell it for £20, and another item may cost you £1 and you sell it for £4. The profit margin of the second item is 300% while the first item has a profit margin of 50%, but the first item had a contribution of £10 whilst the second item has contributed £3 to your profit. The sales volume of each item must be taken into account too in order to assess the total contribution of an item to your profit.

6- Make good use of promotions

Offers can increase your sales and guide the customers to purchase the food items that you would prefer to sell. Your offers should be clearly visible in the menu and carefully designed to benefit both you and the customers. Fortunately electronic menus make it easy to add and change offers in your fast food menu and alter them again based on customers approval and feedback.