The menu is a powerful sales tool. Therefore, developing a thoughtful and strategic menu to reflect your brand, is integral to success.
At The Engine Room, our menu engineering consultants help implement strategic practices to help you elevate your business and create a more profitable menu without sacrificing quality.
What is Menu Engineering?
Menu engineering is the practice of evaluating a bar or restaurant’s menu by strategically analysing sales data, food costs and item popularity to maximise profitability. This involves a structured development process to engineer a menu that is specialised to each partners’ needs.
It can sound complex because it involves a lot of intricate details, but it is predominantly about cohesively partnering a researched and appropriate food concept and the use of menus with cost calculations, and the right mix of items to increase profit.
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Contact UsOur Methodology
Running the busy daily schedule of your hospitality business can be time-consuming. Therefore, working through the minutiae of prepping your menu can slip through the cracks due to the detail and demanding nature of these data-driven tasks.
The foundations of menu engineering are determining exact food cost and analysing menu item popularity. The process begins with choosing a set period of time to assess your menu alterations. We collect cost and popularity data for each menu item, to compare the profitability against the demand, thus informing each item’s relevance to your menu.
Our team considers all factors that affect the desired outcome of your food concept. Putting an effective strategy in place to ensure that the gap between your expectation of the venture and the reality is minimised. This includes specification sheets to ensure production consistency to protect gross profit, assessing data to understand dish popularity to guarantee a good sales mix plus stock management to make sure ingredients price increases are immediately reflected and swapped out if necessary.
Testing, tweaking, and measuring the new menu’s impact will improve the functionality of a redesigned menu, which in turn will increase profitability. Our expertise in customising food specs can lead to an operation of streamlined purchasing, production, and delivery.
As Menu Engineering consultants, we go further than simply considering the menu. We create an implementation plan which incorporates fundamentals such as staff training. This involves teaching staff about your products and their ingredients, any desired upselling, how your food concept fits in with the wider industry, presentation, and the full customer journey. Our plan also involves optimising the kitchen by aligning storage processes and auditing/matching skill sets to suit the team.
The Benefits of Using Menu Engineering Consultants
Menu Engineering helps to maximise profitability, manage costs effectively, improve the customer experience and reduce waste. At The Engine Room we leverage our knowledge of menu psychology to offer support to your F&B business.
Strategically managing your menus can influence customer behaviour. Becoming more aware of the effects of your menu by using effective data of both qualitative and quantitative values, can help you make more precise decisions to increase sales and to take dishes and combinations that really work, forward into a long-term strategy. That’s exactly what our tried and tested recipe store offers.
Our approach to menu engineering does not focus solely on profit but also considers variety, creativity, and customer satisfaction, as we believe in encouraging innovation. Adjusting your menu does not need to be limiting, instead it can be a vessel for experimentation within your business. When you let us delve into the details of enhancing your menu, we let you get down to developing the standout items.
Recipe Customisation
Our services will help you save time and effort by offering a range of recipes to support your business. These recipes include methods, ingredients and yields, nutritional information, photos, and allergen information.
Our pre-designed recipes will help you cut costs, repurpose ingredients and mitigate waste. The collection is filled with proven examples which facilitate growth by providing you with modifiable options that suit your business. This can help curb decision fatigue whilst simultaneously encouraging inspiration.
From cakes to soups or cookies to sandwiches, we currently have hundreds of recipes to choose from and with on-going development, this database will grow with each season, bringing new ideas and variety to your menu.
In turn, we can manage a full-scale menu engineering process defined by your specific concept, dishes, and expectations.
To discuss this opportunity in more detail or raise any questions, please get in touch.
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