4 Signs It’s Time to Reevaluate Your Menu

What’s on the Menu?

Your menu is one of the most important tools you have for shaping customer experience and driving profitability. Over time, even the best menus can become outdated, overly complicated, or misaligned with customer preferences. That’s why regular menu evaluations are essential.

By keeping a close eye on performance, trends, and operational efficiency, you can ensure your menu continues to work for your business and your budget.

1. Your Margins Are Shrinking

When you combine rising food costs with ineffective menuing, your margins are sure to suffer. If you’re looking to improve profits at your restaurant, you can start with a menu audit and refresh.

The key is to assess which menu items are:

• Most profitable
• Most popular
• Least profitable
• Least popular

That way, you can spot opportunities for improvement.

2. Some Dishes Never Get Ordered

When is the last time your chicken bake made it to a table? If you can’t remember, it may be time to update your menu. Even past favorites have an expiration date and if a dish isn’t selling, it’s taking up valuable real estate on your menu.

Plus, unless you’ve perfected cross-utilizing ingredients, you’re likely wasting materials each month on unordered items. Start recording how frequently different dishes are ordered and consider replacing them with something new.

3. You’re Unable to Satisfy Customer Requests

No restaurant can meet every customer request. However, repeated requests for certain options or items may provide valuable information on what your diners are looking for from eating out.

Requests often reflect industry and local trends. When you tune into these preferences, you may identify opportunities to refresh your menu. For example, some recent trends in dining include:

• Alcohol-free beverage options
• Less processed food items
• High-protein menu choices

4. Some Dishes Take Too Long to Prepare

Back ups in the kitchen could be a staffing or training concern. However, sometimes the problem is an overly complex menu. A wide variety of dishes can be a selling point, but it can also slow down kitchen operations.

When a menu tries to do everything,it creates challenges. Kitchen staff has to prep more ingredients, use more equipment, and spend more time on training. Paring down your menu into a simple but efficient selection can speed up your kitchen while improving procurement.

Take Control of Your Menus

A menu refresh might sound intimidating but with the right resources in your corner, it can be easy. Foodbuy Foodservice Members can partner with our in-house Culinary Solutions Team for menu development support.

This team of culinarians specializes in both operational efficiency and procurement optimization. That means that they can help you find synchronicities between the preferences of your guests and the needs of your budget. They’ll help you identify opportunities for improvement and implement them seamlessly.

Learn more about the Culinary Solutions Team today.