We know that many of our followers have their own restaurant businesses or dream of opening one someday. So, The Therapist founder Joana Teixeira shares 5 tips for launching a successful menu:
- Evaluate your products: when reworking a menu, whether for summer or winter, it is always wise to look at the sales from the previous menu and decide which dishes really must stay and which ones truly need to be changed. The criteria we use for this choice are: customer preference and dish profitability.
- Seasonal ingredients: in our case, we always start by thinking about which ingredients will be in season when the menu is in effect, to ensure we uphold our principle of only using local products.
- Assign value: once we define what the dishes will be, we determine the cost and consequently the price for each one. Ingredients are only one part of a dish's cost; we must always consider that every dish sold should cover all the restaurant's costs: salaries, rent, electricity, water, HACCP, insurance, etc. We want to ensure we have the fairest price offering while being able to cover our costs at the end of the month.
- Input into a system: it is important to have some control system for the dishes, including their composition, which ingredients we source from which supplier, their price, their nutritional value—in short, every establishment should define what is important to have registered in a control system, which could even be an Excel spreadsheet.
- Train your teams: ensure that on the launch day the kitchen and floor staff are up to speed on the entire menu and monitor the first few days of implementation closely to ensure everything runs as planned.
And one extra tip: have fun with the process! New menu launch days can be quite stressful because everything is new, but there is nothing like approaching this change with a sense of fun and accepting that everything will go better the next day.
Tags:
