Menu Engineering: Upsell While They're Browsing

This post is part of a series to help you build a winning menu that will engage with your customers, assist your team and most importantly, drive your bottom line.

This is a brief post, but it is vital in getting those extra sales ringing through that till. If you have an engaging introduction set out in a nicely presented menu, people will naturally go on to browse it from beginning to end. 

During that time, they’ll probably want to order a drink. And since they also feel peckish, I'm guessing they wouldn’t mind a little snacky-bite (as Mrs. K calls it) before they err, eat. I now I usually do.

I mean, think about it: The table have mostly arrived, but they’re just waiting for one more guest. So you give them the menus and they start reading the intro (‘Wow, what a great story, I’d love to do that’) and  perusing the recommended dishes (more on that in my next post).

‘Ooh look, nibbles - at the top of the page.’

Congratulations. You just gave them an opportunity to spend some money.

Polenta with Fig

Simply put, browsing the menu is a fantastic opportunity to up-sell. From Olives and Breadsticks to Mini Fish and Chips and Smoked Salmon Canapés. The list is endless. 

Three rules to follow however:

• Make them expensive (if you dare)*
• Serve them quick, 
• Don’t make them filling. 

*Why make them expensive: because people who choose expensive snacky-bites while they browse the menu are making a statement of intent. They intend to enjoy themselves, whatever the price. So serve them up quick and get ready to follow suit on the wine and supplements.

*There is another reason to make them expensive, which I learned the hard way. Some diners will have nibbles INSTEAD of starters! I know, right? It’s a little annoying when it happens, but console yourself in the knowledge that you made good margin on the snacks they did order.

Once those drinks and nibbles are on the table, you're next question is; What steps have you taken to influence their food choices that work for you? 

Check in with my next post to find out more.

Series: The Art of Menu Engineering

This post is part of a series to help you build a winning menu that will engage with your customers, assist your team and most importantly, drive your bottom line.

I work with lots of very passionate chefs who love to cook great dishes from locally sourced food and in return we are rewarded with really happy customers. So when those chefs talk to each other about menu engineering in our food trend workshops, they speak from a position of knowledge and experience. 

French Laundry's Thomas Keller confers with his chefs

Time and again, terms like menu-busters; food heroes; increasing GP (gross profit); achieving margin (pretty much the same thing) and even up-selling or cross-selling are thrown in and we all go home feeling warm and fuzzy because we feel we've learned a valuable commercial lesson. What strikes me though, is that I don’t see the front of house guys in this conversation. Nor have we considered asking the marketing or retail-experienced guys what they might think.

So here’s a fundamental question I have for any chef who wants to practice or teach menu engineering: have you owned your own business and relied on that same menu structure to meet rent and payroll at month-end? Rarely the answer is yes. But one thing is certain, it takes more than menu-busters and margin to create a powerful revenue-driving sales tool that any great menu should be.

Let me take you back 14 years to my experience of shouldering that burden in my new restaurant which had only opened 12 weeks previously at the time. On any given night we were expecting 300 guests in for dinner of mostly trekking and expat groups from all over the world. So far so good, you might say. The thing is, I was the only person in the business who spoke English fluently and in the dining room, many of our customers spoke English as a second language. Yeah, that’s kind of a challenge. 

Now Chef, write me a menu that will sell our food. And our Wine. And Desserts. And Coffee. And breakfast tomorrow. And goes on to create repeat business through word-of-mouth. But most importantly right now, will overcome the waiter’s inability to SELL due to his shyness or his language barrier. When it’s put in those terms, you learn pretty damn quick. 

Chef Gary Jones writes his Lunch Menu

To begin with, I guess the first question to ask is this: what is Menu Engineering? Well as expected, those boffins at Wikipedia have an answer for that, but they don’t have THE answer. Because that really depends on your business and your customers. What I can do however, is throw some perspective on how I have looked at this conundrum over the years. Up front, it’s about psychology. Behind the scenes however, it’s about growing your profits. 

If your menu is not driving sales, then tear it up and start again. You owe it to yourself, your staff and your investors.

Over the next few posts I want to address these key areas:

• Your Menu Introduction: Selling the Sizzle
• Upsell while they're browsing
• The power of ‘Recommended’?
• Using Emotion in your Dish Descriptions
• Winning Words and Phrases
• A Price point plan

Just to be clear about what I mean when I ask, what is a menu?, check out my previous post and then we can look in more detail at some of those key elements in creating a sales tool that works for you.

A Leader who knows his Onions

A colleague of mine recently had to give a short presentation which involved describing a leader that inspired her, but using food as the analogy to describe that leadership inspiration. Her challenge caught my imagination and we had an interesting discussion about it. As we are in the catering sector, the humble onion is one ingredient that gets overlooked in our business and yet underpins so much of what we produce from our kitchen. With that in mind, here is a leadership analogy that might just work for you.

An onion packs lots of character despite its size. 

And like a true leader, this appearance belies an unflinching willpower that’s fueled by passion. (Be careful of the smaller ones, they tend to have more bite!)

If you cut an onion open during a meeting, it’s aroma will definitely stand out.

… and this ability to ‘stand out from the crowd’  and leaving that memorable impression is what turns a good leader into a great one. 

However, the same onion has a harmonizing effect when cut within a kitchen.

Skilled leaders create harmony and team spirit by motivating the people around them.

Sometimes the humble onion leads from the front - just look at French Onion Soup. 

- true leaders don’t shy away from situations that others might find very challenging.

And in other recipes the onion leads from behind by bringing out the best in other flavours.

Through empathy, influence and skillful maneuvering, a smart leader can energise the team to raise their game. 

Onions add bite & texture when thrown in a salad, but cooked down in a sauce they add sweetness. 

Different challenges have diverse paths to a solution requiring the canny leader to think outside the box and encourage the team to explore those paths.

Cutting across an onion reveals a number of rings - symbols of both strength and continuity. 

Like great leadership, these represent new experiences or challenges, with one bigger than the last.

And as any search on leadership will tell you, an onion - just like our proverbial leader - is made up of many layers. 

For me, each layer represents a chapter in our experience that moulds us into the type of leader we are today.

As for stripping them away, you might think there will be nothing left. But paradoxically, I believe we are left with ‘everything else’. Put simpIy, the leaders who shaped our early behaviours, continue to influence our decisions today. So it is vital to seek out - and offer - great leadership!

If nurtured under the right conditions, an onion can be cultivated to produce a future crop. 

This can also be said of true leadership skill. Be that manager, mentor or coach.

One final point about the humble onion: 

like any great leader, they also have the potential to move you to tears.

The Myth of 'Cheaper by the Bottle'

Let's take a bottle of wine (750ml) which you are going to sell at £12.00, then it is fair to say the equivalent large glass (250ml) of wine should work out at £4.00 (one third) to bring in the same revenue. Most operators however, will charge MORE than this per glass as they want to encourage you to purchase the full bottle.

My strategy to encourage a good following of regulars in the bar (to supplement our dining revenue) was to make it 'cheaper by the glass'. In this case, perhaps £3.85.

But is this fair to your diners who you want to encourage to return? Well let's think about that for a minute. Whether it is the couple on Table 1 or the group on Table 12, they will tend to order by the bottle regardless of pricing for any number of the following reasons:

To quickly get 'settled in' for the evening or occasion.
To enjoy the 'sharing' element that such a purchase brings.
To avoid the hassle of looking for the waitress every time they need a refill.
To show off. (To their date, to other tables nearby or sometimes just their wealth.)
To feel pampered.
To get a quick consensus (in a group)
To easily calculate everyon's share of the bill.
And because they figure they will be paying less for it as it's usually 'cheaper by the bottle'.

Therefore if you charge less by the glass:
The average diner won't notice - especially if the food and service meet expectations.
The astute diner will figure it out and perhaps order by the glass. (But will they count how many they have?)
And the best diners won't care - and they are the ones you should be working to attract anyway by exceeding their expectations.

And if you still need convincing why your bottles should bring in more revenue, don't forget about the added cost to your bottom line for the service staff, linen, rented floor space and general cost of time and energy that adds up while uncorking and topping up at the table.

Meanwhile in the bar, very few of your punters buying their drinks in rounds will calculate how much wine they are consuming by the glass and consequently drink more of it. And if they think it is good value, they will convince themselves to have another round since they are "saving" every time they spend.

Are you earning too much money?

If you're an investment banker then I suspect you probably are. But for the rest of us I'm sure the answer is a resounding NO.

So we agree that you're earning just enough money (if there is such a thing). And when you finally get your hands on this hard-earned cash, what do you do with it? Generally it's used to pay the essential bills and get the basic things we need to keep us going until we are left with a little bit (hopefully) at the end that we can call our own. This is the bit I want to think about for a minute.

When you spend that money on say, a coffee or a sandwich or perhaps a beauty product in the sales, how do you expect to be treated by the person serving you? To be miserable, grumpy and rude? I don't think so. We want to be smiled at and spoken with. We want them to make us feel special. We want to feel that our custom counts for something. We want to be appreciated (not to be confused with just thanked). In an ideal world we want it to be a rich and warm experience.

Is this how we treat our customers who come in to spend their hard-earned money in our business. Do we make the effort to genuinely smile (even on the phone, it shows), or say a few words of chitchat beyond a mere 'can I help', or go that little extra and offer to bring it to the table or carry it to the door? These are the so-called 'little things' that count really big in turning that mundane transaction into a rewarding customer experience that might encourage a return visit. And paradoxically the experience can be as rewarding for us too.

One final point: Just think how much would it cost to buy an uplifting experience like that. Although great service is expected as part of our customer's purchase, how we deliver that service, for better or worse, remains something we give away for free. In the case of an exuberant, outgoing and talented Barista, it might just be the price of a coffee.

Every person. Every day. Every Time.

Are we delivering excellence? A profoundly simple question I put to my team this week on our first day back after a fantastic Christmas break. Giving it some consideration, a variety of answers came back ranging from 'yes totally' to others who felt 'we could do better'. I tend to agree with the latter.

But first, let me explain how this bout of philosophical navel gazing cropped up. As we neared the end of another hectic term last November I found myself looking for some nugget of motivation that would slingshot me through the hectic Christmas period ahead and into 2011. It came in the form of a rather innocuous question in my annual and first ever - appraisal at that time; “Are you delivering excellence?” Hmm, I would have to think about this carefully because truthfully I knew there was room for improvement.

A few days later in a very unkempt changing room I suddenly had an epiphany about this excellence I was meant to be delivering which has since given me enough motivation for months to come - enough to start this blog even! You see, while I had been thinking about the big showy VIP things that we tend to focus on most of the time, I was overlooking the everyday mundane tasks (such as keeping this changing room tidy) that also require excellence from every member of my team.

With this newfound perspective, I put it to them; how does our Kitchen Porter deliver excellence? How can HE deliver excellence when he doesn't cook fabulous food for a living? (Or even mediocre food for that matter). Nor does he serve Champagne to our guests with panache. After all that's not his job. His lot is to mop the floor, wash the pots, throw out the trash and keep smiling throughout. I guess in his case the more fundamental question is 'how can WE help him to deliver excellence?'

Picture yourself, I continued, standing in the changing room with the state it is in most of the time and consider the question again. Would a visitor, senior manager or contractor using the facility think so?

From this point of view, they all agreed we had some way to go. But in doing so, we had just taken our first steps towards this elusive state we seek out. Because in admitting to our deficiency in such a key component of Hospitality, we had taken our first small step towards delivering that excellence. Every person. Every day. Every Time.

My new mantra for 2011, and I have promised to bore my team silly with it, is for each of us to ask of ourselves 'Are we delivering excellence?' Because if we do so in the banal tasks, the big showy VIP ones will take care of themselves.

Look around at the area within arms reach of you. Are you delivering excellence in how it looks?...

Start there.