The 1 easy tactic that makes any menu more profitable

A good menu can be the difference between your restaurant struggling to get by and your restaurant bringing in millions in profits and letting you expand to multiple locations. It’s not just a list of the different foods and drinks people can get, it is the backbone of your business. 

Very often we see that people don’t view their menus as the backbone of their business, instead they see it as some arbitrary list that doesn’t have to be very optimized. These are the people that are struggling not only with low sales but low profits, high expenses, low reviews, and overall just aren’t having a good time running their restaurant.

We’re going to cover the only methodology you need to turn your menu into a 7-figure worthy one. And when you implement it right not only do you profit more, your work gets a lot less stressful. 

You’ve likely heard this phrase a million times in different applications but less is more and in menus this is so disproportionately true. Less is SO much more when it comes to menus. A smaller menu has a few key benefits to it, firstly, it makes it way easier to operate the restaurant, less prep time, less different ingredients that you need to buy, less recipes to teach, and less pages to print when you go to print it (minimal but it is a benefit). Secondly, it makes it much easier for your customers to choose what they want to eat and makes them happier with the choice they made since you eliminate a lot of decision fatigue. This also gives you the added benefit of your tables turning a little quicker which in the long run is a lot of money coming your way. It’s a win-win strategy so we’ll cover exactly how to make your menu smaller. 

There’s 4 types of items on any menu, “High Profit, High Popularity” items, “High Profit, Low Popularity” items, “Low Profit, High Popularity” items, and finally “Low Profit, Low Popularity” items. The easiest way to cut items is to take out all Low, Low items. There is no reason to keep them around as people don’t buy them and if they do, you don’t profit much. So if you have a lot of those on your menu, take them off right now.

Now that you’ve cleared the easy ones, what do you do now? Well if your menu is now sitting at 5-7 items per category, you’re good to go, there’s not necessarily a reason to keep cutting it. Now if you aren’t there yet here is what you do, cut the high profit, low popularity items as it’s much easier to increase profits than it is popularity. And keep cutting until you reach that 5-7 item per category benchmark.

Then to increase the profits of those high popularity items try reducing portion sizes or increasing prices until it reaches a profitability level that you’re happy with (70% gross margins minimum). Price increases are really easy here because you already have demand for them, so it’s much easier to get popular items to be profitable than it is to make demand for profitable items. 

So that’s the most powerful methodology when it comes to making your menu and therefore restaurant much more profitable and exactly how to implement it starting today.