How Changing the Menu at Your Restaurant Often Will Boost Profitability

It’s no news that the restaurant industry is dynamic and competitive. To thrive in such a high-pressure environment, you need to use the best weapon at your disposal: your menu. Changing the menu at your restaurant often can help you sell more food and be successful long-term. How? Read on to find out!

How Many Items Should Be on a Menu?

On average, six menu items are enough for a quick-service restaurant, while a fine-dining one would benefit from seven to ten items.

Smaller menus tend to be more profitable because they help customers decide faster and allow you to focus on quality over quantity.

Not to mention it saves the restaurant money, streamlines kitchen operations, and helps reduce food waste.

All in all, a small menu is better, and changing the menu at your restaurant often can help you attract a wider variety of customers with seasonal ingredients and unique dishes.

Free downloadable resource: Small menu template (one-page)

The Benefits of Changing the Menu at Your Restaurant

Before you take the plunge and make a menu change, here are the main advantages of updating your menu often:

• Keep things fresh and interesting: While it wouldn’t make sense for you to give up everyone’s favorite menu item, the same old dishes every day might get a bit boring. A menu update can help you give customers something new to look forward to now and then.
• Use more affordable seasonal ingredients: If you want to lower food costs, it’s a good idea to source your ingredients locally. Seasonal ingredients are cheaper and easier to get, which will increase menu profitability.
• Rethink menu items that are no longer profitable: One of the cardinal menu development guidelines is to analyze your existing items to see if they’re worth keeping anymore. If they don’t sell well or require expensive ingredients to make, replace them with something else.
• Capitalize on food trends: Maybe you’ve heard of a popular food trend in your cuisine that you’d like to try, or the competition started using an ingredient that everyone is raving about. Don’t be afraid to experiment too – you can afford it when you change your restaurant menu often.
• Adjust prices to keep making a profit: Menu optimization also allows you to rethink your prices to account for the price of ingredients going up, inflation, and other such factors.

How Often Should You Do a Menu Refresh?

Ideally, if you’re going to rely on seasonal ingredients, you should change your menu with the seasons, so four times a year. If you don’t want to do that but still want to refresh your menu now and then, once a year should be enough.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that you can’t add a new limited-time dish whenever inspiration strikes you or there’s a new food trend you want to follow.

Changing the Menu at Your Restaurant in 5 Easy Steps

1. Create a brand-new category to highlight the new additions to the menu

If you’re entirely rethinking your menu, remember that dividing it into clear categories is going to help customers spot what they want more easily.

Typically, you should order the categories as such: appetizers, main courses, desserts, and drinks. However, you can also divide the categories by food type: pizza, pasta, salads, etc.

If you want to draw attention to specific dishes that may have a higher profit margin, you can add them at the top of the menu in their own category.

A new menu at your restaurant should always come first. For example, let’s say you’ve changed your menu for the summer. Start the menu with a “New Summer Menu” category:

With our online menu builder, you can say goodbye to PDF menus that you have to keep reprinting and uploading on your website. You can make as many changes as you want to keep your menu fresh and customers happy.

Check out this video tutorial to learn how to set up your menu:

2. Personalize your dishes with choices and add-ons

The next thing you need to do to ensure changing the menu at your restaurant will make customers want to order more is to allow them to customize their dishes with toppings, add-ons, and other choices.

Add-ons ensure that you don’t need a large menu to be successful. Focus on creating a few stellar dishes and enable customers to personalize them instead.

Here’s how you can add choices and add-ons using our menu builder:

3. Customize the new dishes with a mouthwatering photo and description

Menu writing is a big part of a menu refresh. If you feel like your dishes are not selling that well despite being high-quality and reasonably priced, you should take a look at how you’re presenting them.

Are they displayed next to a mouth-watering photo? Does the description make you want to order that second?

Download our free e-book to learn how to write food descriptions that will make customers hungry and increase your average check value.

4. Add a limited-time promo for the new dishes

Another way to start your menu update with a bang is to draw attention to the new dishes with a limited-time promotion such as 25% off the New Summer Menu for the first week.

Getting customers to try them at a discount increases the chances of them coming back for more if they love the dish.

You can create a variety of restaurant promotions, from discounts to meal bundles, free delivery, freebies, and more, using the promo engine built into our menu creator. Check them out:

5. Enable customers to order the new dishes on-location or online

Finally, once your new menu is ready to go, you need to make it available to as many potential customers as possible, which means both on-location and online.

Our menu creator comes with a built-in online ordering system that allows you to accept orders directly on your website. All you need to do is copy and paste the customized code we provide to display the See MENU & Order button.

If you’d like to use the same menu to accept orders on location as well, we have the answer: a dine-in ordering menu generator.

Our system will generate a QR code that when scanned, will open your menu for customers to place orders at the table. Follow these steps to generate your own QR code menu for free in minutes:

Final Thoughts

Changing the menu at your restaurant often comes with a flurry of benefits, from a profitability boost to lower costs and happy customers. Luckily, in this day and age, it’s easy to update your restaurant menu often, especially if you use an online menu builder that enables you to display your menu both online and offline.