Do you have members complaining that there is not enough selection on the menu? Do they complain that they don’t like anything on the menu, or do they just say “I can’t eat anything on the menu”? Well, if you are hearing any of these complaints more often than not, you have to read on.
The key to converting these complaints into compliments could be found in one of the basic Food & Beverage Management skills we are taught – Menu Engineering. This is one of the fundamentals that is taught in hospitality programs around the world. You are first taught to categorize your menu items, putting each menu item into a group: Star, Plow Horse, Puzzle, or Dog, depending on how they performed.
Menu engineering was developed as a way for you to help increase your profits by highlighting and placing specific menu items in certain areas of the menu, which is great, but as a private golf club your Food & Beverage department isn’t always driven by profit alone. As I have said before, we need to stop trying to run our Food & Beverage operations at a golf club like an independent restaurant. It just doesn’t work.
We have a fixed customer base we are servicing that, in most cases, are at the facility three to five times a week, so keeping them happy becomes our priority. This entails providing quality products, good value, and great selection, which can prove to be an overwhelming task.
Statistically speaking, the most criticized department at a private club is the restaurant. This in part is because most members think they are a chef, a restaurateur, or at the very least, a real foodie who knows everything that is wrong with the menu, what is missing and how to make it better.
We have all heard the stories, comments and complaints, “not enough selection, portions are too small, poor quality…” and the list goes on. We are all well aware of how difficult it is to cater to 500-1000+ “regular customers” that all have different ideas about taste, flavours, and nutrition, as well as their individual financial appetites, so selection is the biggest challenge.
This is the reality of our world, so keeping them all happy is a tough and sometimes a seemingly impossible job. Although this may be our reality, there may be something we can do to help increase the selection without just adding more items to the menu. This is where a new spin on menu engineering comes into play.
Statisticians go to school for years to learn how to slice and dice information to provide answers and insight into some very difficult questions and challenges. Statistics can reveal a lot, so I think we need to look at our menus’ sales information in a new light.
Firstly, when you are reviewing the menu over the winter you need to take a different approach when analyzing the sales data from the past season. In order for us to do this we need to start off by asking ourselves what answers we are looking for. In this case, the answers we are looking for are not just what were the most popular menu items, or most profitable items, but why they were the most popular and vice versa – why they were not.
The reality of the situation is we can’t have a menu with 80-100 items on it, so in order to achieve our goal we need to make sure that each item on our menu is working hard to satisfy a portion of the membership.
A way to determine if this is the case, is to start by looking at sales categories rather than specific dishes. For example, if you have 40 items in total on your menu and 10 of them are in the salad category that means 25% of your menu items are in this category. Now, if 40% of your sales (by volume not by dollars) are in this category it might suggest that this could be an issue and you are not providing enough selection in the salad section. If the numbers were reversed this could suggest that the category has too many options in it.
The next thing you need to look at is popularity. Look at the top 10 and bottom 10 items, cross reference these items to the categories you have on your menu and see if a higher percentage of either the top, or the bottom, belong to a particular category. If this is the case, it would suggest you need to make some changes, either to the entire category, or at least to some of the specific items. Doing this will help you prioritize your “dogs” and “stars” in each category, rather than just as an overall rating.
So, to analyze this a little further, if you were to have two or three of your lowest selling items in one category this would suggest that perhaps the entire category should be eliminated.
Next, you need to put each menu item into a “sales rationale” category. I generally use four buckets for this which are: “Familiar”, “Price”, “Creative” and “Health”. Just to make sure we are clear, “Familiar” is for items such as chicken wings, burgers, etc. “Price” are items that you feel people are ordering based on the price point or value perception. Items that I often feel make it into this category are things like pasta, pizza, all day breakfast and even the odd sandwich or wrap.
As for the “Creative” section, this would include things that are out of the norm. This may include a chorizo burger or a salmon clubhouse sandwich. In other words, signature dishes. And for “Health”, well, that I am sure is self-explanatory.
The key to doing this is that you have a few people (servers, cooks, managers) involved in the process of putting the menu items into a category, and most importantly, you make sure that each item only goes into one category. After you have done this, what you should see is a reasonably even spread of items in each of these buckets. It doesn’t have to be 100% but within a few per cent of each other. If not, you need to bring it into balance by replacing the least popular item in the bucket and switching it with a new item that will fit into the section that needs a boost.
When replacing an item you need to use the cues from the other popular items to help you create what should be a “new” popular menu item. By cues I mean things like key ingredient, flavour level, dish composition and style.
Now, I am not suggesting that this is the silver bullet to all the member comments and complaints, but maybe it will provide some new information and insight that will help you create a menu that will satisfy a larger portion of the membership (because we all know we will never make everyone happy).
So much of a restaurant’s success is based on the selection provided in the menu that is offered. This is why taking the time to drill further down into the numbers, and interpreting the story they are telling, is vital to a happy membership as well as a successful operation.
