A long and extensive food menu offers your customers a great number of options to choose from, while a small selection is offered by a limited menu. So, what would you choose? General wisdom would have you go for a more extensive menu, but we are here to tell you otherwise and with good reason.

Today a long and intricate menu is nothing more than a marketing gimmick to attract more customers by enticing them with more options to choose from. But this way of thinking ignores critical aspects of running a restaurant business-like, inventory management, overhead costs, order processing, and more. How come the world’s biggest restaurant brands – McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, KFC, etc (you name it) are all limited menu chains?

The reason is pretty straightforward, they have understood the power of smaller limited menus that enable you to streamline the operations that help you save more, earn better, and build a brand identity at the same time.

Smaller The Menus, Bigger The Profits! Why A Smaller Menu Is Actually Good For You

A smaller menu offers you something not many restaurants enjoy, freedom! Look at your competition, a majority of them are under debt, and being crushed under the reeling pressure of an extensive menu they can’t successfully manage to operate. A larger menu means more food items, more food items mean more raw material requirements and that results in more staff members required to manage all such operations.

The more variables you add to your equation, the higher the chances of error. Therefore you end up with a restaurant with an inflated overhead cost, inefficient staff, average food quality, and forgettable customer experience. Now ask yourself, why would anybody want to return to such a restaurant?

If you want to build a restaurant that has a strong brand presence within your industry niche and makes money, then you keep on reading to find out how a smaller menu is good for you!

Brings Down Operational Costs

The cost of raw materials is one of the most significant portions of a restaurant’s operational costs. An extensive menu requires you to maintain an equally elaborate raw material inventory, which results in higher chances of food wastage.

On the other hand, a smaller menu inherently requires less inventory that becomes a breeze to handle, if you have a robust Restaurant Management System. With a lesser inventory that you have to potentially purchase and manage, you save more that directly feeds into lowering your overhead costs.

At the same time, many different food items require the same basic ingredients, for example, cakes and brownies are different but share many similar ingredients. Hence having strategically selected menu items can help you negotiate better deals with suppliers, as you order large quantities of multi-purpose raw materials, reducing your operating costs even more!

Makes It Easier To Focus On Food Quality

Just like food with excessive oil can clog your arteries and kill you, a restaurant menu with excessive food items can clog your operations and kill your food quality. A restaurant is only as good as its food, therefore an increase in food quality should be your utmost priority in business.

A smaller menu gives you and your staff tremendous freedom, as it eases the burden of cooking a wide variety of items that require exquisite attention to detail. With a smaller menu, you allow your chefs to cook high-quality well-executed dishes that people can’t get enough of, rather than making sub-par food that people are marginally okay with.

Smaller menus also allow for higher levels of order accuracy and taste consistency as you restrict the potential variable in your food equation to the absolute necessity. It also makes coordination within the kitchen much easier, which results in faster table turnaround times and food that is fresh, delicious, and consistent with impeccable attention to detail. Thus elevating the quality of customer experience and leaving them highly satisfied and ready for more.

Streamline Inventory Management

Because of a smaller menu, you can drastically simplify your inventory management tasks as their fewer variables to take care of. Lesser food items on your menu mean lesser raw materials required, hence you can get away by maintaining limited stocks of raw materials that suit your operational needs daily.

Reduction in recruitment in raw materials also means you need less storage space at your restaurants. You also reduce the money spent on transportation costs as you no longer require an extensive number of raw materials. Hence you encourage lesser bulk and more optimized operations that help you earn more by saving more!

Optimized Order & Menu Management

Humans beings are complex creatures that have an intricate way of thinking and decision making. To decode the human brain is a task that is still in its infancy, hence it is impossible to concretely say why we do what we do, but there are theories. For example, the most prominent theory on decision making says that when a consumer is bombarded with too many options, they experience something called ‘analysis paralysis’.

Barry Schwartz, one of the world’s most renowned psychologists called it the “Paradox of Choice”, the more you have, the less you want. A smaller menu helps both your staff and your customers fulfill their intentions, for your customers it means ordering something they would want to eat, and for your staff, it would be to deliver on that order request.

A smaller menu makes the entire process simpler as it reduces the number of moving parts involved by decreasing the number of given choices. With fewer choices you allow your staff to work in a highly organized manner and be able to process more customers & orders.

Makes Your Restaurant’s Brand More Memorable

It might sound counterintuitive, but a smaller menu offers you better opportunities for building your restaurant’s brand identity. For example, when you imagine fried chicken, there is a high probability that KFC might have inadvertently popped inside your head.

Even though KFC didn’t invent the fried chicken, they were the first ones to create an entire brand around it, that has become so strong today, that it’s difficult to separate the two.

It is better to be great at one thing, than being average at a hundred, and a smaller menu allows you to do just that. With higher food and customer service quality you will be able to leave a long-lasting impression on your customers that will be enough to pull them back time and again!

Things To Keep In Mind When Making Your Menu Smaller

You must understand that creating a smaller menu for your restaurant goes beyond just editing certain food items that don’t sell that often. A smaller menu is not only quantitatively small but also streamlined for optimizing all aspects of your restaurant operations like inventory management, table turnaround times, service quality, etc.

It is situations like this that a Restaurant Management System can be really helpful, as it provides you with necessary data-points that enable you to make better-informed decisions. In the absence of an RMS platform here are a few things you need to keep in mind when making your menu smaller:

• Don’t Stagnate – When you don’t have data to pinpoint what sells in your restaurant and what doesn’t, then you always need to be on your toes. You must keep experimenting with new variations & menu combinations to test what works best for you.
• Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket – Due to not having an RMS platform, you are at a severe disadvantage, you don’t know what works and what doesn’t. Hence you shouldn’t abandon all your food items in one go, rather maintain fluidity and always have contingencies ready if something goes wrong.
• Aim Before You Shoot – If your restaurant is situated in an area with a high vegan population, it doesn’t make sense to create an ‘All-beef’ menu. Therefore before you change anything in your menu, always keep in mind your general customer base.
• Take Feedback – You may be a gifted restauranter, but you aren’t a clairvoyant, so stop trying to predict the future. Once you make changes to your menus, people will respond, make sure to take that feedback and understand your strengths and weaknesses.

In Conclusion

Therefore having a smaller menu that is limited in nature has many potential upsides that impact your restaurant positively. With smaller menus, you enable better service quality, higher customer satisfaction, hassle-free order processing, and better inventory management. All these benefits compound over time, to turn your restaurant into a brand, that people can’t stop loving!