Picture this: You own a thriving restaurant that is experiencing a growth spurt in its operations. So you do the natural thing and expand to open a new branch to feed the growing demand, but things don’t go the way you thought. Your franchise’s food quality is taking a hit, reviews are bad, customers aren’t returning and you’re hemorrhaging money.

What did you do wrong? Well, one of the problems could be that you didn’t micro-manage your menu to focus on increased quality of food, higher operational performance & lower overhead costs. As you spread your operations, you also risk diluting the magic that made your restaurant a hit in the first place.

Loss in quality will result in a loss of customers, thus here is how you stop it from happening!

What Is Micro-Menu Management & Why Is It Important?

A restaurant business is an undertaking that needs many simultaneous processes to work in unison to operate to its full potential. An operation’s failure in logistics results in the delay of food production, which can then cause a delay in service, which means customers get their food late.

All of this culminates in a cascading effect and negatively impacts the restaurant’s brand reputation. Therefore you need to micromanage your menu, which means you need to take definitive steps that have a long term strategic impact on the functioning of your establishment. Micro-menu management intends to create a system that has a degree of autonomy of action by using practices that standardize & streamline your operations.

Here is how you conduct Micro-Menu Management:

#1 Focus On Quality, Not On Variation

While having a large menu with a wide variety of food might be appealing on paper, but it’s far from it. You might be successful in amusing your customers at the beginning with fresh menu items, but soon the entire task will become tedious and costly.

Think about it, McDonald’s, one of the biggest food chains on the planet, has just two permanent food items; ‘burgers and french fries.’ With just two items they went on to earn $21 Billion in global revenue in 2018 alone.

It is much better to have a few menu items that you excel in, rather than having a plethora of items you’re okay at. With fewer food items on your menu, you will be able to focus on quality while keeping your overhead costs low hence increasing your profits.

#2 Standardize Your Practices

The first thing you need to do in micro-menu management is creating an SOP or Standard Operating Procedure for your restaurant. An SOP helps you reduce clutter and create a clear strategy for action that results in less wastage of resources thus saving you more money! Having an SOP for your menu also makes your service quick and streamlined as it reduces the table turnaround time.

You must understand that the customer hates monotony, but loves familiarity. That’s a dichotomy that you must navigate correctly to succeed. With an SOP, you will allow your customers to have the same brand-experience at multiple outlets, all while maintaining the true essence of your food.

#3 Adopt A Centralized System

The biggest issue restaurants that are in the expansion phase of their growth face while conducting micro-menu management is maintaining consistency. This consistency can be of both food and service quality, so the natural question pops up is how?

The answer is simple, adopt a centralized system. Running a good restaurant is all about taking in customer feedback and improving your service and food quality over time.

To do that, you must have a cloud-based system that enables you to control all your outlets with a single interface that allows for faster menu and SOP updates across multiple outlets. With such a system restaurants can remain nimble on their feet and always stay ahead of bad trends thus saving precious time and resources.

Pro Tip – Order Up! is an end-to-end restaurant management system for restaurateurs allowing them to manage their menus, their outlets, and their orders. Along with a cloud-based restaurant management system, it comes with a white-labeled mobile application in Android and iOS for customers to order food online. Click here to learn more

#4 Stock Upto Need & Minimize Waste

The biggest challenge that you will face while running a restaurant business is fighting the ever-increasing operational costs. If there is one business that requires a daily infusion of capital to function then that would be restaurants, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

You can plan smart and get ahead of the curve by conducting micro-menu management and only stocking intelligently and minimizing waste. As mentioned before once you establish an SOP powered through a cloud-based centralized system you will be able to tap into the data of your operations.

Once you have assessed that data, you can then go on to streamline your stocking measures to suit each outlet individually to maintain maximum efficiency with minimum wastage. The less you waste, the more you save and in the hospitality industry, every penny counts.

#5 Rightsize Your Staff

Every business venture is faced with such a reality once they cross a certain threshold of operational capacity. Sometimes restaurants don’t employ enough people, while on the other hand some over-employee, therefore it is crucial for reducing your costs by right-sizing your staff.

Use the data that you generate through your cloud-based centralized system to cut down redundancies and better understand the needs of your staff to streamline the process of micro-menu management. As a result of which you will be able to increase staff productivity while also bumping service & food quality.

#6 Take Control In Your Hands

The most critical aspect of micro-menu management is the ability of a restaurant business to take control of its operations. All the above points deal with the internal factors hampering your control, but there is one external factor.

That external factor being food delivery app networks that many modern-day restaurants have partnered with. Even though their initial proposition might seem enticing, the longer you depend on such services the more you become a hostage of their malpractices.

Many such food delivery app networks impose many menu restrictions that violate your freedom of choice as a business. Hence restaurants must move away from such platforms and create their food delivery app for reaching their customers!

Pro Tip #2 – Did you know third party food-delivery apps charge restaurants up to 30% of their listed prices for the privilege of delivering their food? This is where Order Up! comes to the rescue. Empower yourself to magnify your restaurant’s sales and revenue by paying 0% commission when someone places an order through your app! Click here to schedule a FREE demo.