This week, I'm going to answer a commonly asked question -
how often you should update your restaurant menu?
Hey, everybody. Ryan Gromfin here – author, speaker, chef,
and the founder of the Restaurantboss.com,
restaurantprofitandperformance.com, as well as clickBACON.com.
And like I said,
I'm going to answer the question of how often
you should update your restaurant menu.
Let me just get right into it and tell you right now. As often as possible.
Well, what does that mean, as often as possible?
There's going to be a lot of factors that determine that, but ideally,
I'd like to see you updating your restaurant menu once a month,
at least every two months,
some of you, three months, some of you, four months,
no more than that.
You must be updating your menu at least three times a year.
Like I said, ideally,
I would update your menu monthly or every other month,
some of you can stretch it to every three or four months,
but if you're updating your menu once a year,
once every other year.
If you haven't updated your menu in 18-months, get to work.
Here are the factors that come into play with
updating a menu and why I like to update menus so often.
A lot of times we've spent so much money
on our menus,designing them, building them,
printing them, laminating them,
whatever it is that the cost to update the menu
doesn't outweigh the benefits.
So the first thing I suggest is,
get out of that cycle.
Figure out a way to create a menu more often
for much less money.
There's some great online tools like imenu.com or Canva,
or even if you work with a designer,
you should be able to work out a deal where
it's very inexpensive to update your menus on a regular basis.
Then, you need to figure out how to print your menu and get it out on a more
regular basis more often for less money.
I'm not going to get into the details of actually how to do that in this video,
I just want to explain to you the theory behind
why I like to update menus more often.
When we wait too long to update a menu, we create what I call elasticity.
Think of a rubber band, right?
Where the rubber band is resting in its
spot and then you stretch it and stretching it gets
tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter until eventually,
it snaps when you pull too hard,
that's what's happening with your restaurant menu prices right now is that
your restaurant menu when it comes out,
if you're waiting a year or two years to update your prices,
when it comes out, chances are you're overpriced to the market
because you've waited so long,
you've had to take this knee-jerk reaction where
you've raised everything a dollar or two dollars,
10-20% raises.
It's shocking to your customers, they're offended by it,
they see it and so now you've got this new menu, you're overpriced,
people are a little turned off by,
you are going to lose a few customers, they're going to complain,
but then over time, your menu becomes priced
perfectly because your prices are going up every day, right? It feels like,
but then, 6-8 months later, now your menu is slightly underpriced.
So if you can imagine this rubber band, right?
Where you started, you are a little overpriced,
there's no pricing pressure and then you stretch
it and you stretch it in you stretch it until now all of a sudden there's
pricing pressure again and its snaps,
and then you've got to do this whole process again.
What I suggest, like I said is updating your menus as often as possible.
Now, when you do these updates,
don't add massive amounts of money to your menu,
don't change every single item.
You should be looking at making adjustments to your wording to locations,
to placement, to specials, to different menu strategies that you use.
And if you're interested in learning more about all of these different menu strategies,
I do have another program called Profit Maximizer Execution Plan.
It's called the Profit Maximizer Execution Plan.
You can get more information on it below this video,
but really the big thing here is that you're slowly
updating prices,
a little bit at a time. Maybe this month,
only update 5 or 6 items on your menu and just add a nickel or a dime to them.
In the next month, update another 5 or 6 items and add a nickel or dime.
And then next month, another 5 or 6 a nickel or dime, and then eventually,
after 6-months, you've gone through all these,
now you go back to the item that you added a
nickel to six months ago and add another nickel to it.
Now the only way that you can do that is if you don't do even dollar pricing,
or if you don't do consistent pricing,
right? Where everything on your menu ends in 99 cents or 49 cents,
it's hard to add a nickel to it.
So, I suggest you use totally random pricing on your menus.
And what I mean by that is that some items are going to be 435,
685, 550,
790, 1120, right?
Totally random numbers that really mean nothing,
there's no system, there's no organization to it
other than the fact that you know your cost on these items,
you have set them accordingly,
and then to keep up with your pricing increases,
you're just slowly adding a nickel or a dime to them.
And trust me those nickels and dimes add up over time into massive
profits for you.
Best of all, your customers don't see it, they don't notice it,
they're not offended by it, it's just part of the process.
So, how often should you update your restaurant menu? As often as possible.
I suggest once a month depending on your
circumstance and the type of restaurant
that you operate. If you want to go to every other month,
that's fine. 3-4 times a year,
but no less often than that.
I hope you enjoyed this week's training and I can't wait
to bring you a new training video next week.
Have a wonderful day.
[Music]
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Until the next time I see you, go out every day
and improve the lives of your customers,
your employees, your vendors, and of course, your family.