What is your menu planning process?

1 Assess your situation

Before you start creating your menu, it is essential to assess your situation and identify any constraints and opportunities. You need to consider your concept and identity, such as your vision, mission, unique selling proposition, cuisine, style, and atmosphere. Additionally, you should think about the target market; who are your customers and what do they expect? Consider their demographics, psychographics, and behaviors. Moreover, you must evaluate the resources and capabilities you have available; this includes human resources, financial resources, physical resources, and technological resources. Finally, it is important to recognize the external environment; what are the trends in the industry, market, and society? How can you keep up with changing customer demands? It is also crucial to understand the regulations, standards, and ethical practices.

2 Define your objectives

Once you have assessed your situation, you need to define your objectives and criteria for menu planning. Customer satisfaction, profitability, variety, and sustainability are all common objectives. To achieve customer satisfaction, you must meet or exceed their expectations and create a positive dining experience. Profitability is achieved by optimizing pricing, portioning, and promotion strategies while balancing food costs, labor costs, and overhead costs. Variety is achieved by offering a diverse and balanced menu that appeals to different customer segments, occasions, and preferences while incorporating seasonal, local, and specialty ingredients. Finally, sustainability is achieved by reducing environmental impact and promoting social responsibility through ethical sourcing of ingredients and minimizing food waste and energy consumption.

3 Research and analyze

Once you have set your objectives, you must research and analyze the relevant information and data that will inform your menu planning. You can collect customer feedback by using surveys, comment cards, online reviews, and social media to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, you can monitor and analyze trends, opportunities, and threats in the industry through secondary sources such as reports, articles, blogs, and podcasts. You should also use menu engineering techniques such as contribution margin, popularity index, and menu mix to classify your menu items into stars, plowhorses, puzzles, and dogs. Lastly, you should use nutrition analysis software such as Nutritics to calculate the calories, macronutrients, micronutrients, and allergens of your menu items to ensure it meets the nutritional standards and guidelines.

4 Design and test

Based on your research and analysis, you can now design and test your menu. To do this, you need to select your menu items according to your concept, identity, objectives, and customer preferences. You should also create or adapt recipes according to your standards, specifications, and procedures, and document them with clear instructions, measurements, ingredients, and equipment. Additionally, you need to test your recipes for quality, consistency, and feasibility using standard methods such as sensory evaluation, yield testing, and costing analysis. Finally, you should design your menu layout according to your format, style, and theme by utilizing menu design principles such as eye movement, typography, color, and graphics in order to attract and influence your customers.

5 Implement and evaluate

The final step of your menu planning process is to implement and evaluate your menu. To do so, you must train your staff on how to prepare, present, and serve your menu items, as well as communicate standards and expectations. It's also important to promote your menu through various channels, such as online and offline. Additionally, you should use tools like sales reports, profit and loss statements, and key performance indicators to track and analyze your results. Finally, you need to review and revise your menu according to feedback, data, and objectives in order to improve customer satisfaction, profitability, variety, or sustainability.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?