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What can restaurant operators do to bring in new guests and keep them coming back for more? Minimizing Menu Price Increases : Just because diners are still eating out and ordering in, does not mean they are happy about higher menu prices. The key is to keep these promotions short to avoid menu bloat.
Around 33 to 40 percent of food goes to waste each year. A large chunk of that comes down to complex problems in global food supply chain management that most restaurants have little control over. What restaurants can do, however, is re-think how their direct food supply is managed – from transport to inventory control.
Is your restaurant up to speed with the latest best practices for back of house (BOH) management? Everything from decreasing food waste to exploring how automation can increase revenue for small business restaurants is related to BOH procedures. Here are some back of office trends to watch for in 2023.
Front-of-house teams juggled high guest expectations with paper logs, manual reports, and legacy systems that weren’t built to keep up with the pace of service. We saw widespread adoption of mobile payments, digital ordering, and contactless dining almost overnight. Real-time insights? Virtually nonexistent.
A recent eBook by Softarex Technologies highlights all the main aspects of AI usage in restaurant operations, from customer service to back-of-house management. These systems can understand various accents and dialects, process orders accurately, and even upsell menu items based on customer preferences.
Steady Online Ordering Brings Food Waste, Donations to the Forefront of Priorities Orderingfood online increases restaurant sales, but it also can potentially increase wasted food if proactive measures aren’t taken – for both the business and consumers at home.
When youre updating your online menu or online ordering system, its tempting to just copy over the dish names from your restaurant menu and call it a day. Well-written menu descriptions dont just tell guests whats in a dish; they entice customers, set the tone for your brand, and can increase sales.
From salted egg yolks and chili crunch fusions to mushroom-infused teas and freeze-dried fruit powder garnishes, Kimpton’s in-house experts share the standout ingredients, menu items and techniques that will come to the table in 2025.
Menu pricing isnt just about covering costsits about finding that sweet spot where profitability, customer perception, and operational reality meet. Somewhere in between is the number that makes sense for your food costs, your market, and your restaurants unique position. Set prices too low, and youre leaving money on the table.
As a step further, offering a flexible menu catered to solo diners – with smaller portions to reduce food waste and allow the diner to taste more dishes – provides waiters with an additional opportunity to make personalized recommendations specific to these menu offerings.
Restaurant operators searching for something versatile that will cross the dayparts need to look no further than their breakfast menu as waffles have been breaking out of the morning. Profitability: Waffles are a low-cost, center-of-the-plate item and one of the most profitable breakfast item menu offerings.
And no, increasing restaurant sales doesn’t mean turning your restaurant staff into pushy upsellers trying to squeeze a few extra dollars out of every order. And no, increasing restaurant sales doesn’t mean turning your restaurant staff into pushy upsellers trying to squeeze a few extra dollars out of every order.
Foot traffic or heat mapping, menu item engagement, or consumer demographics by time of day. The quicker businesses can feed that information back into operations, the better, whether for personalized dining, staffing optimization, or advertising and marketing.
That includes food prep equipment like mixers, food processors and slicers. Following some best practices for care and cleaning not only helps support the longevity of the equipment, but it also helps ensure staff has equipment that can produce consistent, high-quality food output. Check the operator’s manual.
To tackle these challenges, restaurant owners are relying more on digital tools like mobile ordering, self-service kiosks, and AI-powered workforce management. Self-order and payment kiosks as well as QR code menus are streamlining front-of-house operations, improving order accuracy and speeding up service.
I came across an old quote from Phylicia Rashad (for those my age – the lead actress in the series “Fame” from many years back) that gave me another opportunity to think about the cooks that I know and have known over the past five (nearly six) decades and why I chose to stand in front of a range. Art is the basis of human expression.”
One location might offer seamless mobile ordering, while another struggles with glitchy payment systems, creating inconsistencies that can frustrate customers and impact revenue. Customers crave simplified steps at the beginning and end of their food service experiences, and it’s not hard to understand why.
Customers on average will order more menu items, resulting in a larger bill for the restaurant and a larger tip for the employee. Many restaurant operators juggle multiple locations, and adding managers adds another link in the chain of command to manage. A busy staff means productive staff, which is good for business.
With the rising costs of goods, consumers growing more conscious of spending habits, and private equity-backed brands popping up in communities large and small, mom-and-pops are in danger of adding to the failure statistics. Today, independent restaurants can and should tap into those same tools–without the massive corporate budget.
When properly deployed, they can transform the employee experience by improving daily operations, syncing front-of-house and back-of-house communication and execution, and delivering a memorable dining experience that won’t send staff to the walk-in cooler for a good cry. Hospitality is greater than the sum of its parts.
The tool from the East Coast vegan chain — a digital take on a split-flap mechanical display that appears on its website and in the chain’s ordering app — estimates the amounts of water, land, CO2, and oil saved by eating vegan burgers. These numbers are largely hypothetical. Congratulations. The environmental mission can come later.
US Foods Holding Corp. launched its COVID-19 online operator resource, the US Foods Restaurant Reopening Blueprint. The Restaurant Reopening Blueprint is informed by interviews with key stakeholders such as diners, restaurant staff and US Foods consultants and chefs. Click here to view the application and instructions.
Every day, youre juggling staff, food quality, inventory, customer service, purchasing, and moreall while trying to cultivate a dining experience that wows your customers enough to keep them coming back. Running a restaurant is a balancing act. Its tough, and cant be done passively. What is Restaurant Operations Management?
In this guide, youll learn how to use ChowNow tools along with a handful of other effective strategies to increase order volume, boost your current customer traffic, and grow your overall sales. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to stay top-of-mind with customers and remind them its time to order again from your restaurant.
Are you doing all the right thingsserving amazing food, delivering top-notch service, crafting perfectly balanced drinksbut the tables still arent filling up like they should? The problem isnt your food or serviceits visibility and customer engagementand were going to help you fix that. Optimize your Google Business Profile.
Online ordering has transformed the restaurant industry, turning what was once a convenience into an absolute necessity. In 2025, the US online food delivery market is expected to reach $424.9 Customers expect to browse menus, place orders, and pay for their meals with just a few taps of their phones. billion in revenue.
Is online ordering inefficient? Do you lose money due to food waste? Do you lose money due to food waste? Experiencing over-ordering or last-minute shortages? With a modern cloud-based POS, restaurants can streamline order taking, reduce human error, and improve the overall speed of service. Consider your budget.
While there are clear benefits to an all-digital menu system, to get the most out them, you must first take a step back to re-examine what your menu means to you. Your menu: Part love letter, part manifesto, instructions for use and a bill of goods, all rolled into one. Should your menu move to the cloud?
Everything from food to labor is getting more expensive, which means restaurant margins are tighter than ever. The right marketing strategy helps you get the most out of every dollar by increasing customer retention , boosting order volume, and encouraging repeat visits. Consumer behavior is constantly evolving.
Business begins at the endpoint, especially in food service and hospitality. This includes the entire order to pay processes, from employee collaboration to guest interaction, whether via smartphone, tablet, kiosk or VR headset. And this will take some time. Build Data-First Architectures.
You are sitting in your favorite restaurant and have placed an order on a tablet at your table. After a few seconds of placing the order, a notification appears on your messaging app. Ding* ‘Your order is being prepared by Chef Bot 19 and will be delivered to your table in approximately 19 minutes.
Front-of-House. Henry is ready to order some dinner. He visits your restaurant’s app and orders his favorite dish on the menu. He receives an estimated wait time for his order of 45 minutes. He receives an estimated wait time for his order of 45 minutes. Let’s come back to Henry.
Each system has its own tablet, order flow, and set of requirements, making it difficult to keep up with operations smoothly. Each platformUber Eats, GrubHub, DoorDashrequires its own tablet, login, and order management system. Order management issues. Consumers report that 24.4% Staff training and inconsistent efficiency.
Hospitality operators are rapidly turning to contactless ordering and payment solutions to help navigate the long road back to normal from COVID-19’s impacts. " While contactless ordering and payment is here to stay, many operators remain concerned about how this new service model will impact their guest experience.
Increasing your restaurants online order volume doesnt have to feel like an impossible task. In this guide, well walk through seven practical ways to boost your restaurants online order volume. Optimize Your Website and Online Ordering Experience If your restaurants website isnt easy to use, youre probably losing out on online orders.
With rapid advances happening across various industries, including the food industry, you might be wondering: What does AI have to do with running my restaurant? These are tools that can help you streamline operations, easily schedule staff, and make sure you never run out of ingredients for your best-selling menu items.
How do you successfully reenter the world of service, sales, and most importantly, profitability as we bounce back from COVID-19? Start with Your Menu. Assuming your operation was open at all during COVID-19, you probably removed a number of items from your menu. It’s easier for the front-of-the-house to present.
You can capitalize on peoples’ cabin fever during this time of self quarantine by promoting your order pickup services. Try offering free curbside pickup for all orders placed directly through your establishment, saving the cost of third-party services. This idea can be applied to dine-in, pickup, and delivery orders.
Since the pandemic, restaurants have endured a plethora of issues ranging from fluctuating dining restrictions to supply chain issues to rising food prices. To take some of the pressure off of an already small staff, restaurants have begun turning to technology solutions with touchpoints in the front and back of house operations.
A chief reason is due to caution or uncertainty exhibited by conscious consumers, with 48 percent saying they are taking the ‘wait and see’ approach and holding back on spending in 2024. Moving to Multichannel Dining Experiences Dining out is… back? Orders come from a multitude of places.
Understanding your target market is the foundation of making smart decisions for your menu, pricing, and overall guest experience. Without a well-defined target market, restaurants risk wasting resources on strategies that dont connect and menu offerings that dont selltrying to appeal to everyone, but standing out to no one.
In the back of the house, rampant inflation and ongoing supply chain disruptions are cutting into margins. Simultaneously, staffing is an urgent and ongoing front-of-house concern. Until now, the restaurant industry has operated on outdated, analog technology like faxed orders and invoices in the mail.
Nearly every restaurant in the United States relies on a Point of Sale (POS) system for the majority of its front-of-house operations. That system needs access to the internet in order to keep functioning. Not only can that become frustrating for your guests, but it can also make in-house operations much more difficult.
Tacos are served up at Maizajo, where corn tortillas are made in-house. Stephanie Wu Long seafood lunches, grasshopper cocktails, and more A version of this post originally appeared in Stephanie Wus newsletter, From the Editor, a roundup of the most vital news and stories in the food world. Subscribe now.
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