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Fast food and casual dining are currently seeing higher traffic. With dining out becoming more of an occasional treat, it's very important that guests have a great experience – whether that's at an upmarket restaurant or a fast food outlet. Menu consolidation will be important if these trends continue.
You can have a crowd-pleasing menu, loyal regulars, and a packed dining roomand still watch your margins disappear. Too many restaurant menus are built on intuition and aesthetics, not real numbers. What Is Menu Engineering and Why Should You Care? Because not every dish thats popular is profitable.
Fast food and food delivery gradually began changing that equation. 2024 was a year of experimentation with AI, with restaurants testing it on customer-facing interactions, like AI drive-thru ordering, with varying degrees of success. The restaurant experience was once solely comprised of human-to-human, in-person experiences.
Minimizing Menu Price Increases : Just because diners are still eating out and ordering in, does not mean they are happy about higher menu prices. Restaurant operators should limit significant menu price increases, explore value menus when possible, and avoid implementing any sneaky service charges.
Above all, food is set to be the star of the event, 92 percent of employees say attending a holiday party with exceptional food makes them more excited about the event and 78 percent of employees are looking forward to the food at holiday parties the most.
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.
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.
Amid these potential disruptions, operators need a fresh approach to managing food costs. Extreme Weather: By 2035, experts predict that higher temperatures alone will push up worldwide food prices by between 0.9 To keep food costs under control, real-time insights are key. percent annually. Think of it as an adaptable tool.
The hospitality industry has always been about delivering great service—but today, that means more than just good food and friendly staff. For years, restaurant technology has been about speed and efficiency—faster orders, better scheduling, streamlined payments. Contactless ordering and AI powered recommendations.
The restaurant experience isnt just about great service and ambianceits deeply tied to ingredient sourcing and food costs. These policies, which will affect a wide range of imported goods, could ripple across the food and beverage industry in the form of higher prices, tighter margins, and evolving menus. With new U.S.
Successfully navigating fluctuating food costs, especially with volatile ingredients like eggs, requires a multi-faceted approach, Mike Stasko Jr., What are the best practices for dealing with food costs for recipes when necessary items are fluctuating in price? How can you avoid rising prices on egg-focused menu items?
Keeping menus updated across various online ordering systems and third-party delivery apps can feel like a never-ending game of catch-up. Manually updating menus across multiple online ordering channels is tedious, time-consuming, and prone to mistakes. What is Menu Management Software?
Improve Seasonal Menu Offerings When it comes to the holidays, consumers love to tuck into festive favorites. It’s the perfect season for experimenting with new menu items that align with previous seasonal trends. On the other hand, no restaurant wants to risk overordering.
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.
At the same time, a rise in fast-food prices driven by inflation is reshaping consumer behavior, with many customers now treating fast food as a splurge rather than a convenience. For example, AI can help QSRs make smarter inventory decisions by analyzing purchasing trends and aligning ingredient orders with demand.
Although dynamic pricing is a staple in industries like travel and hospitality, its application in fast food is uncharted territory. Recent experiments with pricing strategies, such as summer value promotions, yielded lukewarm results, leaving operators questioning the best approach to menu pricing.
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.
To reduce menu confusion and minimize price sensitivity, Ori’Zaba’s Scratch Mexican Grill recently rolled-out a rengineered and easier-to-read menu. " The new menu, which showcases enticing high-margin labeled photos and a new call-out feature “Be Extra! percent and 2.3
Many restaurant operators have misconceptions about average order volume (AOV) and how it works, making statements like: I need more customers to make more money. For example, lets say you have 50 orders in a day that total $2,000 in revenueall you need to do is divide the total revenue by how many orders you have for the day.
You take your seat at a table embedded with a touchscreen menu. Tap a few buttons, and your order is sent to the kitchen, where robots are preparing dishes with precision, ensuring perfect consistency every time. Throughout the meal, robot servers deliver your food and clear the table when you're done. Need a drink?
This will also allow the operator to concentrate on the operational and menu aspects, ensuring that both customer service and menu innovation remain exceptional and continuously evolving. People are looking for authenticity and transparency, so highlighting where your ingredients come from or how food is made can go a long way.
Over the last two decades, I’ve worked alongside operators in just about every hospitality setting—independent cafés, high-end dining rooms, food halls, and regional chains. We saw widespread adoption of mobile payments, digital ordering, and contactless dining almost overnight. Operators had to shift—fast.
A third of diners said their favorite restaurant changed in the past 12 months, with “better food” (46 percent) and “better value” (40 percent) cited as the leading reasons, according to Tillster’s 2025 Phygital Index Report. The survey of 1,500 U.S.-based
From smarter ordering systems to food that travels better, here’s what pizzeria owners can expect in the year ahead. On the customer side, AI is beginning to play a more significant role in online ordering. This not only frees up labor but also reduces order errors.
MVP Menu Performances More than 200 million people tuned in to the Super Bowl last year—many with a plate of wings in front of them. 11, 2024, comparing it to the average Sunday in 2024 and found that: Wings win MVP with an 87 percent increase in sales The average price of wings ordered increased 18 percent.
While there was a brief dip in consumer awareness of menu price increases in late 2024, the spring of 2025 has seen a moderate rise, affecting dining habits and consumer perceptions of value. Millennials and parents also over-index in restaurant visits, with a strong inclination toward nightlife activities and premium dining experiences.
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. That’s where the NEXT Flavor Report comes in.
These systems can understand various accents and dialects, process orders accurately, and even upsell menu items based on customer preferences. Inside restaurants, AI is powering self-ordering kiosks and chatbots, streamlining the ordering process and reducing human error.
Pre-packaged meals, made-to-order sandwiches, fresh salads, and even hot food bars are no longer afterthoughts—they're part of a growing meal strategy. Consider Buc-ee's, the Texas-based gas station chain whose food selection is so popular that it inspires resale markets and fan pages.
Foot traffic or heat mapping, menu item engagement, or consumer demographics by time of day. Restaurants are already experimenting with using AI to handle drive through orders to allow human employees to focus on customer interactions in the restaurant.
checking for understanding) Patience and adaptability to different communication preferences Example: “I had a customer with several food allergies who was, understandably, very concerned about ingredients and cross-contamination. I offered several suggestions from our allergy-friendly menu and explained the ingredients to them.
"If I had the opportunity, I would encourage them to employ voice analytics, not to automate ordering, but rather to analyze customer/employee conversations for insights into customer experience, operational efficiency, marketing effectiveness, safety compliance, employee engagement, and more, he said. "The
Organize all your orders dine-in, online, and third-party and fulfill them in a flash, right from your POS. The restaurant, with its then-$55 and -$80 tasting menus, was a food-media darling: In 2019, it earned a Michelin star and topped the Los Angeles Times 101 Best Restaurants list. We have a way more extensive pantry.
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. The “ PLNT Impact Tracker ” on PLNT Burger’s website wants you to think about what you’re eating.
A growing number of chefs are shifting their attention to independent operations that focus on foods with wider appeal that need a commitment to excellence. This was, after all, a peasant food, but now is in a class all to its own from utility to high cuisine. Everybody loves food that you can hold in your hands.
Remember when guests used to walk in, grab a menu, and browse through every page? Now, they're on their phones before they arrive, checking your reviews, looking at food photos, and getting recommendations based on their past orders. Let's put this in restaurant terms.
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. Waffles saw a 15.4
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. Cuisine type?
Robert Sietsema/Eater NY Wonder wants to fix food delivery — so it just acquired Grubhub On November 13, Wonder, the company that describes itself as “a new kind of food hall,” announced its acquisition of the established foodordering and delivery platform Grubhub. How does Wonder make its food?
Restaurant operators need to embrace menu and technological innovations in order to meet guest expectations this holiday season, according to the Fall/Winter Trend report: a report produced by Provoke Insights in collaboration with Modern Restaurant Management (MRM) magazine. "Our
Sure, the chef may have his or her name on the menu, the owner may proudly greet every guest, accomplished line cooks may amaze everyone involved, service staff win the day with attention to detail and salesmanship, and one could certainly argue that dishwashers are MVPs because if they fail, the whole operation starts to crumble.
If youre one of the thousands of restaurants that added online food delivery in recent years, you might be wondering: is it actually helping my business grow? These metrics give you a clear picture of your delivery performancefrom order volume and customer retention to delivery speed and profitability.
A spike in food costs, a drop in sales volume, or one slow season can wipe out months of hard work. They tell you how much money your restaurant keeps after paying for everything from food costs to labor expenses to utilities and rent. This gives you a sense of how effective your menu pricing is.
Nowadays, running a successful restaurant takes more than great food and good service. Another way to get local backlinks is from local news articles, food bloggers, or restaurant directories to boost your visibility in search results. Make sure to add high-quality photos of your food, interior, and staff.
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