Education: Mastering Menus for top marks at school

Analysing the performance and profitability of each dish on your menu can help improve the financial performance of your school catering service. It enables you to identify the most profitable dishes, the ones that might be dragging your financial results down and those that just need to be tweaked.

These are some of the points made by Judy Roberts, who runs RightProductRightPlace in her presentation on “Menu Engineering” to TUCO members earlier this year. She says, “Menu engineering is the process of evaluating menu pricing and item placement to increase profitability per customer. It helps to determine which dishes to feature and guides customers to purchase what you want them to buy.”

Judy’s Recommendations

Analysing menus to highlight opportunities for reformulating recipes to increase vegetable content and to reduce meat or other expensive ingredients. Judy says, “If you use a cheaper cut of meat, then you’d also need to factor in a potentially longer cooking time, so the way the recipe is put together may change. In this way, recipe innovation is encouraged as new ideas are tried out.”

Accurate sales data will show you the popularity of each dish. “Hopefully this data will come from the tills,” says Judy. “Each dish is given a code which can be tallied during service to show sales breakdown dish by dish. If that is not available, then a portion count will be needed – portions made compared to portions left gives you the number of portions sold.”

If there is a dish which makes a good return, but isn’t as popular as you want or expect, then speak to the students who did choose it. Knowing why some like the dish may throw light on why others haven’t. Judy says, “It might be the position on the menu or counter so that new students don’t see it, whereas the regulars know exactly where to find it. The best way is for a team member to speak to a student – that way you are getting specific feedback. Online feedback will probably end up with more generalised answers.”

Once recipes have been adjusted to improve costs, the way dishes are presented on the counter or menu is crucial. Judy says, “Positioning the products you want to sell most of in the most visible positions will ensure more are sold. Eye-level and right in front of students is the mantra.”

The number of times that menus are changed depends on the regularity of service. Generally, menus should change with the season, but in schools, where students visit daily, it makes sense to change it every four weeks as a minimum, or even more frequently “or it will become boring and predictable,” adds Judy. “If students only visit occasionally, maintain the same menu across the season with a few daily or weekly specials to capture the attention of more frequent diners.”

Printed Menu Tips

Judy gives the following advice on how to make printed menus as effective
as possible:

Keep menus uncluttered so you can highlight specific dishes.
Use coloured fonts to make them stand out – red is always good for catching attention, but don’t overdo it.
Pricing – don’t put everything in price order.
Include pricing with the dish description rather than in a column off to the right. That way customers don’t scan down and pick on price rather than the mouthwatering description.