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Training Staff On Menu Knowledge

Ben Beddow — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 02:27:31 +0000

Training Staff Menu Knowledge

Ben Beddow

He likes to write content and travel the world. He has been in the hospitality industry for soooo many years and still at it!

Published January 7, 2022

All too often, in restaurants across the country, a server or bartender heads to the kitchen to ask the chef a brazenly simple question that, all in all, they should know the answer to. These members of staff represent the location to its guests’ and it is their job to present the menu to the guests in the correct manner. This correct manner is effortless, will confidence, coupled with informative descriptions, and immediate answers to any of the guest’s questions.

Unfortunately, this is not the case all the time. The same issue also exists with beverage menus and a venue’s alcohol offerings. Servers are often seen headed to the well to ask the bartender about a certain drink or liquor, before returning to their table. All these trips away from the table create unease and uncertainty for the guests and also display a lack of professionalism on the part of the server and the establishment.

Many managers are blind to the plight of a lack of in-depth menu knowledge amongst their employees, and many just take it as a part of service. But managers, and their guests, shouldn’t expect this subpar level of service from their servers. Before we jump into training staff menu knowledge let’s first look at the benefits of proper menu knowledge.

Training Staff On Menu Knowledge

The Benefits of Menu Knowledge

Server Confidence: The more knowledgeable a server is of the menu the more confident they can be in their presentation of it.

Guest Confidence: When a server leaves the table to answer a question the guest is left feeling awkwardly embarrassed, and can mean they lose some faith in the quality of the venue they’re dining in.

Higher Level of Service: When the server knows the menu their level of service is elevated by knowledge and confidence. This is noticeable by the guests and gives them confidence in dining in that location; potentially meaning that they’ll spend more money.

Better Time Efficiency: Running back and forth to the kitchen or bar to ask questions wastes time. Not only the time of the server but also that of the other members of staff and the guest.

Guest Loyalty: If servers are knowledgeable and confident, guests are confident and trusting of the service staff. Such confidence and trust in a venue and its staff can increase guest loyalty and mean that they’re more likely to become a returning customer.

Server Confidence: The more knowledgeable a server is of the menu the more confident they can be in their presentation of it.

Guest Confidence: When a server leaves the table to answer a question the guest is left feeling awkwardly embarrassed, and can mean they lose some faith in the quality of the venue they’re dining in.

Higher Level of Service: When the server knows the menu their level of service is elevated by knowledge and confidence. This is noticeable by the guests and gives them confidence in dining in that location; potentially meaning that they’ll spend more money.

Better Time Efficiency: Running back and forth to the kitchen or bar to ask questions wastes time. Not only the time of the server but also that of the other members of staff and the guest.

Guest Loyalty: If servers are knowledgeable and confident, guests are confident and trusting of the service staff. Such confidence and trust in a venue and its staff can increase guest loyalty and mean that they’re more likely to become a returning customer.

Server Confidence: The more knowledgeable a server is of the menu the more confident they can be in their presentation of it.

Guest Confidence: When a server leaves the table to answer a question the guest is left feeling awkwardly embarrassed, and can mean they lose some faith in the quality of the venue they’re dining in.

Higher Level of Service: When the server knows the menu their level of service is elevated by knowledge and confidence. This is noticeable by the guests and gives them confidence in dining in that location; potentially meaning that they’ll spend more money.

Better Time Efficiency: Running back and forth to the kitchen or bar to ask questions wastes time. Not only the time of the server but also that of the other members of staff and the guest.

Guest Loyalty: If servers are knowledgeable and confident, guests are confident and trusting of the service staff. Such confidence and trust in a venue and its staff can increase guest loyalty and mean that they’re more likely to become a returning customer.

Before continuing there is an important note to make regarding dietary knowledge. Specific dietary requirements, be they allergies, intolerances, or preferences, are becoming more commonplace. When a member of service staff can answer a guest’s questions regarding their requirements with authority the guest feels exceptional welcome, gains confidence in the location and is more likely to return or recommend the venue to their friends and family.

The Elements of Successful Restaurant Menu Training

These tools for menu training range from the basic training of food menus to more in-depth methods of menu training for servers in restaurants. There is no one way to train employees on menu knowledge, as everyone learns differently. But, stressing the above benefits to employees can help them see why such knowledge is important to both their success and the success of the venue they work in.

Hard Materials

Standard practice is often to provide new employees with copies of the menus to keep and use how they wish. This should include the food menu, the beverage menu, and a list of all liquors and liqueurs on offer in the location. These materials allow an employee to study the menu outside of the location and gives them no excuse not to learn the menu.

Hard Materials

Menu 101 Session

Managers, and even the chef, should sit down with new hires for a 1-on-1 session to discuss the menu in full. Covering everything from the most basic menu items to the signature items of that location. This should be done with the employee’s hard copy at hand so they can make notes on it for their own future reference. It should also take place in a space free of judgement or prejudice, allowing the employee to freely ask whatever questions they want, no matter how silly or basic they may seem. The more they ask now the less they’ll ask later and the more confident they’ll be during service.

Here it is important that all allergy suitable menu items should be identified and marked up, along with those items that can be modified to fit specific dietary requirements.

Tasting

Tasting food allows an individual to connect the dish on the menu with tangible flavors and to talk about it from a first person perspective. However, conducting a tasting for every new employee would be an expensive and wasteful process. What venues can do, however, is offer a new hire an introductory meal from the menu, trying to push them towards the signature items they would want them to try. They can also give them samples of some of the most important elements of a dish.

If a location is conducting a major menu revamp then they can consider producing all of the menu items for an employee tasting before launch. This allows the employees to taste all the new items and to refresh their taste buds on existing menu items. Allowing employees to taste new menu items is also common practice when just one item is being added to the menu.

Formal Testing

Weekly menu tests are a common practice in fine dining, but outside of this world running menu tests for servers and bartenders is rare. Many venues have, however, begun testing new employees before the end of their training period, stipulating that they must pass in order to serve at that location.

Setting formal menu tests ensures that the employee will study the menu thoroughly and be better informed for service than if they were not tested. At a minimum formal tests should cover:

Most popular items
Item modifications
Gluten free items and modifications
Vegetarian and vegan items and modifications
Spirits on the shelf
What beers are available
signature cocktails

It is up to a particular location to decide if and how often they formally test their employee’s menu knowledge, and some will go as far as to hand out consequences -such as spending a week back waiting or running food- for failing tests.

Continuous and Casual Testing

Asking employees menu questions on the fly in front of their peers can keep them all on their toes and is a helpful tool to ensure that everyone keeps up to speed with their menu knowledge. These impromptu questions work best at line up and during slow periods of business.

The Final Course

There is a lack of expectation in restaurants regarding staff menu knowledge, and the notable improvements it can make to service and a restaurant’s reputation are often overlooked. Ensuring that a location’s employees know their menu back-to-front not only makes life easier for them and their colleagues but it improves their work confidence and, as a result, can severely enhance the guest experience in that location.

The post Training Staff On Menu Knowledge appeared first on Online Ordering For Restaurants | ActiveMenus.

What is Menu Engineering?

Ben Beddow — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 05:26:28 +0000

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What is Menu Engineering?

Ben Beddow

Published October 1, 2021

It is an old yet true adage that “restaurants run on thin margins”. Every advantage that a restaurant can score itself is a point to the home team and means that margins are a little safer than they were yesterday. One lens through which cost optimization is scrutinized is a restaurant’s menu, but how often is the menu itself scrutinized?

A menu is more than just a list of the foods and drinks offered by a location, it is an invitation to guests to experience the best of what a restaurant has to offer from their kitchen and bar. A well designed menu can be attractive to the eye but a well engineered menu isn’t just working to be pleasing to the guest’s eyes, it works to entice them into ordering what the restaurant wants them to order; particularly those things that are of greatest benefit for their bottom line; that is the goal and benefit of restaurant menu engineering. A well engineered menu entices customers to make the choice they think they want without telling them that they’re making the choice that best benefits the restaurant in which they’re sat.

What Is Menu Engineering

Definition of Menu Engineering

The definition of menu engineering is to take a beautifully designed menu that is appealing to a location’s target audience and loyal customer base and tweak it, often unnoticeably so, so that it silently funnels customers toward the choices the restaurant wants them to make i.e. those that are best for their bottom line. Fundamentally, this means crafting a menu to suit a location’s customer base, and then fine tuning it so that it is working as hard as any of a location’s employees’ to ensure customers are happy and that the restaurant is turning a profit.

Let’s be clear, restaurant menu engineering is not a topic that can be fully covered in this medium sized blog. There are decades of research and trial and error that have gone into understanding how to do menu engineering and how menus can be used to enhance a location’s profitability, and, whilst the dream is to be able to sum it all up in a short piece, the reality is that engineering a menu is a time wrought, ongoing process, implemented over months, using multiple techniques that require quite in-depth explanations that enable the person who implements them to continue learning from their menu and continue to improve it as time goes on.

Why Say Engineering, Why Not Say Design?

Menus have been designed for decades, if not centuries, but to engineer a menu is to fine tune it. You could say a high-end sports car is designed for speed and beauty whereas, in reality, it is engineered for speed and much of its beauty is a result of that engineering. It is the same with menus, engineer a menu for profit and add design, almost as an afterthought, and you’ll be left with an exceptional looking menu that is highly appealing to both the consumer and a restaurant’s bottom line.

Restaurant Menu Engineering Tips

As said, fully engineering a menu can take a lot of time, effort, and upkeep, but there are some elements of menu engineering that don’t require the informational input that fully engineering a menu does. These “Tips” are menu formatting techniques that can be used to give a location’s bottom line a boost without having to delve into all the math surrounding menu engineering but provide an excellent basis as menu engineering examples.

Paper Quality

It might sound trivial bit the paper a menu is printed on does matter and the feel of the menu in a customer’s hand can influence their decision making. If a menu feels high quality then the customer is more likely to trust that location and is more comfortable to spend more money on food and drink at that location because they’ve “felt” the quality.

Placement Inside Menu Categories

Menu’s are split into categories, an example menu may be split into the following menu categories: Appetizers, Salads, Burgers & Sandwiches, Entrées, and House Specials. If a customer were to read each of these categories research has shown that they are most likely to remember the first and last items they read. Therefore placing the most profitable items in each category at the beginning and end of that category increases the chance that guests will order them.

Price Organization

Each menu item is priced to cover its own costs and to provide a return to the restaurant, with each item fitting inside a specific location’s pricing and costing strategy. Regardless of how the math on this works out there are bound to be some items that are overpriced for what they are. But how does a restaurant stop customers from noticing this? Placing over priced items next to reasonably high priced items is one way of disguising highly priced items. For example if you have an item that is overpriced for what it is it should be placed next to a naturally high priced item, like a lobster or a fillet, so that the price of the overpriced item seems much more reasonable that it would seem if it were next to a much cheaper item.

Drop the Dollar Signs

Over the past 15-20 years you may have noticed that most restaurants, and other retail outlets, have dropped the currency symbol from their menu or items. This is a simple menu engineering tactic that has been well researched and is proven to increase customer spend. Simply: seeing a dollar sign, $, next to the price of a menu item is more likely to induce thoughts of cost or “value” and is, thus, more likely to deter the customer from purchasing a more highly priced item because of the value association made in their head by seeing the $ symbol.

Calculating Menu Engineering Results

Using the above formatting points to enhance a menu should bring tangible results. Removing dollar signs can be measured by monitoring check averages; i.e. check averages should rise once currency symbols have been removed from a menu. Placing certain menu items first and last in a list should produce an increase in the sales volume of these items, as should price organizing overpriced items. Improving the paper quality of menus should also see a rise in check averages as it means customers will be more comfortable spending more money.

Some of these changes are measured using the same metric, so this means that they should be introduced gradually, 2-3 months apart, so that their effect can be properly measured. Introducing two improvement techniques at the same time that are measured the way means that it’ll never be possible to distinguish which improvement is producing the desired result.

Also, in our last post we discussed increasing a restaurant's average check. A location should be sure that they're not running both menu engineering improvement that are measure through increased average check sales and implementing average check increasing tactics at the same time. If they do managers and owners will not know which is producing positive results and will be unable to increase their positive value action.

A Final Say

Fully engineering and optimizing a menu for profitability can increase sales by an average of 2-10%. This shows the huge potential that is available to every restaurant by paying attention to their menu and the items on it. The menu engineering examples that are shown above are tips that only skim the surface of what menu engineering is and should not be expected to increase a location’s sales by multiple percentage points. Utilizing these tips is, however, a stepping stone in the right direction for any location aiming to increase their profitability and looking to discover the advantages of menu engineering.

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