7 Tips To Offset Rising Beef Prices
Beef prices are rising, and as they rise, you may need to consider making adjustments to your menu to help offset those rising food costs. Here are 7 tips to help offset the rising costs of beef without losing any customers.
1 – figure out your theoretic food costs. Before you do anything at all on your menu, check the price on the menu against the actual cost of goods. Simply take the beef price per pound and divide into price per ounce. Then figure out your portion size (realizing it may vary a little) and simply multiply the portion size in ounces by the cost of the beef in ounces. Add back in the other plate costs and simply divide the selling price with the food cost to get to the food cost percentage.
Before you take a price increase, however, make sure the food contribution (margin) is still strong enough to support the product on the menu. Just because the price increased on beef doesn’t necessarily mean the product is no longer profitable. Also, a beef item may have a higher food cost percentage, but is still very profitable, so be careful with percentages, and always make your decision on how much actual money you make, and not the overall percentages.
2 – make sure the steak you’re selling isn’t the most expensive item on your menu. The most expensive item on a menu is always the hardest item to sell. Which means that you will need something more expensive on the menu to make the higher price steak items look less expensive by comparison. Remember, the one time in a person’s life they are most likely to buy the most expensive item on a menu is the day they sign on their house. And the thinking is: “I’m $300,000.00 in debt, what’s another $100.00?
When HotOperator redesigns a menu, they always add a higher priced combination to offset the price points of the higher priced steak items with some other item you already have on the menu. So if you have a shrimp scampi on the menu, use that together with the steak for a steak and shrimp item that can be a higher price than the steak.
3 – place the beef items together in one location on your menu, and feature them with highlights to call attention to them. When consumers go into a restaurant, they want to know what you recommend. Because beef, especially steak is valuable, people expect to pay more for them. So all you need to do is recommend them to give them a boost and sell more of them. And when you do, you will take more money to the bank.
4 – use a beef temperature ordering guide on your menu. Consumers believe, and rightly so, that you take beef products seriously when you have a guide to ordering beef to the right temperature. When you use this device, you are telling your guests that you know how to cook steak, and they will like the steak more when it’s cooked to their perfect doneness.
5 – use table talkers to sell steaks and beef products, especially if you display a nice photo of your steaks. People respond to photos, but only if the photo looks good enough to eat. So don’t go cheap on photography, but instead, make sure your photos look really terrific!
6 – bonus your servers. Restaurant servers are coin operated. They focus on the products that bring the easiest money for them, or that offer an incentive of some kind. And keep in mind, steaks and beef products often bring an additional $8 or $9 dollars to your plate contribution, so there is enough money there to share with your servers. So give them a buck for every steak they sell next week and move some beef!
7 – make sure your menu is design-engineered. This is essential. A great menu can bring up to 12% to your bottom line. And the menu never takes a day off, gets sick or insults a customer. Think about it, if you make a million in sales right now, the menu could bring in an extra $120,000.00 this year alone. And if your menu is not well engineered, you’re losing that much every year you’re in business.
For a FREE menu consultation, ask your Brown Foodservice representative to connect you with HotOperator today! To get FREE Table Talkers, ask your sales representative how to get these FREE tables talkers with your next order of Geo. Brown Land & Cattle Beef!
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