By: Chris Barr
Your Average Ticket Size Is Your Choice
Before designing a pizza menu, every pizzeria operator should take a crash course in “Pizza Menu Engineering” in order to balance costs, sales, and profitability. Ultimately, your takeout menu will play a huge role in whether your average ticket is $15 or $25, and more importantly, what percentage of your average ticket is profit.
That being said, this is one area of marketing that many owners fail to research or spend time on. It’s easy to say, “we already have a takeout menu, I don’t need to do anything else…” but you might be losing money on every order without optimizing the menu for sales. Your pizza menu is meant to do more than itemize your dishes and prices, it is meant to sell and help you realize the maximum potential of your business. Even better, the same “engineering” practice can be (and should be) applied to everything you use to sell. This includes your website, box toppers, doorhangers, text messages, and the rest of your marketing collateral.
Sell Like The Chains!
Don’t believe me? Recent research and sales numbers posted by national chains and large independents proves that optimization (in print and online) easily generates an average of $2.00 or more per ticket. Domino’s online ordering has boosted their profits 23% in less than one year!
Effective engineering throughout your “marketing mix” will also encourages customers to review your entire menu while reducing their first-time “ordering anxiety.”
For example, adding a best-seller star next to your popular and profitable items enables new customers to make a “safe choice” their first time ordering (while simultaneously boosting your sales). Make sense, right?
In many cases, engineering means upselling to higher priced items or bundled deals, or tantalizing the customer so that they order extras like sides and beverages. Why would a customer only buy a Large 1-Topping when they could get a 3-Topping + Side + Drink for only $2.99 more? If you sold 20,000 pizzas per year that extra $2.99 would amount to a staggering $60,000 in sales – and that’s just the tip of the iceburg.
The first concept to learn is that a menu doesn’t need to be set in stone. With the reasonable prices of printing full color menus these days, it is totally unnecessary to simply do an annual cost analysis in order to keep prices current with market value. When you see profits dwindling away, it’s time to analyze cost, sales and profitability, and adjust on the fly. You don’t necessarily have to change prices on pizzas, you can make up the difference through bundles, upsells, specials, etc.
As you know, market fluctuations are a lot more regular than that, and a profitable menu may need to change quarterly. For example, the cost of a gallon of milk may be $2.08 this week, but in a month that same gallon will cost you close to $4! And every operator has struggles to understand the cheese market and cheese prices (good luck!). Keep tabs on what you are paying for your inventory so that when you see your profit margin declining you know it’s time to engineer a new menu or strategy.
Use all the marketing tactics available to you when designing the layout of your menu. Feature dishes with the highest profitability in places that are proven to be a focal point on the page. The upper left hand corner is the first place a customer will look, so place high profit items or those amazing ‘upselling’ appetizers in that area. Ask your designer, ask your marketing consultant, do what it takes to make it right.
Many people believe that appetizers are placed there because they come out before the dinner. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Appetizers are placed strategically so that they add dollars to the bottom line of the ticket. For example, start your menu off with a bold headline that reads “No Order is Complete Without Amazing Sides!”. Another tip with location is to add high quality photos of your best selling dishes (the most profitable ones!) so that they tempt the customer to order that item. If you want to sell cheese sticks, show pictures of cheese sticks, not ravioli!
Not sure where to start?
Ask your Taradel rep for a few “best-selling” pizza menu templates that have been pre-engineered for success, then, you can simply add your prices and offers. We keep your layout on file so that you can easily make updates, improvements, and modifications as you learn what sells and what doesn’t. Once you have “the perfect menu” distribute it everywhere and never stop. If your menu sells, hand them out, give them to businesses, mail them to every home, apartment, and business near your store, and use local events and sponsorships to build recognition, and ultimately, huge profits.