Offer renewal
Changing a restaurant’s menu with the seasons is now essential to meet customer expectations. It’s a way of keeping up with the times, building customer loyalty by offering something new, and attracting new customers. But how do you go about it?
How do you renew your catering offer?
Renewing a restaurant’s offer means changing its menu. Culinary trends evolve, as do consumer behaviors. Renewal is a proactive way of staying competitive.
The degree of renewal can vary. Depending on your context, it can mean simply renewing your menu seasonally, or repositioning your culinary identity to keep up with the times.
The trick to successful renewal is to evolve your services without losing your existing clientele. To achieve this, it’s important to keep some of your staples or signature dishes, so that your regular customers can find their bearings while exploring the new items on the menu.
Our best practices
Keeping track of your customers’ satisfaction by seeking to understand their positive and negative comments, and keeping a regular watch on new trends, will give you relevant ideas for evolving your offers.
We recommend that you follow the five main steps below to successfully change your offerings:
- Identify the dishes to be changed and select the products to be worked on
- Draw up technical data sheets and calculate material costs
- Test and adjust recipes
- Train kitchen teams to execute new recipes
- Explain and let the front-of-house team taste the dishes, so that they can make the right sales pitch and promote the new products to customers.
A press release for a drastic change in the offer and/or communication on social networks to tease out the new recipes can help you create buzz and publicize your new offerings.
Furthermore, in a world where consumers are ever more eager to experience new things, it can be a good idea to boost your offers by proposing events. These can be recurring events, or one-off, ephemeral ones. These events can be musical, with live bands, or playful (depending on the space available; pétanque/molki tournament, tasting of regional products in conjunction with your suppliers, etc.).
The support we offer
As a restaurant consulting service, DUCASSE Conseil can work closely with your teams to reposition your offer or renew your menu as the seasons change. To do this, a project team visits your site and talks with key restaurant contacts to define the elements that need to evolve and refine the number and categories of recipes to be created.
A review is then carried out and shared with the management of your establishment to ensure that it meets your expectations. A presentation of the recipe titles and the products used is then made before organizing a tasting of the new recipes for validation.
Once the new offer has been defined, our experts come on site to train your teams in the new recipes and to ensure that the culinary philosophy of the project is fully understood by all the staff concerned. Team training is essential to the success of your new offering. For example, the DUCASSE Conseil team assisted the historic Paris brasserie Au Petit Riche in its repositioning to meet new consumer trends and refocus the menu around products from the Loire Valley – a strong element of the establishment’s culinary and historical identity.
Contact us for advice and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible!
