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Having a variety of different food items available on your menu will allow you to draw in more customers to your café. If you are worried about it complicating your day, here’s how to introduce these foods to your café menu so that it will go as smoothly as possible.

Don't Introduce Too Many New Foods at Once

Many café owners make the mistake of introducing too many foods at once. They get so excited about their new menu offerings that they forget that a lot of work goes into utilizing new foods in their café. This can slow down service times, increase employee confusion, and decrease overall quality. This is why it’s best to only introduce one or two new foods at a time. Let everyone adjust to smaller changes rather than blow them over with sudden changes.

Get Bread Delivery

The food you might want to introduce for your café probably uses a lot of bread. After all, sandwiches and toast are common café offerings, and bread is also offered on the side of salads and soups, which might make up your lunch menu. Using fresh bread can give your food a great boost, but making bread is time consuming. 

If you are worried about how you will find the time to bake bread every single day, you can utilize fresh bread delivery. This will allow you to have fresh bread whenever you need it without having to complicate things by trying to make it yourself.

Prepare What You Can The Night Before

Many people likely visit your café first thing in the morning for coffee and breakfast. However, delays in food prep can make them late for work or appointments, leaving your customers upset and unlikely to return. To prevent long wait times, do as much food prep as possible ahead of time. This might include cutting up fruits and vegetables, marinating ingredients, or preparing condiments. So that you don’t have to get to work too early in the morning, try to do food prep the evening before.

Talk to Your Staff First

One of the biggest struggles that a lot of café owners face when introducing new foods is their staff not being sure how to prepare these new items. This is why you should talk to them about these new offerings beforehand. Show them how to prepare each item, and make sure they have the chance to make these dishes on their own as well. You can also provide recipe cards for the kitchen for any new employees or anyone who might need a reminder.

While introducing new foods to your café menu can make it more diverse, you may find they also can make your day more complicated if you aren’t thoroughly prepared ahead of time. Fortunately, there are some things that you can do beforehand that will save you time and will allow your staff to be fully prepared to work with these new food offerings.

With the closing of dining rooms and the trend of social distancing, you will want to find a way to drive business to your eating establishment. One of the smartest ways to continue your business’s growth is to transition to a drive-thru only menu. Here are the four top ways you can keep your business going with a drive-thru only menu.

Limited Menu

The first thing you will want to do is limit your menu to your most popular items. Also include items that will be easier to create. For instance, you can create sandwiches using Kaiser buns. This limited menu will allow you to get more customers through your drive-thru and get more revenue per hour.

Contactless Billing

You can allow people to make their orders quicker by having them use your restaurant’s app. This will allow you and your team to fulfill the order quickly and have it ready for them to pick up. Creating an app is easy and will allow your customers to have fast access to your menu.

More Car-Friendly Lot

You will want to make sure that your establishment can handle the drive-true traffic. Therefore you will want to make sure that your drive-thru can handle vehicles up to 10 or 11 feet in height. You will also want to make sure that you can accommodate at least eight cars onto your property without causing any congestion. You may want to consider a trial run with you and your employee’s vehicles before you launch your drive-thru.

Market Your Drive-Thru Menu

Now it’s time to let your existing and future customers know about your drive-thru only menu. Therefore you will want to contact your existing customers via your e-mail list. Also, you can reach future customers by advertising your drive-thru menu. You can also create flyers that invite people to download your restaurant’s order app. Finally, you can offer a special discount or deal for the first month of your drive-thru’s operation.

A drive-thru can go a long way in boosting your business in a time of social distancing and government-mandated closures of in-restaurant dining. You should create a limited driver-thru only menu, create an ordering app, design an effective drive-thru space for your customers’ vehicles, and market your drive-thru menu. By following these simple steps, you will be well on your way to creating a growing drive-thru business.

Operator Solutions Using Mocafe

• customer perceptions and demands
• labor force skill, knowledge and passion and budget
• brand promise and message
• production space, design and storage

We'll come back to this topic again in the future, so for this blogpost, lets just focus on the second item; labor. Let me ask this question..

Operator Solutions Using Mocafe

• customer perceptions and demands
• labor force skill, knowledge and passion and budget
• brand promise and message
• production space, design and storage

We'll come back to this topic again in the future, so for this blogpost, lets just focus on the second item; labor. Let me ask this question..

Solutions for Operators

A standard practice in the restaurant industry is to calculate the food cost of every item you sell. Knowing this cost allows you to a) purchase ingredients more wisely and b) maintain and train staff to standards. There is a time investment in making these calculations, but the reward is a "tighter ship", leading to greater profit opportunity and lessening of production costs.

So how do you calculate the production cost of your menu items? If you ballpark it in your head, it's likely to not be accurate. Let's get started in a demonstration. First, download the sample Food Cost Worksheet. Then you'll need tools to measure: a scale and volume measuring (cup/teaspoon) tools are necessary.

Click this link to open a Food Cost Worksheet Template you can download for your use.

Please notice there are formulas in some of the cells. Be careful to not edit those cells.

Let's fill this worksheet out for a bagel with plain cream cheese. The first thing to do is enter the date and the recipe name: "Bagel with Cream Cheese". We're not going to enter anything in the cells named "RecipeMultiplied" nor "Size" - we don't need these for this sample.

Next, let's enter the sell price for this item. I randomly chose $2.95. We don't need to enter anything in either of these two cells (there are auto-formulas in them): "Cost Per Portion" and "Cost %".

Now let's enter our ingredients. We type in Bagel (be as specific as you want - this is a text cell). Moving right, we enter the number 1 in the "Count" column. Moving right again, we enter the cost of that one bagel in the "AP$/unit" cell. Let's pause so I can explain these column heading in both the measures section and the costing section.

In the measures section, we have three columns marked "Weight", "Volume" and "Count". If the ingredient is measured by weight, enter it in that column (this is when you need a scale). If measured by volume, enter the volume amount in that column. The same goes for count.

In the costing section, we have the column marked "AP$/unit". "AP$/unit" stands for Price of Ingredient As Purchased, per unit of measure. In this example, the cost of one plain bagel is $0.75 each.

The right-most column is the subtotal for this ingredient. You'll need to enter a formula in here. The formula for the bagel in this example looks like this:

=sum(E10*F10)

E10 is the cell that contains the count of the ingredient. F10 is the ingredient cost. The multiply function is the star character *

Writing the formula in this column is pretty easy. You only need to choose which cell from the measure of the ingredient you want in the formula. It is going to be in either the Weight, Volume of Count cell of that row. Let's look at the next ingredient to demonstrate what I mean by this.

The next row down has the cream cheese ingredient. I've put in one ounce by weight and entered the cost per that weight measure (ounces). The formula I write in the subtotal column looks like this:

=sum(C11*F11)

Pretty simple, really. In the old days, they'd do this with a calculator and note paper. Once you get comfortable entering the subtotal formulas, it goes pretty quick. By the way, if you have multiple ingredients in the same measuring column, simple copy the formula from one row to the next.

So what happens now?

The worksheet automatically adds up all the subtotals at the bottom. It also calculates the food cost percentage. These are handy numbers for you to know. You now know exactly how much a menu item costs in raw materials. You also know how much of the menu selling price that cost is; in this example, 36.6 percent.

Got questions? Feel free to comment below and I'll answer.

Jeff from Mocafe