One of the mistakes restaurant startups make frequently is to have too many items on the menu. Having “too many” items may seem counterintuitive. After all, One Fat Frog often boasts about the size of our warehouse because our huge selection – basically several of everything you can think of – is important to our business. If a restaurant entrepreneur needs a piece of equipment, we need to have that available. However, the same rules don’t apply to your restaurant businesses.
Restaurant menus that are bloated with too many menu items cause a financial strain, lead to an inefficient kitchen, and can even turn off customers. How? I’m glad you asked.
Let’s say for example your restaurant menu has 12 kinds of soup and you are not a restaurant that specializes in soup. Think it’s good to have that variety? Not really. First of all, you’ll increase the time each diner spends at your restaurant without increasing the amount of money they spend. That’s because they’ll spend a lot of time deciding what to order. “Sorry, I’m not ready to order yet. There are just too many choices!”
Too many menu items also makes your kitchen less efficient because your cooks are going back and forth making too many different things. The more menu items you have, the more ingredients you need, which increases your operational costs. Also, if you have too many items on your menu, inevitably there are going to be some menu items that are not ordered often enough, which means you’ll be throwing away the extra ingredients. Food waste can be significantly reduced with menus that are trimmed of the fat.
If you have fewer items on your menu, your menu can be more focused, where more of the items share common ingredients, which reduces food waste. It can also help you steer diners toward menu items you want them to buy, such as meals that have a larger profit.
You certainly don’t want to take your most popular meals off the menu, but removing underperforming items or meals where you don’t make enough profit shouldn’t cause a loss of business. Instead, it will reduce spending, reduce waste, get your diners in and out faster, and result in a larger profit margin. Perhaps most importantly, you won’t have to deal with customers like my mom:
“I just can’t decide. It all looks so good. Is this one any good? Oh, it is. Hmmm… What about this one? Oh, that’s good, too? Can you come back? I just can’t make up my mind.” It takes my mom about 20 minutes to decide between 10 menu items and that time increases exponentially for every extra item on the menu. So if you don’t reduce your menu size to save money, do it just in case my mom decides to come in for dinner.