What do the chains know that you need to know?
- They know that their menu is their marketing plan.
- They know that their menu prices align with their cost to produce a profit.
- They know the menu items that produce the most revenue.
- They know when menuprice changes are imperative.
If someone asked you “Which menu item gives you the highest profit?” could you provide an answer? The reality is most operators don’t know. They have a gut feeling, but they don’t know exactly. The difference between a gut feeling and knowing exactly can mean the difference between a profit and a loss.
So what do the chains do? They use one reliable trustworthy source for goods and services, we call that a prime vendor.
At first this might seem totally contradictory. Shouldn’t you keep your suppliers honest? Won’t buying from two or three different suppliers keep the costs lower?
The reality is that juggling multiple suppliers takes you away from what should be your primary focus: the customer.
Franchises invest the majority of their time in the area that produces revenue – the customer experience. In order to do that, they must have a system.
They have a system that creates consistent results day after day, and that’s it. They have a system that creates the same hamburger at the same location, every location every time they make it with any employee each and every time. What we’re doing with Eyenalyze is bringing systems that the franchises have implemented, paid for, and developed – and we make those available to independent operators.
An essential part of that system is knowing your food costs down to each item. The franchises typically have one supplier for this reason.
For example, with Eyenalyze, Performance Food Services clients can now apply food costs to their sales in real time. They can see by hour what their profit margin is. This level of control is now available to independent restaurant owners.
How It Works
The Performance Food Service representative sits down with you and breaks down your menus and recipes. It’s simple. You take your menu, you break it out in categories, you basically look at each menu item, and you break down the recipe for each menu item.
We’ve generated, through Eyenalyze, a place on the internet at www.eyenalyze.com to enter the information. This information is then housed on the internet and accessible 24/7.
It also is available not only 24/7, but it’s available to make changes. In the event that you want to change your menu, if prices change through Performance Food Service, basically, you’ll be able to go in there and see the new desired results when you change your recipes.
The next thing that happens is we merge your cost and sales information together.
This enables you to see your sales mix from your point of sale data (basically daily sales, how much of each menu item you sold on a daily basis), and then you will have invoice data, which provides current pricing. And what that does is it gives you the ability to have a real time menu analysis.
So the next step is to contact your Performance Food Service AM, and analyze your menu to determine what your highest profit margin item is. And if you’re even considering adjusting your menu, if you ever thought of adjusting your menu prices, this is a simple tool to work hand in hand in partnership with your Performance Service AM, and develop and have quantifiable results and actual numbers that you can look at and modify on an ongoing basis.
This process is not static – it’s dynamic. Prices change, behavior of customers change, so you need a real time food costing menu analysis program that you can update based on the environment of where each restaurateur is located and what’s happening in the economy. So contact your Performance Food Service representative, and get started.
