Increase Sales With Vegetarian Alternatives

The vegetarian population is huge in every country, and that creates a market you can offer your dishes to. On top of that, this way of eating is increasingly popular among people who want to lose weight, since they associate vegetarian with weight loss (even if that isn’t entirely true), and that creates a second market for you.

Let’s look at a fairly common problem… a group of five friends wants to celebrate one member’s birthday. Because he is vegetarian, he almost always ends up with a celebration different from the traditional dinner out, because his friends know the birthday guy won’t be willing to go to the meat restaurant the group prefers.

That’s exactly where an opportunity gets wasted, because if your restaurant doesn’t offer a couple of vegetarian dishes, it can’t be considered an option when a group of friends like the ones in the example wants to go out and celebrate.

Below we share some recommendations you should keep in mind when you add vegetarian alternatives to your menu and use this strategy to increase your sales:

• 1 – A vegetarian won’t necessarily come to your restaurant just because you offer a plate of vegetables. They can easily eat that at home. You need to offer special dishes from vegetarian cuisine so vegetarians have a reason to visit you.
• 2 – A vegetarian doesn’t only eat lettuce or tomatoes; you need to educate yourself well on the subject of vegetarian people, and you’ll realize the huge variety of creative dishes that exist. That way you’ll have a long list of options from which to pick the dishes that best fit your restaurant.
• 3 – Your vegetarian offer must always be part of your advertising or marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter if your ad shows the huge cuts of meat you offer in big letters; you can devote 15% of the ad to also highlighting that you offer vegetarian alternatives, and you’ll start to notice the revenue increase this strategy generates over time.
• 4 – Related to point 1, you need an attractive offer; one dish isn’t enough. You should have 3 to 4 vegetarian dishes, because this will make the vegetarian friend (the one who came with his “carnivore” friends) tell another group of vegetarian friends about your dishes, and that will increase your revenue. Plus, having more options will make the vegetarian customer come back on their own to try other dishes of yours.
• 5 – As for people who want to lose weight, keep in mind that by using arguments related to health care, low calories and so on, you can make your restaurant an option for them. Naturally, someone who wants to lose weight will look directly for restaurants that specialize in that, but if your restaurant is closer to them and they know you offer healthy alternatives, they will almost certainly not hesitate to visit you.

It’s worth mentioning that vegetarian dishes don’t necessarily help you lose weight, so if you want to cover the second market we mentioned, you’ll need to add healthy, low-calorie alternatives on top of the dishes designed specifically for vegetarians.

Try it, you have nothing to lose by trying, and it has worked for us… today I have no problem publicly admitting that this “vegetarian effort” we made at the time leaves us about US$23,000 in extra profit on its own.