How an unimportant dish can help you increase sales

Sometimes a dish that seems unimportant can be key when you want to increase sales at a restaurant. Here is my own story.

This happened at one of my restaurants, and I am sure it may be happening to you too if you still do not have full control over what comes in and goes out of the business (it is a very common mistake in our industry when you are new to the business).

Our menu has a dish that was included only because it is part of that type of food, but it was never promoted. We never dedicated a single line of advertising to telling people we offered it, and the only ones who “knew” about it were those who looked at our menu online or were already at the restaurant and about to order.

At first, with little money, we managed everything manually (we could not pay for an automated tool to keep everything digitalized), and we had no idea about many things when it came to statistics.

After about a year of running that restaurant, we implemented a system that was not fully automated, but it let us digitalize everything manually.

To our surprise, when we looked at the statistics that system generated, it turned out that this unimportant dish was actually “responsible” for a good part of our profits: it was the fifth best-selling dish and also one of the cheapest to prepare.

That dish on its own generated approximately 20% of the restaurant’s total profits. Profits, not sales… PROFITS.

The dish had never cost a single cent in advertising, it was not important, and we did not even think about promoting it because it was not that appealing, but people liked it.

Why did this happen?

There are several factors. After seeing the results, we analyzed all of them, and this was the conclusion:

The dish actually seemed appealing because of its price and the description it had on the menu. It was slightly different from the description of the other dishes, because it highlighted every ingredient and used phrases such as “delicious combination” and “fresh.”

As for the price, since it was much lower than the rest of the main dishes, it made the dish look like a good option when some customers wanted to eat more but did not want to spend as much.

And what happened next?

As you can imagine, we made the most of everything we learned from this… we reinvented our menu, and the same effect has already happened in two other restaurants, and we love it.

I invite you to apply it. The key is in the menu, and to do so we recommend that you read the article Tips for Designing a Menu That Increases Your Restaurant’s Sales.