Restaurant Owners: Top 5 Tips on How to Sell with Your Menu

QR codes can be applied in almost every business and almost every industry.  Restaurants have been one of the first few businesses to take to this technology.

Here at BeQRious.com, we are all about best practices.  So how do you make more money by simply paying more attention to your menu?  Here are our top five tips:

1. Take time to categorize your offering.  People often go into restaurants craving for a chicken dish, or a pork dish.  That’s why it makes sense to group your dishes according to their main ingredients: pasta, pork, beef, vegetarian, seafood, and whatever you have.  The more categories you have, the better. 

It is said that people often order what comes first on the menu, so if they want chicken, they are most likely to order the first chicken dish you listed.

Start off with the most profitable dish you have for every category.  By most profitable, we mean those which offers you the biggest margins.

2. Highlight a dish.  Create a Dish of the Month, or perhaps have a section for your daily specials.  This is where the QR code comes in handy.  Since you can’t really print a different menu every day because of cost constraints, you can invite your diners to scan a QR code to reveal the daily special, which could also include pictures or a video of the food and of how it was prepared.  You could even provide an in-house iPhone that they could use if they happen to leave their smartphones at home. 

3. Pictures sell.  A customer is more likely to order a dish when he or she sees a picture right next to it.  This is when you can get more creative, with the help of a QR code.  You could take them to a mobile site that features not just pictures of your dishes, but also the cooking procedure.

4. Exclusivity.  Joe’s Terrific Home-Style Burger would be a terrific name for, well, a hamburger.  It doesn’t only differentiate your burgers, but it makes people think that it is unavailable elsewhere and they could only get it from your shop.

5. Flaunt your ingredients.  A dish would sell better if people knew what went into them.  This would be extra special if you went out of the way to procure expensive and special ingredients for your dishes.  For instance, you use Belgian chocolates for your desserts, or Kopi Lowak for your house brew.  You could list all the ingredients on the menu, but why stop there?  Go a step further by putting a QR code that resolves to a video  showing your cook or chef using all these fine ingredients to create a gastronomic masterpiece!