Boosting Pizzeria profit using Business Intelligence in menu optimization

Using BI in menu optimization to boost Pizzeria profit.

Is your pizzeria profitable in its full potential? If you sell the best food in town, you are head and shoulder ahead of competition but the question remains. Are you making the best use of the restaurant equipment you have? Could you be making better use of your restaurant supply?

As a business man, you already know that if you are not making the best use of your kitchen equipment, you may be leaving money on the table.

Here are two questions that will enhance your profit several points:

• How to influence customer's pizza choice?
  
• If you had such a power, which product would you recommend?

How to help customers to choose pizza using BI?

There is a lot of different ways to influence a customer’s choice in a pizzeria:

• waiter recommendations,
  
• showing beautiful pictures on the walls,
  
• emphasizing the pizza's name or,
  
• showing the pizza's picture on menu.

If all products look the same on menu, each pizza may have the same chance to be chosen. Which pizza would you choose if you didn't like any one in special in the menu below?


Not optimized pizzeria menu

However, if one product outstands, it becomes a recommendation.

Which pizza would you recommend if you knew how to use BI?

Considering only pizzeria profitability, you should recommend the most profitable type of pizza.
To know which one it is, follow these steps:

• Estimate the pizzeria’s cost for each type of pizza
  
• Calculate the profit by type of pizza
  
• Sort the list of pizzas from the most to the least profitable

Suppose you found the "Steak and Cheese" pizza to be your most profitable dish. Why not to recommend it like in the menu shown below?



Pizzeria menu BI optimized for profit


Conclusion

I hope you don’t go changing all your menus right now just because of this article. Product profitability is not the only point to consider in menu or restaurant design. However, I am quite sure you have some customers that just don’t know what to order, right?

When that is the case, why not taking the pizzeria profitability into consideration while you help the customer with his decision making process?

As a conclusion, you don't have to expend mega bucks to have BI solutions in your pizzeria and that could be the road that will take you from a pizzaria owner into a Food Services businessman.

Back to Business Intelligence for Small Business.

Business Intelligence for Small Business

How can a Small Business use Business Intelligence - BI?
BI can be quite simple (and quite complex sometimes). In our case, let's start from something simple:

Suppose, in a restaurant, you sell pizza and pasta. Keeping trek of sales, it is possible to know not only how much you sell but also what you are selling. That is the first step to determine your best product.

If you know prices and costs of each product and how many of them are sold, it becomes possible to develop an action plan to make your restaurant a huge success. The idea is not only to sell more (what is actually good) but improve the sales of the right products.

For instance, having in mind the top 4 products you could consider:

1) Implement a bonus program.
Consider compensations for selling the top products.

2) Product promotion:
2.1) Free trials
2.2) Coupons
2.3) Menu optimization
2.4) Press Release

If you want to know more about BI for Small Business, just stay close.