Optimize the profit in your restaurant
Do you calculate the raw material costs for your dishes? If you don't, you won't know how much you're making from your dishes, and therefore you won't know which dishes to highlight on the menu.
According to key figures from HORESTA, approximately 2 out of 3 restaurants are running at a loss. In addition, the average profit is only 1 percent of turnover. So a restaurant with a turnover of 5 million earns an average of 50,000. Add to that a corporate tax of 22% of the profit, and there is not much left.
300 percent is the key to success
It is important that you, as a restaurateur, manage to price your dishes sensibly. The rule of thumb is that you should have an average 300 percent margin on your dishes. This means that a dish that costs 40 kroner to make should be listed on the menu for 120 kroner. Remember that 25% VAT must be added on top.
The rule of thumb of course depends on your restaurant's other costs, its size and not least the general price level. When pricing your dishes, it is not necessary that you achieve a 300 percent margin on all dishes. Some dishes may only give 200 percent, but then it is important that you have other dishes, or side dishes, that make up for it.
Find the cheapest main ingredients
It is important to know which foods are cheap to buy and which people like to order. Here are some of the foods and dishes that have the highest margins:
- Salad
- Assert
- Vegetables
- Pancakes, ice cream and other desserts
A simple tip is therefore to highlight the dishes on which you have the highest margin. If possible, put a clear box with particularly profitable dishes in the middle of the menu. Feel free to use texts such as "The chef recommends". This way you can increase the sales of dishes with high margins, and thus it becomes much easier to generate profits in the business.
Understand customer expectations
It is not always the customer's expectations that match the actual price of the dish. That is why some dishes can be sold with a margin of 500 to 1,000 percent. Pasta dishes are good examples of this. Unfortunately, it goes both ways. So dishes that are expensive to make, whether due to labor time or expensive ingredients, may not be sold with a margin of 300 percent.
A high-quality beef steak is expensive to buy, even for restaurants. Yet they have to set the price low enough for the customer to order the dish. Part of the reason is that many customers won't buy a steak for 400 kr. if there's a good pasta dish next to it for only 125 kr.
Cheap main ingredients, expensive accessories
Restaurants that have good steaks on the menu, not least steak restaurants that make a living from expensive ingredients, have a pricing strategy that allows them to still achieve the 300 percent. They price the steak by itself without side dishes, for example at a price of 230 DKK. Only a few people will eat the steak without side dishes, so the restaurant offers sauce (e.g. 40 DKK), French fries or baked potato (50 DKK) and possibly vegetables (e.g. 40 DKK). In the end, the customer ends up paying 300 DKK for the main course without drinks. In this way, steak restaurants still make good money on steaks.
There's money in vegetarians
Although vegetarians often don't spend nearly as much money as their meat-eating friends, it's not a bad idea to attract vegetarians. The dishes that vegetarians typically order are soups, salads, pasta and other appetizers. And this is where there's a lot of money to be made, simply because the margins are so high. So welcome vegetarians.