If you’ve ever worked in the Support Center for a multi-unit restaurant brand, then you’re familiar with the perennial challenge of building localized menus for each individual location.
Local managers or franchisees understand how vital effective menus are for driving the business—both topline revenue and gross margins. But they usually don’t have the analytical experience to build their menus effectively—at least not without a lot of support from you and your chef or product management team.
What’s more, local managers likely don’t have the copywriting and graphic design skills required to make each menu look and feel as polished, friendly, and engaging as today’s discerning customers expect.
And given the wide breadth of their responsibilities—from hiring new staff to managing inventories and suppliers, to addressing the daily emergencies that crop up in just about every average day— they certainly don’t have the time to spend hours producing this month’s (or this week’s) latest menu.
At headquarters, meanwhile, brand teams face a challenge of their own: either lean into local menu production fully, with all the labor and distractions that carries with it, or lock down menus from customization completely, and miss the opportunity to optimize menus for local needs and tastes. In today’s fast-moving, highly competitive economy, the latter approach looks increasingly unsustainable.
Fortunately, there’s a third alternative—a kind of “Middle Way” in menu production. That is, to create a brand-compliant restaurant menu template, and install it on a local marketing platform that makes the customization process “pick and mix” easy.
This approach saves massive amounts of time and effort compared to manual production, while also ensuring that the resulting menus are built to maximize results, while also supporting and strengthening the brand.
Design a Menu-Building Experience Franchisees Will Love
After more than a decade working with thousands of local restaurant and hospitality managers, we’ve found that the top desires are as follows:
I want to build my menu—with items tailored to my customer preferences—in less than 5-10 minutes. To accomplish this, you’ll need your menu-building tool/website to provide franchisees the ability to pick and mix items from a content database of pre-approved options. You’ll need to organize that database so that specific items are easy to find – without lots of searching and scrolling. Each item will need to come with brand-supplied descriptive copy that’s effective and engaging. That copy should also be open to minor edits from the franchisee, so they can alter the default, if they need. Pricing should be suggested (or mandated, if that’s the brand rule). And brand-compliant typography should be applied automatically, so franchisees don’t have to sweat the details.
Your template should also adjust its layout automatically based on the number of items that the franchisee chooses to include—converting effortlessly from one-column to two or three columns as the case may be. Descriptive icons (for spice or calories, or carbon footprint, etc.) should also be applied automatically
And the system should present an instant on-screen proof of the manager’s choices as she makes them, so they can be confident in what they’re producing.
I want my draft menu to be approved by the brand quickly.
As entrepreneurs and business leaders, restaurant franchisees have great confidence in their abilities. They need that confidence to deal effectively with whatever each new seating might bring. So, they like their menu approval processes the way you probably like your visits to the dentist – as rare as possible, as fast as possible, and as painless as possible.
How do you achieve this type of efficiency while maintaining brand discipline? First, make sure that your menu-building tool/website has an approval process that can be turned on or off with push-button ease. It should also be possible to subject some locations to menu approval, while leaving other locations free of that requirement.
In the approval process, the system should give your brand team the ability to approve menus as is, to send them back for revision, or to revise on behalf of the location, before approving. This third option is a great tool, by the way, for building loyalty and trust with your franchisees.
And when it comes to turnaround times, keep in mind that franchisees typically think in terms of hours, not days or (God forbid) weeks. That may sound daunting at first to your HQ team. But you would be surprised how easily and seamlessly approval can fit into your team’s workday – when the template is set up properly.
I want all the printing options for my menu – all in one place.
Sometimes, franchisees need to build menus for a special event at their location. Sometimes, they need a few extra copies that they can print in their office upstairs. Sometimes, they want to order a month’s supply of menus at the lowest possible print cost. Sometimes, they want to send a file to a local print shop for same day delivery. Your menu-building tool/website should support all of these options, and allow you to make them available to franchisees as you see fit.
I want to build online and print versions of our restaurant menu with ease.
If you’ve set up your menu-building tool /website properly, then you should be able to deploy menu items to both digital and print environments with ease. This should include the ability for franchisees to add links for specific items to their e-commerce facility – to support takeout and catering orders.
Define a Menu-Building Process That Meets the Brand’s Business Needs.
One of the first and most obvious benefits of launching an effective menu-building tool/website is the collective sigh of relief that you’ll hear from your HQ marketing and design teams.
That’s because they can free themselves from fulfilling countless complex requests from individual restaurant locations, and start thinking creatively and strategically about the direction of the brand.
But to reach that much-desired state, brand leadership needs to consider the following questions.
How much freedom are you willing to cede to local restaurateurs? Every brand has to make the decision about how tightly controlled the brand framework should be. If your brand demands scrutiny over every line-break in copy and every image’s crop, then you might not be ready to cede production freedom to your local operators. But if there is a bit more play in your branding framework, then the savings in labor and turnaround time can yield extraordinary returns.
Do you have the data-management skills to build and maintain a database of product content?
Turning creative copy and images into structured product content is no easy task. It takes a team member who combines both aesthetic sensibilities with an analytic and organized mindset. It also means setting aside time each month to maintain and update content so it stays fresh.
A menu-building tool/website also requires some application management skills. You need somebody on your team who can authorize and permission users. Who can man the approval loop when team members are out of office or on PTO. Who can review reporting data regularly and extract meaningful patterns to help guide future creative development. It can be – but doesn’t have to be – a full-time job. But it does need to be clearly assigned.
Is your brand team ready to embrace the power of templating to offload repetitive production tasks?
When you ask this question, don't accept a too-quick “yes” for an answer. Probe with your creative team to make sure they really will accept templating as part of their design delivery process. Talk to your vendor about setting up a laboratory, so you can build some real-world examples of templates. Share the results with your team, weigh the pros and cons. Do this before you sign a multi-year deal for a piece of enterprise software.
Above all, make sure your design team is ready to start incorporating template usage into their design process. This is second-nature to folks who come to design from a web-first mentality. But for teams that have their roots more in the world of print, it may take some getting used to. Allow time for that, and celebrate success as your designers make the transition.
Is your team ready for a 3-6 week implementation process?
Generally speaking, that’s what a full-blown menu-builder/website will require. Expect weekly status calls. Iterative reviews of your startup templates and user experience. Detailed questions from your vendor about the structure of your content. And the need to make best-fit decisions about content, design, responsibility and more. It’s not rocket science—but then again, it isn’t “instant-on” either.
Conclusion: How To Know If You’ve Made The Transition
Whenever you think about changing the way your brand is executed and goes to market, it’s imperative to envision what success will look like. In the case of a menu-builder tool/website, here’s what that could mean.
- Your local operators are producing menus with different arrays of items—providing insights into the way your brand plays across different markets. The reporting data that you can derive from local menu-building data is likely to grow quickly. It can help you to determine where items are playing well, and where they’re not. That creates another line of communication between the front line operators and your executive chef and his/her team. And it puts the brand/marketing team at the very heart of this truly fascinating conversation
- Menu-creation frequency goes up, while printing volume for each individual execution goes down. This would indicate that operators are responding more nimbly to competitive activity and changing customer preferences.
- The creative team is focusing on big themes and promotional periods, rather than putting out fires. When late nights occur, it’s because of a big presentation to leadership – not because a local operator has missed a website deadline.
- Local operators begin to demonstrate more trust and less frustration with the HQ and brand teams. Ask your vendor to run regular satisfaction surveys with your franchisees (good vendors will want this without even being asked). And be sure to bring your franchise development people in on the process. A forward-thinking, technology empowered approach to marketing can be a big part of selling the brand to new operators.
If those benefits sound big relative to the modest cost and relatively rapid implementation of a menu-building system, you’ll know why web-enabled menu-building tools have made the leap from early adopter to mainstream customers. If you haven’t made the leap, it may be time to put menu-building on your brand’s development menu – today.
CampaignDrive by Pica9 is a brand templating tool that allows for the rapid customization of brand-compliant local marketing materials at scale. To get started, we recommend scheduling a free product demonstration.
