Many chains use master corporate menus to control food cost and brand consistency. By standardizing menu offerings, recipes, and portions, restaurant chains better protect their margins and deliver a consistent product across multiple locations. This streamlines IT operations.
Tastes can vary from one area to another. The leek-and-potato pizza that’s a hit in Oakland may not go over so well in Dallas. With regional differences in prices, coupons, and tastes, how do you put the concept of a corporate menu into practice?
Master Menus
A POS system with chain-friendly menu management tools will allow you to define a master menu. You can also tailor it to each region as needed. Head office staff can create and maintain one or two menu files to use across the entire chain or a region. This keeps the core of the menu consistent. It also ensures that PLUs used for online ordering always match those in the store menus.
It’s easy to customize a single corporate menu to allow for different prices, coupons, and offerings at individual locations. The "Store Groups" feature makes it easy for virtually any element in the menu to be location-specific by simply selecting a check box. Adding new store groups was made much faster too.
Corporate Menus
Corporate menus are a powerful tool and should be used with caution. Before distributing a menu across multiple locations, test it thoroughly at one or two stores. Here are some helpful tips for you to be aware of:
- POS software version - Stores should all be using the same version of the software that was used to create the menu.
- Back office settings - Tax rates, print routes, security rights, and other back-office settings may need to be changed in order to support a new corporate menu. With the right POS tools, you can manage back-office software settings from head office. This is done by allowing you to push packages of preconfigured settings to the restaurants’ POS systems.
Are you using a master menu for multiple locations? If not, what’s holding you back?
