Your Menu

Creating Your Menu

Creating your menu

The purpose of your menu is to make your food sound so appealing that your customers cannot resist ordering! It should be put together based on customer needs (as discussed earlier) to ensure that you are offering customers what they want, when they want it, at a price they are willing to pay. Your menu should be professional looking and clean with mouth-watering descriptions of your meals.

Small-scale catering operations will benefit from having a menu. For example: professional looking sandwich or pie menus are simple and effective at increasing sales. Larger-scale catering operations will require menus that are more extensive, with meals made up from the main meat categories of beef, chicken, lamb and pork. Vegetarians also need to be accommodated; research estimates that 5–7% of the adult population are vegetarian (Key Note Research 2004, National Diet & Nutrition Survey 2001); and, as almost 2 in 5 women and 1 in 6 of men are dieting most of the time (Mintel report 2004), ‘healthy option meals’ also need to be incorporated in your menu.

Separate Menus

Separate menus can be used to target different customer needs for example: breakfast menus, quick bites, light meals, and children’s menus. These can be displayed at different times of the day or week when you are targeting different types of customers.

Menus for special occasions such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter and Christmas also need to be planned and promoted well in advance.