How to make more Christmas Profit | KitchenCUT
Much as we may not want to admit it, Christmas IS coming and it’s a sobering fact that in the hospitality industry, most businesses will take at least 25% of their annual revenue in the period between Thanksgiving and the New Year. We need to be ready and prepared. A period of just over 5 weeks (only 10% of the whole year) is responsible for a quarter of annual F&B revenue. So what can you do to ensure that during these five critical weeks, your operation is performing to its full Christmas profit potential? We asked Kitchen CUT Co-Founder and former Michelin Starred Chef John Wood give us some tips on how to make more the festive season more profitable.
Menu management to protect your Christmas profit
It goes without saying, that it is fundamental to get your menus correctly costed and priced ahead of the Christmas period. If your margins are not correct on your dishes and your menus, you will struggle to hit your targets. In fact, in some case I have seen the festive season ruin the entire year’s margins through incorrect costings.
It is critical that you not only have a competitively-priced offering to entice people into your business, but you are also selling it at the right price to make a great Christmas profit.
Typically, menus are written earlier in the year and in some cases the prices have already been agreed and publicised to potential customers. However, in most cases these menus have not been correctly costed with exact prices from suppliers; often people just guess or take last year’s prices and add 5%!
If you’ve already confirmed your Christmas menu prices, it’s not too late to properly cost your dishes and menus using your suppliers’ prices and ingredients. I appreciate there may be some seasonal variances, but this % can be built into Kitchen CUT very easily.
Act now before it’s too late
You still have time to create accurately costed recipes and menus on Kitchen CUT, and to make incremental tweaks to portion sizes and product changes to ensure that you’re achieving the margins you have targeted for the year. Most customers will spend more over the festive season, so this is your opportunity to tweak those Christmas profit targets and generate a better margin than you’ve been achieving over the rest of the year.
Consistency
With the ability to add multiple photos on all recipes (and now the option to add your own videos), you can really start to ensure that your standards are set and kept the way you want—even when you’re not there!
Service notes
Adding ‘service/waiters notes’ to your recipes, allows you to explain important information, without the need for lengthy pre-service meetings.
- Product traceability and information
- Special service cutlery or techniques
- Suitable condiments
- Up-selling opportunities that match each dish
- Wine/Beer and other beverage pairing for each dish
- Plus anything else the chef or manager wishes to pass onto the teams.
Then you can simply print off a service spec sheet for each of the team to learn.
Allergens and Nutritional information
With Kitchen CUT’s unique industry-leading features you can easily automate your allergens into all your recipes and menus to make sure all your guests are safe. Your teams can confidently respond to any requests, safe in the knowledge that the information is correct and linked to your supplier/vendor information.
You can also add full nutritional and calorific details, pulling from the USDA, FSA CoFiDS labelling system within seconds, for those health conscious customers.
So what shall I do to prepare for the Christmas season?
If you want to get on top of the festive season before it gets on top of you, why not sign up for Kitchen CUT and get yourself really ready to make sure this is your most profitable and successful season ever?
You can get more information about Kitchen CUT by emailing support@kitchencut.com or calling +44 (0) 330 113 0050
You can register for a free trial here.