The Customer is Always Right: Benefits of Menu Customization for Restaurant Franchises
Customers love options. More specifically, they love the engaging in the process of choosing what to eat. So instead of simply offering them a laundry list of menu options, giving customers the opportunity to help create their own meals through menu customization can appeal to a broad range of diners.
Less Can Be More
That may sound strange, but somehow, better-edited menus offering a limited range of fresh, simple ingredients in a range of combinations can offer the customer more freedom than a telephone book-sized menu with all of the dishes already set in stone. With smaller, customizable menus, the restaurant can focus more on the quality of the food it’s turning out. Fewer menu items, when used to creative inventive, personalized dishes, can cross all meal times throughout the day.
Mindfully shrinking and customizing your menu benefits your bottom line, as well. Most restaurants with traditional menus operate under the rough estimation that 80 percent of your profits come from about 20 percent of your menu items. Every conventional menu has its most popular items and its items that don’t receive as much interest.
Offering a customizable menu simplifies the menu auditing process, in which you have to weed out the low performers to justify the cost of ingredients. A slimmer menu with customizable options will mean fewer ingredients to purchase and manage. Menu customization streamlines your dishes and makes it possible for you to maximize ingredients by using them in various combinations. This way, you aren’t relying on one or two particular dishes to do all the heavy lifting to maximize the restaurant’s profits.
The “Co-Creation” Menu
Restaurants like Subway and Chipotle were early pioneers of this type of menu customization, offering customers a range of options within specific categories. This approach enhances the interaction between diner and restaurant—giving customers the control over exactly what they would like in their dishes, based on personal tastes and any dietary restrictions, while leaving the food preparation in the trained hands of the kitchen staff.
Of course, this model doesn’t work for all restaurant concepts. If you are operating a store with a very specific menu in mind, it can be difficult (or almost impossible) to offer customizable options that would threaten the structural integrity of your dishes. But for a lot of franchise brands who want to appeal to a broad range of diners, the “make your own” concept makes a lot of sense.
Customizing With Your Pie
Your Pie stands above other make your own pizza concepts by focusing not only on the high quality of ingredients, but on the overall experience of our diners. While we do offer our own unique signature pizzas and other menu items, we give customers the opportunity to customize their own pies with any number of combinations of our fresh, locally sourced, and house-made ingredients. We want our diners to have as much fun creating their own personal pies as we did inventing our signature dishes!
Your Pie is proud to offer an innovative menu with exceptional quality ingredients. We are excited to bring our authentic family recipes and Italian culture into all our restaurants to share with anyone who walks through our doors.
As the first ever fast-casual pizza franchise, Your Pie provides a customizable experience not just for our customers, but for our franchisees, as well. We encourage our franchisees to customize their stores to suit their local markets and the needs preferences of their communities.
If you would like to learn more about franchise opportunities with Your Pie, please visit our franchise site.
