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Even in these fast-changing times it’s worth focusing on a longer-term vision for your food service business.
If you’re considering pivoting to delivery from a dine-in service, you’ve got to make sure it makes commercial sense in both the long-term as well as the short-term - as the switch could impact how you’re perceived by your target market as well as your capabilities.
We’ve been chilling and freezing the inventory of Australia and New Zealand’s hospitality businesses for more than 50 years, with many of our staff proud to hail from the foodservice industry in both countries.
Here are our thoughts on what you need to consider when making this important decision.
It can be difficult to know where to start. Do I tackle the menu first? Do I assess my kitchen facilities? It can be hard to know.
To help you start assessing your options, we’ve compiled a list of key questions to ask when pivoting to delivery.
These questions cover everything from pricing and menus to assessing the capabilities of your existing kitchen. They may help you focus your assessment on what matters.
As you run through the key questions of assessment, it’s worth considering what kind of delivery operation you want to run.
You can work with an aggregator or outsource logistics, downsize to a cloud kitchen, or completely own every element of your operation from the kitchen to the customer’s table.
Each has their own pros and cons to consider.
To look at three of the most popular options in more detail, read Which Delivery Model is Best for Your Business?
When thinking about delivery models it’s important to keep one eye on how this choice affects your menu.
You might want to change as little as possible, in which case you could work with an aggregator that markets a wide choice of dishes to consumers.
However, if a dine-in service isn’t going to be part of the mix, it makes sense to optimize your menu for delivery so you can improve your margins (especially if you need to factor in an aggregator’s slice of the financial pie).
Here are some options to consider.
1. Take a red marker and cross out dishes that:
2. Reassess the ingredient costs of the remaining dishes.
3. Test new variants for your delivery menu, to increase margins and improve deliverability while trying not to diminish taste or quality.
4. Further hone down the menu if there are any remaining items likely to take up excessive time/cost.
Think of the 80/20 rule, which holds true in many parts of business. You don’t want to spend 80% of your prep time on 20% of your menu.
Some dishes, and even some menus, are just not made to travel. So why not offer a new menu? This makes a lot of sense if you can afford to create a completely clean slate and a 100% pivot to delivery is clearly the best long-term option for your business.
While you can experiment to create the ultimate delivery menu for your brand, still aim to keep the menu tight and focus on the dishes you know best and you are known for delivering well. For example, if you are an Italian restaurant that does great pasta – stick with that, because post-Corona you want to still be known for great pasta.
It might be the case that a menu of prepared food is not even your best option. Could a food box of ingredients containing instructions for consumers to prepare the meal at home improve your margins while still delivering a great customer experience? It could also give you plenty of opportunities to market your expertise with instruction videos and other content created in your kitchen.
Going further, could you dedicate your kitchen to cost-effectively producing a unique and well-known element of your menu just for retail? This could further streamline your costs, making them lower and more predictable, and allowing you to buy more at bulk prices.
If you’ve still got inventory to use, creating a delivery menu from what you have in the cool room and cupboard might be a cost-effective and food-safe way to proceed.
1. Use a first-in, first-out (FIFO) stock take approach to categorise inventory.
2. Identify frozen items and dry goods with shelf-life to build your menu around.
3. Donate food which is still safe but has a very limited shelf-life, such as chilled items that include egg as an ingredient. Here are some organisations accepting food donations from businesses.
Discard any potentially dangerous items. This is fairly obvious of course, but you want to take extra care right now in case the disruption created by the pandemic impacted processes in the kitchen. For example, make sure frozen chickens are “rock hard” frozen.
Once you have a reduced inventory of stock you can use for your delivery menu, it’s time to look at the equipment keeping it chilled or frozen.
There is a chance that you no longer need to be running all the refrigeration that you required before COVID-19. However, that doesn’t just mean packing as much food as you can into a solitary fridge, freezer or cool room.
In principle, running a full fridge or freezer is much more cost-effective than running multiple under-loaded cabinets, but you’ve got to make sure it’s not over-loaded (which increases the chances of poor performance or even worse - mechanical failure).
While on the surface of it this sounds quite simple, the more you do now to clean down the fridge or freezer, the more hygienic it will be when you need to use it again. This will also save you more time when your business returns to onsite services. Find out more about how to protect your refrigeration during COVID-19 lockdown.
This is another area that can look deceptively simple, but there’s more to making sure your food reaches the customer at the right temperature than you may think.
For example, the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code requires any business delivering potentially hazardous food between the temperatures of 5° C and 60° C to demonstrate safe practices (Standard 3.2.2, page 53).
In practical terms this means testing delivery time against temperature hold. You’re not required to keep records of transport times and temperature-on-delivery, but it will certainly help if you’re called on to prove you’re using safe practices. You’ll need to state the safe delivery time you’ve determined for the food and back that up.
While this may not be a focus of authorities right now, you can certainly expect a renewed focus on delivery service food safety as the market exponentially grows and businesses re-open.
Consumers already care about food safety a lot more than they did before the pandemic.
So when it comes to marketing your new delivery service, establishing your food safety credentials is an absolute must.
Here are some cost-effective ways to do that:
Delivery may or may not be the new normal for your food service business, especially a year or two after COVID-19 when the outlook may look very different.
Keep in mind that some delivery models, like running a cloud kitchen, can be pretty permanent and make returning to dine-in service more difficult in future.
Whatever course of action you take, try to keep a long-term plan in sight and stay focused on doing what you love doing.
End / Previous Story
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