Your Cart is Empty
Whether you use third party deliver services or your own in-house delivery fleet, the right menu items for your take-out menu is essential for ensuring successful deliveries. It is important to understand that not every meal on your restaurant menu is delivery friendly. You’ll want to choose meals that capture the essence of your business but that can still be thoroughly enjoyed at home or somewhere else.
Here are some questions you’ll want to ask yourself when deciding on a delivery menu:
1. Get Your Timing Right
When it comes to food delivery, timing is everything. With most customers agreeing that speed of delivering is one of their top priorities for ordering out, a speedy delivery can mean a positive customer review for your business.
These are just a few timing elements that need to be factored in when creating a delivery menu:
Before you add an item to your take out menu, be sure that it does not require extensive prep time on top of drive times. A customer may be willing to wait 20 minutes for a meal to be prepared when dining in your location, but if there is a 30-minute drive time to their home on top of prep time, this can result in excessive delivery times and a negative review.
Some foods will continue to cook even after they are packaged. For example, a steak’s internal temperature may continue to rise while in transit, causing it to arrive at a different steak doneness level than the customer requested or with a different texture than desired. It is important to factor total cook time into your delivery time to know when an item should be headed out the door.
Create a mapped-out radius around your restaurant that your drivers can reach in an appropriate delivery time after factoring in the prep time required for your take out menu items. This way, you can ensure that all of your delivery customers have a good experience with your delivery service.
Ensure that you have enough drivers in your delivery fleet to keep up with the demands of your delivery orders. It can hurt your average delivery times if you need to wait for a single driver to return from their route. You may want to hire a third-party delivery team for busier times of the year.
You may not be able to pack up your signature dishes the same way you would plate them and packing up a meal correctly can ensure that your dishes arrive to your customers safely.
The following are just a few ways to properly pack meals for successful deliveries:
It's important that your meals still look presentable after they are transported. Choose to-go containers that aren’t too much larger than the item you’re packing up. For example, pizza boxes should only be a few inches wider than the pizza placed inside.
If you have options like nachos, salads, or loaded fries on your delivery menu, you may want to pack the sauces and condiments separately to prevent a mess when they are delivered. Keeping sauces off your dishes also keeps them from getting soggy in transit. These items can then be assembled when they arrive to your customer.
It's important to use packaging that helps your foods retain their moisture and temperature. Hot foods that are not packaged correctly can end up releasing condensation into their containers, making your customer’s meals soggy. You can prevent that by using hot food bags for items like hot sandwiches and package them away from cold items like drinks to keep them from “sweating.” Be sure to also use insulated food bags while your orders are in transit to help them maintain the proper temperature.
The way your food arrives to your customer will be the statement you make about your business. You want to make sure it looks appetizing and professional.
If you plate it all together, make sure it doesn’t shift around too much in transit or else it will end up looking like a mess. If you plate it separately, make sure the sauces and condiments can be easily identified so that your customer can put it together to their liking. You may need to make adaptations to the recipes of your signature dishes so they arrive in a presentable fashion.
Adding your restaurant's logo to your packaging is also a great way to provide a professional final touch to your customer’s order. Having your logo or slogan on your boxes and bags can help create a memorable experience for your customers, encouraging repeat sales. It's part of your BRANDING strategy.
Your best-selling menu options may not be the best choices for delivery. You can either tailor those best sellers to make them more transportable or make a delivery version of those fan favorites.
Here are some delivery-friendly meals:
Some food items require some tweaking. These are some suggestions on how you can adapt your menu:
You may want to avoid foods that are prone to melting entirely. That cake and ice cream dessert on your in-house menu should probably not come with ice cream on your delivery menu, unless you have the proper insulated containers to send it.
.1. Put Your Menu Online
Most customers who are interested in ordering food for delivery will begin their search online. They will be looking for the following:
In anticipation of your customers’ searches, try adding your delivery menu and ordering capabilities either through your restaurant's website or by using a third-party delivery company’s site, like Grubhub, Uber Eats, or DoorDash.
Hungry customers typically won't have the patience to skim through a long menu of options, so it’s important to keep your delivery menu short and to the point. That means selecting a maximum of 15 to 20 of your best-selling, easily transportable dishes for your take out menu. Once you have picked your offerings, break them up into categories to make your menu easy to navigate.
If your online menu is the only interaction your customer is going to have with your business, you’ll want to make sure that menu is a good representation of your restaurant. Here are some menu design ideas to spruce up your delivery menu:
Nothing is more disappointing for a customer than finding out the food item they set their heart on is no longer available. This can cost you an entire sale. To prevent disappointment, designate a staff member to monitor the online menu and update it in real time depending on your supplies. If you run out of ingredients to make a menu item, immediately pull it from the menu so customers can’t accidentally order it.
If you have recently added a delivery service to your restaurant or are looking to add one as the foodservice industry adapts to the coronavirus, you can use these tips as a guide to structure your menu during these uncertain times.
For any help related to this or any other issues, please, reach out. We'll be glad to help!!