It is not enough to just know how to manage the catering industry, and you also need to understand operation. The model has been changing, and traditional catering should not be too conservative. "Old elements, new combinations", and innovation can only go farther within a reasonable range.
- Customers per capita don’t buy it? How to change a slogan so that customers feel it is worth it. The gross profit of the
- buffet is too low? Increase the product ratio of satiety line and increase profit by 10%.
- "small and beautiful" single store is very popular. Is there no way to survive without taking a single store?
This is a chain buffet restaurant in Wuxi, Jiangsu, with an average customer price of 79 yuan per position. When the first store started, the monthly rent was only 17,000 yuan. Since its opening in four months, the restaurant's monthly turnover has reached about 500,000 yuan. However, after counting at the end of the month, I didn’t make any money.
When the boss contacted me, my first reaction might be that there was a problem with the procurement, it might be that the management cost was too high, or it might be that it was too wasteful.
However, the boss himself replied that he has been a chef for many years and has done all aspects, including catering, procurement, quality control and management, every link is OK, but there is no profit.
This aroused my curiosity enough. A monthly turnover of 500,000 yuan, but no profit. How did you, an experienced catering driver? So I flew to Jiangsu.
Problem: Low gross profit, unclear brand positioning
comprehensively sorted out and extracted supply and marketing data from various stores in recent months, and there are indeed no loopholes. The kitchen production and management of the entire store are really well done. What exactly went wrong with
?
1. Gross profit is too low, less than 40%
The boss said he knew the gross profit was not high, but as soon as the quality dropped, his entire turnover immediately dropped. I have also worked as a chef and I also know that reducing quality is not a solution, it is a dead end. Therefore, quality must be improved, but high quality means high cost, and there is really no profit after improving quality. How to break the
situation? What is the key issue?
2. Unclear positioning, no outstanding advantages, lack of sense of value
If we analyze the problem from the perspective of consumers and categories, as well as from the perspective of our own positioning, we can easily see the essence of the problem.
- brand name: Let’s get together.
- Category name: Buffet Hot Pot +BBQ.
- slogan: What we sell is not seafood, but hot pot + barbecue.
An experienced driver can tell at a glance where the problem lies - positioning.
is long and low, and consumers can't remember it, let alone spread it.
self-service hotpot + barbecue. This category is naturally worthless in the consumer's perception. You can tell at a glance that it is only worth 5 or 60 yuan. If you don’t believe me, I just want to say a seafood buffet. Do you instantly feel that it’s 180% of the time?
You sell for 79 yuan per person, and you can achieve a turnover of 500,000 yuan, relying entirely on seafood and other ingredients to accumulate, which means that every customer who comes to eat takes advantage of it. Relying on cost-effectiveness, we are a cheap repeat customer. Once the quality decreases, there is no need to take advantage of the price, and the turnover will naturally decline. What is even more terrifying is that many consumers will not give you a second chance, and they will change their purchases.
In other words, the brand products are actually seafood, but what we convey to consumers is not seafood, but hot pot + barbecue. The naming of self-service hot pot + barbecue cannot support the unit price of 79 yuan, which does not meet the psychological account of consumers. Consumers spend 79 yuan to eat your buffet hotpot, so why don’t they choose Xiaolongkan and Banu?
The commander was incompetent and exhausted the three armies. One soldier was a beating and the general was a beating.
solution: five tricks, gross profit growth of 10%.
1. Change the category name and change the slogan
In the long run, to transform your own advantages into consumers' cognitive advantages, you need to change the brand name.
even if it is called a seafood buffet, or a steak buffet. You sell for 79 yuan, it sounds at least worth it. Because consumers have a high awareness of the value of products outside the mainland, such as flying in the air, swimming in the sea, and growing in desert, foreign pizza should be more expensive than domestic pancakes, and foreign salads should be more expensive than domestic salads.
2. Pick up the dishes and change them to small, and make profits from the details
Human nature is selfish and greedy. The buffet category amplifies human desire and greed.
Consumers have inertia when picking up food. Usually, they first pick high-value products, such as seafood, and then pick what they like to eat.
If there are eight people on a table and each has two plates, the following may occur: When everyone returns after a circle, they will have a plate full of shrimps, crabs and other high-value seafood on their hands.
Because when everyone picks up food, they will think that we have eight people, so we need to pick up a little more. If you accidentally come back, there will be a seafood meal.
Finally, it is a buffet anyway, and all the clips have been picked up, so when a large table of seafood is eaten, they will just eat a bite or chew it and spit it out. They will not pay the bill by themselves like they do at their own home and eat crabs as seriously.
is not standard because it is eaten clean and not clean. There is no penalty cost to customers. Finally, a large amount of unnecessary invisible waste will inevitably occur. In addition, seafood and other products are not full, and a person can eat several kilograms. The characteristic of
buffet is to pick up frequently and clip less. The plate is too large, which makes it convenient for customers on the surface, but in fact it greatly increases the invisible waste costs of the company.
Secondly, many consumers are lazy. When they start picking up food, they have a habit of picking up food as much as possible to avoid having to go there again. This unconscious behavior will eventually lead to many people planning to eat 80% full, but they will eat 12% full in order not to be deducted of wasted money.
Change the plate to reduce invisible waste. This seemingly unconscious detail directly determines profits and affects the survival of the company itself.
3. Adjust the product structure to increase the sense of fullness and value
buffet is essentially made of second-class ingredients to create first-class quality. Through visual richness and beauty, it first satisfies the eyes of consumers, and then satisfies the mouth of consumers. Through price positioning, it forces companies to adjust the product structure. The operating costs and procurement costs are jointly borne by the basic traffic of the customer base.
In essence, buffet is a psychological game between merchants and consumers.
We not only need to make consumers feel that they are worth it and take advantage of it, but also make them easy to eat and not waste it.
In other words, we still have a deep way to go in the product structure. The product structure of
buffet can generally be divided into:
's previous product structure can be summarized as 30% satiety product line, 20% value product line and 50% conventional product line. That is, it is an olive-shaped product structure. They are all real and genuine, costly, and they don’t look like they are high-end seafood overall.
Another fundamental problem with low gross profit in this store is that there are too few products such as high-calorie foods, meat products, etc., and they receive hundreds of people every day, so you have to make people eat full.
How can we make these hundreds of people feel worthwhile, be able to eat enough, and have reasonable gross profit? It depends on how the product structure is adjusted.
is about to be adjusted to about 40% of the satiety product line, 20% of the conventional product line, and 40% of the value product line, which means it becomes a dumbbell-shaped product structure. For example, add some small abalone, shark fin, sea cucumber and other products that seem to have a high sense of value and a strong sense of ritual but are actually cheap. There are many varieties of value product lines, but they require limited replacement.
4. With personnel distribution adjustment, the product line of fullness cannot be empty
. At the same time, there is another big problem, which is the process of adding dishes.
In our market research, we found that during the peak restaurant dining period, the stalls of the full product lines such as sushi, cakes, and fries are often empty, which means that the preparations have not been completed yet.
In other words, the proportion of human resources is not coordinated, so at the peak, many full products cannot be won. These details belong to inertial thinking in management.
You have one or two hundred varieties. If you eat 100 grams less of these low-cost and easy-to-fill products, you should eat 200 grams more of other products. These full-fill product lines cannot provide, and customers have to pick up other dishes, which is also the fundamental reason for low gross profit.
solution is to adjust the process of adding dishes, that is, no matter how many customers there are, the product line that is full cannot be empty, and the post and responsibilities are determined, and the responsibility is assigned to the person.
5. Add "baby" discarded by single-product stores to create differentiated
When the core advantage of buffet is "multiple varieties, several dozen dollars per person to take full care", it is no longer a reason for young consumers to choose buffets. Can a buffet offer some value that “small but beautiful” restaurants cannot provide?
of course.
For example, there were some Chinese dishes in the past, a gold-medal roasted suckling pig worth more than ten pounds, a roasted whole lamb weighing dozens of pounds, a chopped pepper fish head weighing seven or eight pounds, sea fish, etc.
But these dishes are almost impossible to eat in the popular single-product store, because the small and beautiful restaurant only has a single table of 3.2 people. The business model determines that they have no conditions to sell these specialty dishes and have to give up.
These products are abandoned because of their small but beautiful business model.
Cars can be shared and bicycles can be shared. So, why can't these dishes be shared?
We just need to pick up these treasures and polish them again.
In a beautiful small restaurant, it cannot afford a gold medal roasted suckling pig and a roasted whole lamb, but the buffet restaurant receives two or three hundred people every day. We have selected some special and valuable dishes to continue the sharing model.
is fried, roasted, and cut in the open stall, presented in the form of separate meals. This is our explosive product, our core competitiveness and moat.
This gives consumers a reason to choose our differentiation to buy, rather than other small and beautiful ones.
Others are small, so you are big. Small has the beauty of small, and big has the beauty of big. If you can roast the camel, it will definitely cause a sensation in the entire city.
and these products have the following advantages:
- Difference points: All shopping malls and street shops cannot see or eat such dishes worth tens of kilograms, which can truly achieve no one and self.
- value points: This special dish with dozens of kilograms has a natural sense of value.
- Memory Points: Consumers rarely see this kind of dish, which has strong visual impact and is easy to form memory points.
- communication point: Strong visual conflicts will attract consumers to pursue novelty and will produce large-scale photography and forwarding to Moments.
Now, after more than three months of product research and development and polishing, the product line has gradually formed and matured. Once it was launched, it has set off a craze and the products have basically been verified by the market.
Therefore, it is not enough to understand management in catering, you must understand operation. If the above five points are implemented strongly, the gross profit will definitely increase by 10 percentage points and will not affect the source of customers at all.
Conclusion
Small has small beauty, big has big beauty. Some traditional catering needs to be refined, polished, inherited and presented new ways. But the so-called innovation is not creation out of thin air, the best innovation is micro innovation. We call it old elements, new combinations.
China's food culture is profound and profound, and a hundred flowers bloom. If all catering products are born by one mother, they pursue standardization, compactness, beauty and single taste, this is a tragedy for Chinese consumers and a tragedy for the catering industry.
This article was originally published by @Asong's Business Insights. Everyone is a product manager. Reprinting without permission is prohibited. The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol
