What’s the number one issue facing restaurants heading into a new year? We’re hearing the same question from multiple clients of late. How do I increase my customer count?

Here are tips for restaurants as a solution and some helpful ideas from food manufacturers to serve food faster and more efficiently.

Building Traffic with Value Beyond Price

Inflation is driving consumers to rank price as their top definition of “value”. However, service, consistency, and quality of the food items aren’t far behind. Operators can use these insights to build menus that offer lower cost menu items in tandem with premium upgrades. The barbell menu strategy promotes a dollar menu item with a premium item with equal fanfare. Combined, the strategy offsets dollar menu items with lower margins with near-equal sales of higher-margin items.

Customer loyalty and traffic counts are closely tied. Getting a loyalist to visit your restaurant just one more time per week has tremendous value. Suppliers can help. For example, Red Gold® offers two types of ketchup, one tied to a well-known social cause, Folds of Honor, supporting families of fallen first responders and the military. Serving Folds of Honor Ketchup enhances loyalty for those who care. Even offering a ketchup that uses real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup can add a perception of value to a customer who cares about the ingredients they eat.

Training staff to consistently produce the same, reliable quality menu items time after time with a customer-oriented smile can many times overcome price and promote loyalty and increased traffic.

Menu Change Up

Increased use of limited-time offers (LTOs) to increase traffic is another important tactic. Look at past sales of LTO items and recycle your best to bring back lapsed customers and add new LTO items to attract both new and loyal customers.

Many operators are now more open to ideas for winning ingredients or new, easy-to-prep items from suppliers who have broader knowledge of winning menu items for LTO and regular menus.

Additionally, manufacturers can bring trend-forward prepared items to a menu that reduces the demand on training and labor while shortcutting menu development. One client has been successful in promoting a line of gastropub appetizers featuring loading queso tots and guacamole bites.

Client Texas Pete® takes ease of prep and ingredient versatility to the forefront with operators with its gallery of trend-forward menu items that are as simple as five ingredients that can be prepped in 10 minutes or less. Kitchen efficiency is directly tied to consistency and quality as value adds over price.

Promoting national brands can likewise add value to the menu as a symbol of quality. For example, Johnsonville is the leading sausage brand that is well-known and loved at retail. Adding a leading brand logo to a menu item is a worthy tactic to build loyalty and traffic counts.

Meanwhile, delete slow-moving regular menu items and eliminate SKUs that are of single use. Look instead for multiple use SKUs that have applicability in appetizers, main entrees, and snacks for kitchen efficiency. Red Gold even goes so far to teach operators how their ketchup is a key ingredient to multiple sauces they can serve.

Turn Up the Volume on Social

It’s the lowest-cost form of advertising, so optimize your social media platforms to drive loyal customer engagement. Use paid ads within the zip codes of your restaurants to bring in new customers.

For one Creative Energy client, the simple return of a red and yellow-striped straw that vanished during COVID due to supplier issues was enough to evoke a huge response by thirsty customers who jumped at the opportunity to visit a restaurant to say hello to an old friend—a straw.

Linking social with the street is another tactic for encouraging traffic counts. Client, Pal’s Sudden Service has leveraged its “thought of the day” which is shared frequently by followers via social from the client’s website and on reader boards on street signage to build loyalty that makes the regional chain a leader in customer visits per month.

Conclusion

Activating tactics to drive traffic is a specialty of Creative Energy. We’re not just bringing fresh ideas to the market for restaurants and manufacturers, we’re helping to make it happen. If you need help, we’re ready to listen.