Rapid Dish Development: The 7 Steps to Quickly Develop New Menus
As covered earlier in this blog series, before starting Sous Chef, we had a catering company 2Forks.
Photo by Natasha Kapur on Unsplash
More menus more problems
After freeing up our team by automatically generating our shopping lists (learn more here) and prep sheets (learn more here) we were ready to resume looking for new opportunities to grow our business. Our core strategy to get additional customers was to work with partners like Eat Club, ZeroCater, Platterz, and Caviar. As a provider to these partners, we quickly found that competition was stiff and the customer’s preferences are finicky. We would spend weeks developing a new dish only to have it never ordered. The development costs were piling up, eating into our company’s profit margin. We needed to find a way to quickly create new dishes that the customers would love and would allow us to stay ahead of the competition.
Move quick, fail fast
After many long talks with our chefs, we decided that instead of adding dishes to existing menus we would build new menus around a concept and do it quickly. This is the general outline of the process.
Step 1 - Quick brainstorm of ideas
Here is how we applied our rapid dish development for a menu of Quinoa Bowls. We decided that the total weight of a dish would be 18-20 ounces. 8-10 ounces would be a base of our quinoa mixture while the rest of the 8-12 ounces would come from the toppings and sauce. Next, we quickly wrote down a list of items that we frequently used in our kitchen. Finally, with a little creativity, we mixed and matched items to create a lot of concept bowls, quickly.
This is how our layout looked like for the brainstorming step:
Step 2 - Document your recipes
With our new concepts sketched out, we immediately documented our recipes. This documentation (as seen below) forced us to get a rough estimate of what the weights of each individual item could be. Often times after cooking and final plating these quantities would change but at least we had a starting point. Since all our recipes were linked to our costing information we could see if a dish would work for the margin that we were trying to achieve.
(Find out more about Sous Chef recipe manager on a previous post)
Step 3 - Costing information
Next, we needed to do a sanity check on the rest of the dish. The additional costs of delivery meals are commonly overlooked. Unlike in restaurant meals where you can reuse plates and utensils, delivery-only must factor those into the cost of the meal. Since dishes on our menu are priced between $9-$15 the cost of these items could significantly eat into our profit margin. The $0.28 for the items below represents 3.1% of the total cost of a $9 dish and 1.9% of a $15 dish.
ramekin for the sauce ($0.10)
fiber bowl and lid $(0.15)
sticker $(0.03)
Step 4 - Cook all the dishes at once
We would select 10 dishes at a time and our chefs would cook them. Having 10 at once would allow us to judge them in comparison to the other dishes. We were looking for the ones that stood out.
Step 5 - Structured feedback
And now the fun part, we’d gather the team and start eating. We provided a review sheet that asked for feedback on taste, appearance, and composition. By structuring the feedback we could compare all dishes fairly. The best dishes taste great, look good, and travel well. Dishes that did not meet our expectations did not make it past this step and were removed from the development process. If a meal passed this step we would do a final labor calculation.
Step 6 - Understand labor cost
For every dish that we put on a menu, we anticipate that they will be made in batches of hundreds at a time; so if we don’t have strong confidence in how we’ve calculated our COGS and labor we would not move forward with a dish. By considering equipment and staffing constraints we were able to have a complete picture of our labor cost. Then we were ready to ship the meals to customers.
Step 7 - Ship!
When new dishes were ready for shipping, we would find a group of friendly customers. In exchange for free or discounted meals, we asked for feedback. With this feedback, we were able to have a good clue as to which dishes have the potential to be winners and which ones need additional work.
In total, this process took us about a week. We were able to increase our dish development from 1-2 meals a week to 10-20 a week. This speed helped us find winners faster and get more dishes onto our menus. Since everything was documented in Sous Chef, our reports were automatically generated allowing us to produce any dishes at scale as soon as they were on the menu.
What’s stopping you?
Are you thinking about starting your own food business? A restaurant? A bakery? Juices and snacks? Check out The Simple Guide To Starting A Food Business, Including a Starter Kit.
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