Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Are you expecting young families or more mature tourists and when do
you expect them to visit your restaurant?
•
What gross profit and net profit do you want to achieve? You need to
work backwards to decide what your menu price structure will be;
•
What catering equipment do you have already and what will you need
to purchase? The decision on what equipment you need will be based on
what is offered on the menu;
•
What skills will be required by the catering team to meet the needs of the
menu and what time allocation will the visitor tolerate between ordering
and serving?
•
Design the menu so that it reflects the image of the business and acts as
a promotional tool for the business. Use the menu to sell the story of the
local produce and the local growers;
•
Keep it simple. Long lists of different food offerings confuse consumers
as well as it means you will have to purchase more produce and this
could result in waste produce at the end of the day;
•
Create a 'signature' dish that is unique to the restaurant. We recently
visited a coffee shop in Manjimup in Western Australia that offered Rustle-
berry Pie. It promoted itself as the only coffee shop in the region that
served the unique local berry in a pie. A great example of a simple but ef-
fective 'signature' dish. In Western Australia, Buy West, Eat Best, the State
promotional body for promoting regional food, launched a competition in
2014 to develop a Western Australia signature dish using local foods. This
state-wide competition aimed to promote local signature dishes.
Once you have designed a menu, be prepared to change it. The consumer
will decide what is the ideal menu and we guarantee that you will need to
alter it to meet the consumer needs.
The menu ideally should go on a website where the catering team can
edit the menu daily and drive customers to the website. Richardson Farms
near Baltimore, Maryland (
www.richardsonfarms.net)
does this very suc-
cessfully and it indicates to the consumer that they are a farm in the 'fresh'
industry.
Opening a culinary food offer
Before opening a café or restaurant, visit other food offers in the region. Be
objective in looking at what they are doing, get to understand their menu
and what they are offering and why. Do they promote local foods and local
food offerings, how many people do they seat and when do consumers visit
them? What decor are they using and why? Create a SWOT analysis of each
business visited and then use the combined SWOT analyses to develop your
own business SWOT plan.
Before venturing too far into a food offering check on the local legal
requirements, they differ from country to country and region to region. The
regulations will include:
