When you are in the business of printing menus, there are some drawbacks.
First, you stare at pictures of food all day so generally you are operating in a borderline hangry state of mind. Second, you are constantly analyzing menus in the wild. It’s a nice date night with your spouse and all of a sudden you’re locked in on the curling page, the grease stain, or in the worst case scenario staring at a printed QR code wondering if all is truly lost.
Point being, when menus are printed and still in the shop they are in their most pristine condition, like an aisle of mint condition Buzz Lightyears at AL’s Toy Barn ready to get shipped off to kids around the world that will eventually rip them to shreds.
Menus can be tough but don’t ever underestimate the power of hungry toddlers. Menus don’t last forever, no matter how durable they are. Wear and tear is a normal part of your menu’s lifecycle.
The math behind how many menus to order is when we often see where this goes wrong. Well run restaurants order enough menus to cover however many seats they feel will need menus during a busy rush, but instead of just ordering this baseline quantity, they bulk order more to reduce the price per menu. These extra menus are then staged out over the course of that menus “campaign”.
A campaign is described as that menus lifecycle for items and pricing. We see brands vary from 2 to 6 campaigns per year, with an effort to save price changes for these campaign rollout periods so they can take advantage of the pricing volume discounts for print costs. This gets them out of the rush orders for menu replenishments, saving money on freight costs and print costs.
The key to managing these extra menus is where this works or becomes a waste of money.
One manager told me it best, “I give my team 50 menus. I put the rest in the safe. Every 4 weeks, I have a calendar reminder to switch out menus and I give my team 50 more menus. I throw out the old ones. It’s not left up to the hostesses discretion if they are still good or not.”
The safe may be a bit extreme, but simply putting them in the back office for people to switch out on their own discretion may lead to a shortage of menus if they are replenished too quickly, or if the opposite happens the menus could look too worn out when no one got around to swapping them out for new ones.
If you are tired of learning you needed to order menus yesterday and you are paying for rushed freight, next time consider ordering a few more and staging their release. This may give you more control and save you money in the long run.