Menu Development & Design
The menu is your most-read piece of marketing.
Every customer reads it, most read nothing else, and it decides your margin one order at a time.
Most menus grow rather than get designed.
An item gets added because a regular asked for it. Another stays because it’s been there since opening. Prices move when suppliers move, but not evenly, and nobody has recosted the whole thing in two years.
The result is a menu that’s too long to execute consistently, too complicated to train on, and quietly unprofitable in places nobody has checked. Your busiest items may be your worst margin. Your kitchen holds stock for dishes that sell twice a week.
For a franchise it’s worse — because every one of those problems gets replicated at every new site, and a menu that’s hard to execute in your store is impossible in someone else’s.
What we do
Recipe costing
Every dish costed to the gram, with yields and wastage factored in. You find out what each item actually makes you rather than what you assume it makes.
Menu engineering
Sales data against margin, item by item. What to keep, what to reprice, what to promote and what to take off entirely.
Menu structure
Rebuilt around what your kitchen can execute at volume with the equipment and staff a franchisee will actually have — not with your best chef on a quiet day.
Standardised recipes
Written specifications with quantities, method, plating and portion control, so the dish is the same at site nine as at site one.
Menu design
Layout that guides the eye toward the items you want sold. Printed menus, digital menu boards, delivery listings and table QR menus.
Supply & sourcing
Whether every ingredient can be sourced reliably at consistent quality and price across all your sites — the constraint that quietly kills good menus.
How we work
Cost what you have
Every current item costed and matched against sales data. Most owners are surprised by at least three items on the resulting list.
Rebuild the offer
Cut, reprice, restructure. A shorter menu executed well beats a long one executed variably, and it trains faster.
Document it
Standardised recipes and specifications written into your operations manual, so the menu and the manual say the same thing.
Design and roll out
Menus and boards designed to your brand standards, with staff briefed on what changed and why before it goes live.
A menu is an operations document that happens to be beautiful.
Design studios make menus that look good. Chefs make menus that taste good. Neither necessarily makes a menu that a nineteen-year-old can execute correctly at half past eight on a Friday, at a site you’ve never visited, using equipment you didn’t specify.
That’s the test a franchise menu has to pass. Every extra ingredient is another line of stock, another training point and another way for a dish to come out wrong. Every clever plating instruction is one more thing that will quietly stop happening by month four.
We design menus for the tenth store, not the first.
What goes with it
Menu work feeds your operations manual, your training programme and your ordering system.
Franchise Documentation ·
Training ·
Chat Ordering ·
Brand Development ·
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Find out what your menu actually makes.
One free hour to look at your offer, your margins and where the money is hiding.
Or call Robin directly on 082 451 1604