Menus for Multiple Restaurants

If you are a multi-unit owner (MUO), ask yourself these questions before setting up the templates and profiles for your restaurants:

• How similar are my restaurants generally?

• Where does menu, pricing, promotions, discounts, and inventory “break,” or begin to diverge and differ among restaurants? For example:

  • The advertising market that a restaurant is in affects promotions, pricing, and market-level discount options.

  • The distributor that a restaurant uses affects the inventory that can be ordered and, thus, the menu that can be used.

• What if I want to offer something more (or less) than my market or the national menu? While some items may not operationally be in the national menu, they might be available optionally. For example:

  • As a Store Optional Product (SOP)

  • As leftover inventory that needs to be used up from a previous marketing window (such as sriracha sauce)

  • As an ingredient that the market no longer uses but that your local customers like (such as pepper jack cheese)

The answers to these questions help you identify where you can use a common template across multiple (or all) restaurants and where you need to create different templates. You may decide to have one discount template with multiple menu templates, or you may choose to have multiple discount templates and one menu template.

However you decide to use templates, the more locations you have, the more important it becomes that you spend time mapping out the similarities and differences between your restaurants so that you can create an approach that is flexible, appropriate, and manageable.