At an education session at the recent National Restaurant Show in Chicago, The Culinary Edge’s Erica Holland-Toll shares how to trim the fat but keep the heart and soul of why your guests come to you.

Erica Holland-Toll opened her session at the recent National Restaurant Association Show by hitting the audience with two rhetorical questions: “Is it a struggle to hit your monthly margin targets?” and “Is the sky blue?”

Holland-Toll, culinary director at The Culinary Edge, a food and beverage consultancy, is a culinary leader with more than 25 years of experience across fine dining, QSR, hotels, campus dining and large-scale foodservice operations. She works with dozens of brands large and small to help them get a grip on their finances without letting go of the things that customers love and keep coming back for.

That’s a tough ask when inflation, tariffs, turnover and supply chain in major flux constantly now. Holland-Toll shined a light on mistakes that are easy for foodservice operators to make when trying to save money.

“It’s a mistake to sacrifice quality [for saving money]; the results are rarely defensible, and the outcomes decline in traffic,” Holland-Toll said, giving the example of the Panera CEO who regretfully admitted the brand was “forcing guests to chase tomatoes around the bowl” because they had stopped cutting them in half to cut down on labor.

Holland-Toll pointed out that price increases can alienate customers who see your brand as a value brand. “IHOP increased their prices by almost 82% since 2021 and their guests stopped coming, so their CEO has created for the first time a value menu—for what was traditionally a value brand,” she said. “Subway is also doubling down on ‘value on top of value,’ and that tells a larger story.”

Over the years, The Culinary Edge has helped brands with a fresh perspective on what they’re doing wrong, and how they can make it right, and Holland-Toll shared a few key tactics that reliably ring true.

Show me the numbers

“Our sales mix tells us who we are and how our guests use us,” Holland-Toll said, adding that many answers are hiding within the numbers, if you ask “what sells and what doesn’t? How can we leverage that and do more of that? Do we have an opportunity to do some supply chain negotiation? Do we need to look at smaller square footage?”

Looking at the numbers can also mean predicting the future. “Prices are volatile through the seasons and with different vendors,” she said. “But if you know a short rib will sell, if you can get a year ahead of that, you can take advantage of the best beef pricing. These are things your invoices can tell you.”

Selling out vs. selling more is another mistake operators can make, assuming that if they sell out of a menu item, that’s a good thing. On one hand that’s true, in terms of waste, but “it doesn’t reduce your waste if you lose sales,” Holland-Toll said. “If you’re a steakhouse running out of filet, it doesn’t reduce your waste; it loses sales. Buy more to sell more.”

A caveat to buying more, though, is to “understand your perfect pack size. Bigger isn’t always better, especially if you’re not selling all of it. We see brands make the mistake of buying a 20 pound case of something but as the team is dishing out of it, the product underneath is getting crumbled or going bad.”

Tapping into traffic patterns

“Traffic reports are loaded with clues,” Holland-Toll said. “It’s an opportunity to take a look around. What are your neighbors doing? Are you missing out on a trend? Did you just raise your prices? Know your frequency and what impacts that.”

Through-put can hold so many answers, including whether or not your executing your potential. For example, “if the line is too long, you need to manage your through-put; maybe that’s as easy as scheduling appropriately,” she said. “Maybe you just don’t have enough people at your peak hour.”

And if the peak hour is “working for you, and your year-over-year is still up,” Holland-Toll recommends digging deeper. “Look at another daypart,” she said. “Look at where your sales are soft and look at ways to firm it up.”

Happy Hour is well-known now, but it began as a strategy to address slower shoulder hours, to “get people to come in a bit before dinner time. That was a strategy,” she said. “Maybe you can add snacks to go with a beverage or beverages to go with a snack during your shoulder periods.”

Old dog, new tricks

Holland-Toll leans heavily on the “Star Dog” model for menus, which basically means some menu items are amazing, some are not, and the rest is in the middle. The middle is where she wants to focus, not on the stars and dogs.

“Your stars should always rise and always design your other menu items to outshine your stars, not undercut them,” she said. “And when dogs need to go, you need to eliminate them to drive the right margin, tell the right story and improve your operational efficiency.”

She cautioned not to let the “vocal minority” talk you into holding onto a menu dog for too long. Just because Mrs. Jones loves the pasta primavera and orders it every week is no reason to keep around an otherwise unpopular menu dog.

Sales cure all ills

“There’s no better way to improve your bottom line than to sell more,” she said, advising operators to attach menu items to other menu items, like “dirty sodas or boba and pretzel bites, bagel chip-and-dip or tiny tacos. They all hit at ‘snack o’clock.’”

“Basket fillers” like cake pops, pie poppers and churro fries are perfect for that snack time, and Holland-Toll said to be skeptical of people getting sick of sweet treats. “Everyone says they don’t want sweet treats anymore, but that’s actually not true.”

Get the most out of your menus

That means online and paper. Holland-Toll finds that an old advertising adage, the “Golden Triangle,” still holds true regarding how the human eye tracks across menus, starting in the middle bottom, going up to the right and then the left. “Put your stars in that triangle,” she said.

Also, impersonal ordering is a double-edged sword, taking away the personal touch, but adding a layer of privacy. “A kiosk gives your guest some anonymity. If they don’t have to tell you they want the large fries, they’re more likely to add the large fries, or to add a milkshake instead of a soda.”

Source: Tara Fitzpatrick, FoodService Director