Restaurant menu

Menu prices in restaurants in Canada were 3.1% higher in July 2021 than a year ago, reports Restaurants Canada.

This is the largest increase since January 2019 and more than three times the magnitude of the increase in food prices in grocery stores, which rose 1.0%.

As of January 2019, menu price inflation had not exceeded three percent in a month to July 2021. So far, in 2021, the figure hovered between 2.5 and 2, 9 percent.

By segment, quick-service restaurants were slightly ahead of their full-service counterparts, with QSR menu prices rising 3.3% versus a 2.9% increase for FSRs.

Restaurants Canada suggests that the increase in menu prices is the result of higher overall operating expenses, including cost of sales, labor and other expenses.

A survey of members of the organization found that foodservice operators are under significant cost pressure as the prices of a number of key ingredients have risen dramatically. In particular, seven in ten restaurants reported a recent spike in the cost of fresh vegetables, cooking oil and beef, as well as higher prices for poultry and dairy products.

There is no simple answer to the question of how best to respond to these cost increases, although most respondents would choose a combination of partially absorbing higher food costs and increasing menu prices. rather than doing one or the other exclusively. About a third of restaurants would remove items from their menus or seek out lower-cost ingredients.

Raising menu prices is a method that has been repeatedly suggested by some restaurant experts as a tool to help deal with the financial strains of the pandemic.

David Hopkins of the consultancy firm The Fifteen Group has been one of the advocates. He suggests that the strategic implementation of small price increases may help preserve operator bottom lines, would be tolerated by customers who have shown a desire to support local restaurants, and may also result in higher wages and more hiring. competitive.

Restaurant QR codes are not as trivial as they seem. After the pandemic, many restaurants ditched their plasticized and sprouted physical menus for a more hygienic option: QR codes that lead customers to an online menu. Sounds harmless, right? Well, a new report from The New York Times reveals that these machine-readable labels can invade your privacy.

Companies can implement tracking tools in these black-and-white pixelated codes to target certain customers and collect analytics, raising red flags among privacy experts.

Restaurant QR codes are for security experts

Citing the National Restaurant Association, the New York Times pointed out that half of American restaurants now use QR codes. Sixty-one percent of restaurants plan to continue offering contactless payment options to restaurant patrons, according to a Square’s Restaurant Future Report 2021.

QR codes aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and unfortunately, invasive tracking technology isn’t going out of fashion either. Some restaurants have created a database of their customers’ order history, email address, and phone number.

“People don’t understand that when you use a QR code it inserts the entire online tracking device between you and your meal. Suddenly your online activity of sitting down to a meal is now part of the empire. online advertising, “said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Another marketing expert, Mobstac chief executive Sharat Potharaju, said business owners have no intention of forgoing the benefits QR codes have brought to their bottom line (they help restaurants save up to ‘at 50% on labor costs). Not only can they bundle customer deals and specials, but they also collect data on customer spending habits.

The New York Times noted that Mr. Yum, a startup that sells the technology to create QR-coded menus to restaurants, admitted that the digital menu contains cookies that track customers’ purchase history as well as their phone number. and protected payment information. However, Kim Teo, co-founder of Mr. Yum, said restaurant customer data is only available for this establishment and the information is not sold to third parties.

Sifting through the comments under the New York Times article, some don’t care about the follow-up. “Not having to wait for a waiter to receive and pay the check is worth it,” one poster said. “Some people are too ready to put convenience over personal safety,” replied another.

Whether we like it or not, restaurants collect your data for marketing promotions and run discounts and personalized offers.

Restaurant QR codes are not as trivial as they seem. After the pandemic, many restaurants ditched their plasticized and sprouted physical menus for a more hygienic option: QR codes that lead customers to an online menu. Sounds harmless, right? Well, a new report from The New York Times reveals that these machine-readable labels can invade your privacy.

Companies can implement tracking tools in these black-and-white pixelated codes to target certain customers and collect analytics, raising red flags among privacy experts.

Restaurant QR codes are for security experts

Quoting the National Restaurant Association, the New York Times pointed out that half of American restaurants now use QR codes. Sixty-one percent of restaurants plan to continue offering contactless payment options to restaurant patrons, according to a Square Restaurant Future Report 2021.

QR codes aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and unfortunately, invasive tracking technology isn’t going out of fashion either. Some restaurants have created a database of their customers’ order history, email address, and phone number.

“People don’t understand that when you use a QR code, it inserts the entire online tracking device between you and your meal. So your online activity of sitting down to a meal is now part of it. online advertising empire, “said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Another marketing expert, Mobstac CEO Sharat Potharaju, said business owners have no intention of forgoing the benefits QR codes have brought to their bottom line (they help restaurants save up to ‘at 50% on labor costs). Not only can they bundle customer deals and specials, but they also collect data on customer spending habits.

The New York Times noted that Mr. Yum, a startup that sells the technology to create QR-coded menus to restaurants, admitted that the digital menu contains cookies that track customers’ purchase history as well as their phone number. and protected payment information. However, Kim Teo, co-founder of Mr. Yum, said restaurant customer data is only available for this establishment and the information is not sold to third parties.

Sifting through the comments under the New York Times article, some don’t care about the follow-up. “Not having to wait for a waiter to receive and pay the check is worth it,” one poster said. “Some people are too ready to put convenience over personal safety,” replied another.

Whether we like it or not, restaurants collect your data for marketing promotions and run discounts and personalized offers.

The date of July 14, 2021 will remain special in the history of the Indian startup ecosystem. Food delivery platform Zomato has opened for subscription its Initial Public Offering (IPO) of INR 9,375 crore, which is said to be India’s largest since March 2020.

The online food delivery platform is spearheading a wave of listings like Delhivery, Paytm and Nykaa, which are expected to hit markets soon. While some have criticized Zomato’s IPO for being overpriced, most startup enthusiasts have come out on social media with accolades for delivering Unicorn food.

Zomato’s success story, supported by a lightweight scalable model and a first-mover advantage in food delivery and accelerated by Covid-19, is today a case study for many startup founders and investors. From its beginnings as an online discovery platform featuring digitized restaurant menu cards, to achieving coveted Unicorn status and the very first Indian food technology brand to go public, Zomato has come a long way. path.

Here is an overview of Zomato’s career over 12 years old:

2008: Deepinder Goyal co-founded a restaurant discovery platform called Foodiebay with his IIT-Delhi teammate, Pankaj Chaddah. The duo picked up menu cards from different restaurants in Delhi, scanned them and uploaded them to a website. “There were blue HTML links; there was no search, but you could use a browser’s search bar to search for a restaurant. And as soon as you clicked on a restaurant, you got their phone number at the top and a bunch of menus. cards, ”Goyal recalled in a previous interview with Entrepreneur India.

2009: To date, many restaurants have approached them to advertise on the site. The founders made enough income to pay their rents and include restaurants in other cities.

2010: Foodiebay received its first round of funding from Info Edge, a publicly traded holding company with a portfolio of companies such as Naukri.com and 99acres.com, among others. Info Edge gave the startup a funding round of $ 1 million. The company was renamed Zomato to avoid any potential branding issues with another internet company.

2011: The startup got another $ 3 million funding round from Info Edge.

2012: This has been a pivotal year for the startup, not only because it received its third $ 2.3 million funding round from Info Edge, but that’s also when it got off. extended to other countries, starting with the United Arab Emirates then Sri Lanka, South Africa, Qatar, the Philippines and the United Kingdom.

2013: It made forays into Turkey, Brazil, New Zealand, Portugal, and many other markets and also raised a $ 10 million round from Info Edge, followed by a $ 37 million round. dollars by Info Edge and Sequoia Capital.

2014 : This is the year the food delivery platform began its wave of acquisitions, starting with the acquisition of Menu Mania in New Zealand, followed by Lunchtime in the Czech Republic, Obedovat in Slovakia, Gastronauci in Poland and Cibando in Italy. Later in the year, he received a sixth round of funding of $ 60 million from Vy Capital alongside Info Edge and Sequoia Capital.

2015 : This year, Zomato made headlines for the acquisition of Urbanspoon, a leading startup in the restaurant discovery space in the United States. In addition, Mekanist, NexTable and Maple POS have also become a part of Zomato. The capital injection also continued with Info Edge leading the seventh round of $ 50 million and Temasek a round of $ 60 million with existing investor Vy Capital. Simultaneously, the company also started to work on reducing the burn rate and layoffs were a big part of it.

2016: This is the year the company experienced some setbacks. HSBC released a report that reduced startup Unicorn’s $ 1 billion valuations to $ 50 million. This led Zomato to close its operations in various countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Chile, Sri Lanka, Canada, Italy, Slovakia and Ireland.

2017: The company suffered another setback due to a cyber attack. The records of 17 million users were breached in the company’s database.

2018: It has been a fairly good year for the company. It acquired Bengaluru-based TongueStun Food for $ 18 million in a cash and equity deal and Lucknow-based startup TechEagle Innovations to drive food delivery by drone in India. It also raised $ 210 million from Alibaba’s Ant Financial, which received a more than 10% stake in the company as part of the round. This valued Zomato at around $ 2 billion.

2019: This year, Zomato experienced another problem when restaurants listed on the platform called the company through the #logout campaign for slashing their profit margins through its features like Infinity Dining and Zomato Gold, which offered discounts. important to customers. However, despite this obstacle, Zomato recorded a 177% increase in its partner restaurants and integrated 73,000 additional restaurants.

2020: Fueled by the pandemic, Zomato saw a 225% increase in revenue in the very first half of fiscal 2020. It posted revenue of $ 205 million versus $ 63 million (in the first half of fiscal 2020). semester) last year, according to the company’s semi-annual report. The company also raised $ 660 million in the Series J funding round led by Kora, Tiger Global Management, which took Zomato’s valuation to $ 3.9 billion.

2021: The year has been remarkable so far, starting with raising $ 500 million from existing investors with Ant Group and Sunlight Fund, reaching a valuation of $ 5.4 billion in February, raising 250 million dollars from Kora, Fidelity, Tiger Global Management and finally the IPO. It is also in the final phase of acquiring approximately 9.3% of the capital of the e-grofer Grofers.

Consumers who frequent restaurants are finding higher prices these days as operators charge more for their menu items in an effort to offset rising labor costs.

Menu prices, or out-of-home food prices, rose 0.6% between April and May, according to the latest data from the US Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index.

Prices in restaurants are up 4% on an annual basis.

The menu price inflation rate was lower than the overall inflation rate, which was 5% last month on an annual basis. This is the largest 12-month increase since August 2008.

Menu prices have been on the rise since last summer, when consumers started flocking to drive-through fast food outlets and ordering deliveries and operators paid higher prices for labor and took over. billed consumers accordingly.

But for most of that time, it was the limited service sector that led the charge, as demand for these meals and consumers’ willingness to pay for them drove higher fees.

Still, prices at full-service restaurants rose 4.1% per year in May, according to the Labor Department, which said it was the highest annual growth rate for the industry since October. 2018.

Figures suggest full-service restaurants are increasing their rates as operators face higher labor costs as they fill vacancies to meet growing demand. Sales at full-service restaurants have broadly rebounded in the past three months as consumers with cash to spend filling seats at independent restaurants and casual dining concepts.

That said, fast food restaurants continue to drive up prices. Limited-service restaurants increased their prices 6.1% in the past year.

Annual menu price inflation, full service vs limited service

Source: United States Bureau of Labor Statistics

Labor is largely responsible for the rise in prices. About a third of restaurant income is spent on salaries and benefits, making them more aggressive in their price hikes when wages rise.

“It looks like the industry is going to have to react,” Chipotle CFO Jack Hartung told investors this week after the company admitted it had recently raised prices by 4% to pay higher labor costs. “It looks like the industry is now going to have to do something similar or catch up. Otherwise, you will simply lose the endowment game.

At the same time, it’s not just work. Restaurants are facing shortages of certain supplies for everything from chicken to sauces, which in some cases results in higher prices.

Some of the other inflationary sectors could also put pressure on industry prices in the near future, notably energy, which could lead to higher prices for raw materials and utilities. The energy index has risen 28.5% in the past 12 months. The price of gas has increased 56.2% over the past year.

introduction

Restaurants or the food industry is a booming industry with more and more people exploring the world. In restaurants and food chains, the food menu is very important to the business and must be planned and designed properly. The food menu is the only tool that can make customers and foodies gaga over your food.

According to the latest study, a well-designed menu can help increase sales and attract lots of customers, which will help increase your income. Here are some things you should know before planning and designing your menu: –

1. make an attractive menu with the divisions

Before designing your food menu, make sure you finalize your items properly so that no bad products are added to the list. Once you have finalized all of your articles, you can create subdivisions from breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dinner. In addition, there must be a separate column for desserts and non-alcoholic cocktails or any other specialty.

Design your layout in the best possible way using different menu making software. Save the menu in pdf format and print it.

2. Choose a special layout for your menu

When customers look at the menu, the first thing they look for is their favorite food. Large restaurants and hotels create their menus keeping in mind the principle of the golden triangle. According to this principle, most people look first at the middle section, then the right one and followed by the upper left.

If you have any special items, adding them to the middle section can be a great idea. Main dishes or regular dishes can be placed in the upper right corner. Finally, at the top left, try adding desserts, mocktails, drinks, and other appetizers. This principle has been followed for many years and to this day it is relevant.

3. Menu design

After finalizing your articles according to the golden triangle principle, you need to decide on the total number of sections you want in your menu book. It is recommended that more sections make it easy for customers to find the items quickly. You can create a separate menu book with best food menu designer for items like desserts, mocktails and strong drinks. Additionally, separate menu books can be created for vegetarians and non-vegetarians so that there is no confusion during ordering time.

4. Total number of pages

This thing is very important and should be kept in mind when developing a food menu. The number of pages in your food menu depends mainly on the number of foods you serve in your home. Try to keep your articles in fewer pages if possible. It is important to keep in mind that the names of food products should be visible to customers and should not be overlooked. Try to adjust in terms of texts, don’t size or design, but make sure your menu doesn’t look awkward.

If you’re running a new food business or the vibe is modern, you can even try creating a food menu with bigger pages and unique designs that will meet all of your needs.

Conclusion

So these are the points you need to know about restaurant menu design. Your food menu is something that says a lot about your food business. A clean, less-designed menu can get you lots of leads, but a stylish, well-designed menu book can convert your leads into sales. If you are looking for food menu designers, you can use this link for menu design services.

American chain Wendy’s, an American chain of spicy and frosted chicken nuggets on Twitter, began its long-promised UK push by opening a restaurant in Reading and sticking up a three-foot-tall gold statue of a drink icy outside of it. Reading’s opening has been in the works since 2019, with the brand announcing its weirdly warlike plans for the UK as ‘beachhead for expansion’ in 2018.

Its menu is as you might expect: square burgers; its flagship menu item, the Baconator, and its other flagship menu item, the Frosty (that frozen drink); Spicy chicken nuggets that actually have a bit of heat and aren’t just regular chicken nuggets with a tan spray. The “black and white” Frosty – an off-menu swirl of chocolate and vanilla – captivated Eater NY critic Ryan Sutton enough to call it “truly the quintessential American fast food dessert.. “

As a reminder, this is not a start, the brand having left the United Kingdom for the first time in the early 2000s; he is now known as much for his hyperactive presence on Twitter as for his cuisine; he blamed income equality for stagnant sales in the United States despite his starting salary as low as $ 8 an hour; he has refused to enroll in the Fair Food program this regulates against abuse in the agricultural industry. Wendy’s workers regularly join strikes around the $ 15 struggle, pushing for an increase in the minimum wage. It promises “zero hours” for British employees, but does not detail a starting salary.

Nor is it the only American channel looking across the Atlantic, seeing a real estate market whose bottom has collapsed thanks to the novel coronavirus pandemic, and rubbing its hands in a malicious glee that bothers Mr. Burns. Taco Bell consolidates its forays into the United Kingdom; The Popeyes fried chicken chain cooks up “hundreds of restaurants”. And while the working and farming practices of most fast food restaurants do not stand up to scrutiny, only Chick-fil-A – another American fast food brand – has seen its British attempt fully implode in because of its historical ties to anti-LGBTQ + religious groups. In a market already dominated by huge American players, Wendy’s will have to wait and see if its actual arrival lives up to its expectations. 280 character hypebeast.

Feigang Fei, owner of Cuisine AuntDai in Montreal, wants to be honest with you.

Cuisine AuntDai in Montreal has seen a surge in customer numbers after the owner’s honest descriptions of dishes went viral.

Feigang Fei, owner of Cuisine AuntDai in Montreal, wants to be honest with you.

By Leah Asmelash, CNN

Restaurants are generally known for bragging about their dishes in front of customers. But Feigang Fei, who runs Chinese restaurant Aunt Dai, chose to design a menu with honest descriptions of the dishes.

Each description presents the owner’s perspective on the dishes. For example, about the beef with orange, it is written: “Compared to our General Tao chicken, this one is not SO good. Anyway, I’m not a big fan of North American Chinese food and it’s your choice.

Aunt Dai is my favorite Chinese restaurant in Montreal, but the real treat is the menu, with extremely honest reviews from the owner. pic.twitter.com/FpA1xt0GrF

– Kim Belair (@BagelofDeath) January 10, 2021

Another such description for another beef dish reads: “According to many customers this one is very popular, I still haven’t had a chance to taste it.” Looks like I should spend more time eating in my own restaurant.

Fei, who opened the restaurant seven years ago, was initially disappointed when customers returned the food uneaten. “Some customers who hadn’t tried certain dishes were surprised at the level of spice or texture,” he said. theguardian.com. It was then that he had the idea to write such descriptions.

While the restaurant is in its “survival mode” amid the pandemic, the owner is hopeful that business would rebound soon.

“We don’t have a very good article, something complex and showing the genius of cooking. Our food will always be good, but we’re just not the best, ”he said. “Well, maybe a little above average,” Fei also said.

Food startup Eat Just launches lab-grown chicken nuggets for a still unnamed Singaporean restaurant. This news follows Sinapore Food Agency’s approval of “farmed chicken” for sale as an ingredient. Eat Just also makes Egg Just, a fake egg product made from mung beans. Of Smithsonian:

[…] Cultured chicken is real meat, it just doesn’t come from a slaughtered chicken. Scientists at Eat Just start with biopsies of muscle cells from live chickens, then deliver the samples with plant-based nutrients in a 300-gallon bioreactor to help the tissue grow.

“This is a historic moment in the food system,” Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just, told Mike Ives. New York Times. “We have been eating meat for thousands of years, and every time we eat meat we have to kill an animal, until now.”

In 2019, Eat Just revealed that each chicken nugget would cost $ 50 to make, Deena Shanker reported for Bloomberg Last year. But the company has cut production costs since then, and now the price will be on par with high-quality chicken that could be ordered at a restaurant, reports the Times.

_{Image above for illustration purposes only: McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, Evan-Amos (Public domain)}