Factors Influencing Menu Planning And Menu Product Development Processes

Principles of Recipe Development

Hospitality and Tourism industry is one of the fast-growing industries in the world, which includes a number of industries and businesses. The restaurant business is the most preferable business among them, which has already made a visible place in the global market. This can only be possible when the owners can satisfy the wants and needs of the customers, which depend upon a number of factors. The owners of the restaurants are required to consider some factors such as recipe development, menu and product development in an efficient manner so that customers may get attracted towards their food services and products (Hsu and Wu, 2013).

Principles of recipe development

Recipe development might be a frustrating and tedious job at times, but by following the process with patience, great results can be achieved. Developing a new recipe and improve the present ones it should be ensured that progress and efficiency for the food service are established. Enough time should be taken to do research before initiating the process of preparing food.

Cookery styles

Style of cooking food, staples and common preparation techniques are different all over the world. One can bring creativity is by leveraging the techniques from around the globe to bring their flavours and strength into their favourite meals. Everyone has his or her own style of cooking and it differs person-to-person and country to the county such as mid-eastern cooking Asian cooking, Latin American cooking Mediterranean cooking (Fuller, 2016). 

Creativity

While developing recipe creativity is the most important factor that should be considered. Customers like to try new food products; therefore, creativity should be used to make unique food recipes. The recipe developer should search for variations in food, using their experience to best food to the table. One can support the menu planning and product development by providing detailed nutritional guidance with the food item (Khan, Grigor, Winger, & Win, 2013).

Nutrition

Nutrition should be the priority while preparing recipe. The health of the customers should be considered and they should be provided with the food that high in nutrition and lack in elements that may cause health issues to the person. Most of the restaurant or hotels these days only look providing the tasty food to the customer no matter it is healthy or not. Providing the customer a healthy and tasty food might help the business entity to attract more customers. The recipe should not include the high calorie, fat, cholesterol etc (Morgan, & Sonnino, 2013).

Consistency

Constancy means that the food recipe should be followed all the time and just occasionally. It helps to grow by repeat business where the customers can believe or expect that each menu item will have that taste and healthy nutrients on every visit. This may bring the consumers repeatedly to the particular food provider. Therefore, standard recipes should be used all the time and for every time (Carpenter, Lyon, & Hasdell, 2012).

Factors influencing menu planning

Menu planning is the process of providing a chart that states the items available in the restaurant along with the price tag of each item. This makes it easy for customers to get what they want and what fits in their budget. Menu is first and most important element that influences the customer mind-set to choose the place of their requirements. Therefore, restaurants have to design or plan their menu in such a way that it attracts more customers along with making a sustainable market profit for the business (Kamphuis et al, 2015). Some factors influencing the menu planning are as following:

Cookery Styles

Location

Neighbourhood of the restaurant and requirements of people living there decides the items which will be demanded more. Menu also showcases the price tags of each item that the restaurant is offering and hospitality service requirements vary from place to place. Therefore, while designing a menu and price tag it is showing location of the restaurant is important as it affects the cost of product and service according to the locality.

Theme

Every restaurant has its own theme to differentiate it from the others. This theme has to be followed in menu designing also. As the menu represents the restaurant uniqueness and its services it has to be prepared with the same theme that is followed in restaurant. Menu having a theme that is of the harmony with the ambience establishes a strong bond between menu and the diner. This bod helps the restaurant in serving their customers with better dining experiences.

Order and No disorder

Most of the professional managers use scheduled order to maintain their raw material supply in advance that helps them to serve their customer with better services making regular supply of their products. In order to maintain the product supply managers order their raw material ingredients in advance. This advance requirement is predicted with the help of customer demand and consumption (Raimundo et al, 2017). A well designer menu differentiating the categories of products that are available with no disorder availability helps them to make this process efficient.

Food costs

A menu with variety of products is not enough for business point of view as the cost of products influence the customer attraction and satisfaction. While designing a menu the price has to be decided considering its original cost price including raw material price, and service charge, along with the profit margin. This profit margin has to be according to the reliability of customer satisfaction in its locality. Designing a menu with higher price tags, that is not reliable according to the place, influences the customer satisfaction significantly and may result in decreasing the business of restaurant (Cheng and Liu, 2015). Therefore, cost of the food product must be decided considering all the factors that affect the customer satisfaction along with the business profit margins.

Waste generation

Product quantity is the measure of its price worth. In the menu card the price tag has to be labelled with a price tag according to the quantity served in in such a way that it produces minimum waste from the kitchen. Restaurant waste is mostly kitchen waste and this can be effectively controlled with the use of measuring buckets for both the ingredient measuring and serving purpose.

Factors influencing the service methods

Service performance is the key business objective for food service industry that is used to provide customer satisfaction. But there are some factors that influence the service quality to achieve these customer satisfactions objectives. There are some individual factors as well as organizational factors that influence the service performance.

Service availability

Customers rate the same food with different prices according to their service satisfaction. Type of the service restaurant is provident depends on the customer demandcustomer demand for a particular type of service varies from place to place and type of products served at that restaurant. There are different type of service such as, table service, self-service, single point service, and trolley service that a restaurant can provide to its customers to make them satisfied. While choosing a particular type of service restaurant managers have to consider the customer demands to make them feel satisfied. This will help them to make their business more sustainable.

Creativity

Ambience

Ambience of the restaurant connects customer with the restaurant and make them feel different from other places. This ambience and the space availability must be comfortable for customer. Once customer is connected with the restaurant ambience then it creates a psychology of satisfaction that helps the managers to make their guests feel satisfied.

Staff availability

Customers seek for special attention from the staff or managers of the restaurant therefore a sufficient staff has to be available all the time to attend the individual party or customer. Lake of staff will divide the service attention of customer that can affect the customer satisfaction in terms of service performance (Antic and Bogetic, 2015).

Stages of menu product development planning

Manu products of food industry are the recipes that they serve their customers. These recipes are the key business element that makes a business unique and different from others. The recipe development planning involves different stages that has to be followed to get the perfection in development process. A well-developed product always make customer feel happy and satisfied which are the most important objectives of service industry. Therefore to develop a product perfectly, there are few stages through which the product planning process has to go through (Baiomy et al, 2013). These stages of product development planning are as following:

Idea generation

In order to make a business unique and different from other competitive businesses new product lauch is the best idea. This product must be unique that is not introduced before of presented in this way. For this different ideas are required to get from different minds. This can be done with the help of market feedback or trends that customer are looking for in the market.

Idea screening

One different ideas are collected from different sources these have to go through a screening process to filter the best out of all that are available. At this stage all the ideas are compared with their pros and cons to compare their sustainability as well as their business opportunities in the market.

Concept development and testing

Once the idea is filtered and one is finalised there is the next stage of developing the concept for product development. At this stage creativity and innovation of the organization is used to make it different from the existing products. This stage shape the idea finalised in the previous stage and test different creativities or innovation to get the best market suitable product (Jasinskas et al, 2016).

Market strategy development

When product concept and designs are finalised here come the next stage of market strategy development. This stage is most important from business point of view. A product is not business worthy unless its marketing is not done effectively (McCall and Lynn, 2008). This requires a deep analysis of external as well as internal factors which may affect the market of this new product. For internal factor analysis there are tools like SWOT and many more (Rottenlaw, 2018). Similarly for external factor analysis PESTEL analysis and other tools are available to understand the market opportunities for the new product developed (Mhlanga and Tichaawa, 2016).

Nutrition

Business analysis

In this stage with all the analysis done in the previous one the business feasibility of product in market is analysed by the mangers or professionals. At this stage business is analyses with the help of all the factors analysed and strategies developed for the product marketing. This analysis provides the feasibility of product in the current market scenario (Al-Juboori and Al Saleem, 2012).

Product development

Once the product is found feasible in market with its concept, it has to be developed with all the considerations which have been made in the concept development stage. This stage starts the mass production of the product as per the market demand.

Test marketing

At this stage the product is manufactured too the population selected for market testing. in this stage the product and its marketing strategies are exposed to a selected population to find out if the product has to be rejected or produces at full scale. Test marketing the experiment conducted to check its success chance in the market with the help of an audience customer of selected region and limited number (Langviniene, and Daunoraviciute, 2015).

Commercialization

Once the product pass the testing market stage it is ready to produce at full scale. In this stage the product is made commercial for customer effectively. This stage is considered as the final stage as the product is finally developed and made commercially available to the customer. This ensures that the product is ready to make business for the organization and has no further testing or any other stage to go through (DuarteAlonso et al, 2013).

Influence on the development process

All the stages of product development process have their own significance and influenced by some of the external and external factor of the market. There are several factors which can influence the product development process in a positive or negative way (Yurtseven and Kaya, 2011). Some of these factors are as following:

Cost

Cost is the most significant influencing factor for the product development process. The process must produce a product that is cost effective to make more profit along with providing customer satisfaction making it worthy for the charging cost. This factor affects the different stages like concept development, marketing, and feasibility check (Ozdemir and Caliskan, 2015).

Ingredients

To develop a new product, material or ingredients used are elements influencing the stages of marketing and business development stage of the product development process. This factor enhances the marketing and business development process effective with perfect material selection for the product development (Ivanovic et al, 2015).

Customer requirements

Every stage of product development process can be affected with this factor. Customer requirements are most essential to achieve the most significant goal or objective of service industry that is customer satisfaction. Customer requirements will influence the product designing process significantly (Prihatminingtyas et al, 2014).

Conclusion:

On the basis of above discussion, it can be concluded that menu development for a restaurant is not an easy task and one needs to consider the above-mentioned principles. An organization working in food and beverages industry is required to have the knowledge of all service methods and develop recipes and services after analysing the target market and customers.

Consistency

References

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