SALES: 3 Ways to Run Your 'Gamified Suggestive Sales' Program
Gamification of restaurant sales and suggestive selling programs are a great way for restaurants to boost their bottom line and reward their staff for it. Here are three ways operators can run their gamified restaurant sales program.
DID YOU KNOWS…
Deadly Fast Food
The most dangerous/unhealthy part of your fast food burger isn’t even the fatty grease or high-fructose corn syrup buns. It’s the wrapper it comes in. According to a new study, there are traces of banned, toxic chemicals proven to cause cancer found in an alarming number of fast-food wrappers. Yikes.
End of an Era
Won Kow, Chicago’s oldest Chinatown restaurant, is closed after 90 years in business. As sad as this is for the locals, the owner of the restaurant simply decided to retire. And, like all good restaurant stories, Al Capone allegedly ate there before.
How Bad Do You Hate Yourself?
Don’t like yourself? We’ve all had those days. But do you hate yourself enough to drink pepper spray-flavored craft beer? You can thank Dogfish for this beauty, but they’ve teamed up with Mace Security Int. to release “In Your Mace!” It’s a craft beer partially brewed with oleoresin capsicum, the active ingredient in pepper spray.
OLYMPIANS’ DIETS PROVE RESTAURANTS/CHEFS DESERVE THEIR OWN MEDAL
Why it matters to you: The impressive and strange diets Olympians have been truly something to behold & no small task for their chefs.
Resi Stiegler is an alpine skiing competitor and medal winner. She eats a meal every 90 minutes to keep up with her training. She also sufferers from celiac disease, which means she cannot consume gluten, and like most Olympians consumes between 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day. So her diet is tight.
Fortunately, most Olympic teams have a chef who ensures that athletes are fueling their bodies properly for competition. But this creates a truly interesting conundrum for the chefs. For example, alpine skiers need more protein while cross-country skiers need more carbs to help with their endurance. The team chefs have to work with a staff dietician and each individual athlete to come up with personalized diet plans. This means tweaking servings and ingredients for each dish for each athlete several times a day. One chef even compared it to being on an episode of Chopped!
As we draw closer and closer to the Pyeongchang Olympics, these chefs’ jobs grow stricter and stricter with more difficult obstacles. It’s on the level of making a full thanksgiving dinner twice a day while shopping at foreign grocery stores in a kitchen that travels globally. Doesn’t sound ideal right? Still, takes more than that to stop these dedicated chefs, even if they occasionally feel like an untelevised Chopped contestant (maybe they should enter it in the off season -- lol). Good luck to all of the chefs and Olympians leading up to competition! You deserve a medal!
RESTAURANT WEEK TIPS N TRICKS
Why it matters to you: We highlight a few successful techniques from restaurants around the US.
Restaurant Week can be a massive opportunity to draw in and excite new customers as well as the chance to hook your regulars up with something different to keep them on their toes. Let’s take a look at a few techniques to set yourselves apart from the crowd. With competition being so fierce this week (of all weeks), it is time to highlight what is truly special and unique -- YOU.
A solid signature dish can drive your business on its own. Create something familiar to the masses but with a tweak or subtle flair to set yourself apart and drive interest in what you are all about: a signature sauce, a unique preparation, pairings with a local brewery/winery, etc. This shouldn’t even just be a tip for Restaurant Week really; nobody should be missing out on the opportunity of an excellent signature dish no matter the time of year. Signature dishes can draw a crowd!
Another excellent option is to create something unique and special for that week only. If patrons know that they only have limited time to get that special dish, they are more likely to do so. If you can also do this by Frankenstein-ing together ingredients from existing SKUs, you can easily avoid ordering differently for an additional-internal win. However, remember the limited dishes should always be reflective of your restaurant’s existing menu and personality, so it doesn’t set off any red flags to your regulars! Restaurant Week is an opportunity to highlight what your establishment does best for a reasonable price, not to blindside people with seared bay scallops at your BBQ joint.
