Transcript excerpt from a YouTube conversation (two speakers) advising restaurants on quick profitability fixes for 2025. Core advice: calculate per-dish food cost and weekly sales, identify loss-making dishes, then act (remove, reprice, change portions, or de-emphasize on the menu). The speakers also discuss menu-design psychological tactics—priming and anchoring—to steer customers toward more profitable choices.
What do you think is one thing restaurants, or maybe just maybe a suggestion, a topic, a tool that restaurants can do now to make more in 2025.
The quickest fix, right, for restaurants is understanding your food cost, understanding what each dish costs you, and then understanding what you're selling every week. And then look at it and go, you know what? We, we are losing money on this dish. We are selling too much of it. So we can now make a decision what we do with it. Like, you can either get rid of it. No, you can put the price up, you can adjust the portioning size, you can bury it in the menu so no one can find it. And, you know, and that's a whole different psychology. There's all, you know, you can put stuff in boxes to highlight the stuff that you want to sell, or you put something in a box to highlight it so you don't sell it because it's too expensive.
So it's that like, yeah, graphics can stimulate sales. Sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. You don't know your menu costs. Yeah.
So we had the. So the dishes that we actually have the highest food. Food cost on is our dry aged steaks. So we highlight them and then I highlight the price and then they go, wow, they've got this, but I'm gonna have that. And I'm like, yeah, fantastic.
We call that priming. Priming and anchoring. Yeah. It's a psychological tool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes we, sometimes we have high priced items, we can actually put them on the menu at a certain spot and then put an item that is our more profitable item right underneath it to drive that sales. Because like I said, priming or anchoring is. Yeah. See a steak for like $80, but then underneath I see a stick for 45. I'm like, yeah, I want to stick. But you know, that 80 stick, you know that 45 stick actually sounds like a good deal, right?
