How to increase restaurant sales without giving the profit away

About this guide to increasing restaurant sales

The short answer: how to increase restaurant sales

A restaurant increases sales by serving more covers, raising the average spend per cover, or both. Which one to work on depends on whether the room is full or empty when it matters. If it is full, spend and price are the lever. If it is empty, covers are. In both cases, count cash gross profit, not revenue, because a sale that costs more to make than it earns is not growth.

What actually drives restaurant sales

Strip away the marketing vocabulary and a restaurant's food sales are one multiplication.

A cover is one guest served, not one table. Average spend per cover is net sales divided by covers. Both are on your EPOS report already. The profit per cover estimator runs the same equation against your own numbers and shows what a change in either is worth over a year.

Take a site doing 1,200 food covers a week at £25.00 net, which is £30.00 on the menu with VAT. That is £30,000 a week. A five percent rise in covers gives 1,260 x £25.00 = £31,500. A five percent rise in spend gives 1,200 x £26.25 = £31,500. The same revenue, reached two different ways, and the two cost the business very differently:

• Five percent more covers carry their full food cost, their share of kitchen and floor labour, and they need seats and kitchen capacity that may not exist at the busy times.
• Five percent more spend, if it comes from the sales mix or an extra course, adds the food cost of the extra item only. The labour and the seat were already paid for.

Neither is automatically better. That depends on where the site is losing, which is the next question.

Which problem do you have: empty seats or a small basket?

The most useful check takes ten minutes. Pull covers by service period for a normal month and mark where the room is full and where it is not. Revenue per available seat hour, often shortened to RevPASH, makes the same point in one number: net sales divided by seats multiplied by trading hours. A 60 seat room taking £6,000 net across a four hour dinner service is making £25.00 per seat hour. Compare that figure across the week and the gaps are obvious.

Most sites need the first row, and most advice is written for the third. That is why a marketing push to a Saturday that is already full produces little, and why it works when it is pointed at a Tuesday.

Lever one: the menu itself

The menu is the only sales tool every guest reads, and it is the one most operators have not measured. What matters is not how many dishes sell, but which ones. Two dishes can sell in equal numbers and return very different cash, so moving a few orders from a dish that earns £7 to one that earns £12 raises profit without a single extra cover.

That is what menu engineering does. It scores every dish on cash margin and on share of sales, sorts them into stars, plowhorses, puzzles and dogs, and then moves the menu so the dishes that earn most are the ones guests find first. Practical changes follow from it:

• Promote puzzles, the high cash dishes that few people order. Better position, a clearer description, or a server recommendation. These are the cheapest sales you can find.
• Reprice or re-cost plowhorses, the popular low margin dishes. Guests already love them, so a small price move or a tighter spec carries the weight.
• Keep sections short enough to decide from. Long sections slow the decision and push people towards the safest, cheapest line.
• Let each section have one confident anchor. The most expensive dish frames the ones beside it as reasonable.

Before changing anything, know what each dish actually returns. The food cost calculator gives the cash margin and the matrix position for one dish, and the food cost control guide covers why the number on paper is usually higher than the one in the bank.

Lever two: price, and how much volume it can cost you

A price rise is the fastest way to raise sales per cover, and the one operators fear most, usually because they have never calculated how much volume it can lose before it stops paying. That number is knowable. Using the gastropub main from the menu pricing guide, priced at £21.00 on the menu, £17.50 net, with a £6.05 plate cost:

Read the last row. A ten percent discount has to bring in eighteen percent more orders of that dish just to stand still, and twenty percent has to bring in forty four percent more. A five percent price rise can lose seven percent of its orders before the dish earns less than it does today. Discounts cost more than they appear to, and modest price rises forgive more than operators think.

These figures are the arithmetic for one dish with the plate cost unchanged. They are gross profit, before labour, so treat them as a floor on the problem, not a forecast. Run your own dishes through the GP calculator, which handles VAT on the right basis. And a rise is not always the right move: the pricing guide sets out when to raise a price, when to take cost out instead, and why a blanket increase is the blunt option.

Lever three: add a course, not just a price

The attach rate is the share of covers that order an extra item: a starter, a dessert, a side or a drink beyond the first. It is the cleanest way to lift spend per cover because the guest is already seated and has already decided to spend. The full method, with the arithmetic, is in how to increase average spend per cover.

An illustration, not a result. A site serves 1,200 covers a week and 20 percent order dessert. Dessert is £8.00 on the menu, £6.67 net, with a £1.60 plate cost, so each one returns £5.07 in cash. Moving the attach rate from 20 to 25 percent is 60 more desserts a week, about £304 a week, and roughly £15,800 a year in gross profit. The covers did not change.

What makes the attach rate move is mostly not a script. It is:

• The menu laying the course out. A dessert section guests are shown, not asked about at the end of a long meal.
• The server knowing what to recommend. A specific dish, said plainly, beats "anything else for you?" Brief the team on the three dishes you most want to sell and why, which comes straight from the matrix above.
• The add on being worth selling. A side at 75 percent GP is worth the prompt. An add on at 45 percent is not. Check before training the team to push it.
• Pacing. A kitchen that cannot turn a dessert in time loses the order however good the recommendation.

The same logic applies to drinks, which usually carry a higher margin than food. Include them in the equation where your EPOS lets you separate them.

Lever four: covers on the quiet nights, without discounting

If the gap is midweek, covers are the lever. The table above is the reason not to reach for a discount first: a discount trains regular guests to wait for it, and it has to win a large share of extra orders to break even. Better routes:

• Give quiet nights a reason of their own. A shorter menu, a set menu with a cost you have calculated, or a dish that only runs midweek. The point is a reason to choose Tuesday, not a cheaper Saturday.
• Fit the offer to the kitchen. A midweek offer built from components already prepped for the weekend costs far less to run than one that needs its own prep line.
• Cost the offer before launching it. A set menu is a list of dishes at a fixed price, and some of those dishes will lose margin once discounted by being bundled. Price it from the plate cost up.
• Measure the extra covers, not the offer. Count whether covers on that night actually rose, and what each one returned, over a month.

Lever five: the guests you already have

A guest who has eaten with you once is the cheapest cover you will ever win. The simple mechanics are a way to hear from them again and a reason to come back: a booking system that records an email with consent, and a message worth opening, such as a new dish or a seasonal menu change. Under UK data protection and e-privacy rules, that means asking permission and making it easy to unsubscribe. Keep it occasional and specific. A weekly voucher is a discount programme in a different shape.

Whatever else you do, make the menu worth coming back for. Seasonal changes done well, with the costings behind them, give you something genuine to tell people. That is also the strongest argument for a considered menu redesign rather than a reprint.

When more sales cost more than they earn

Growth that erodes the margin is the commonest way to end up busier and poorer. Watch for these:

• Growth from discounts. Revenue up, cash gross profit flat or down. The table above is why.
• Growth from low margin lines. If the dishes gaining share are the ones earning least, the average gets worse as the till total improves. A menu mix report shows it in minutes.
• Growth the kitchen cannot carry. Extra covers at the busiest times lengthen waits and push labour and waste up. The labour guide shows how to put a number on what a dish costs in time, not only in ingredients.
• Sales that are not reconciled. If gross profit is slipping while sales rise, the gap is usually in waste, portioning and supplier prices, covered in the eleven leaks.

In what order to do it

1. Establish where the gap is. Covers and spend by service period, and RevPASH if you can.
2. Know what each dish earns. Plate costs on yielded weight, net of VAT, scored on cash margin and share of sales.
3. Fix the menu before the marketing. Promote the puzzles, reprice or re-cost the plowhorses.
4. Test one price change and one attach prompt. Measure cash gross profit, not just revenue, over a full month.
5. Only then spend on getting people in. A fuller room is worth more when each cover is worth more. If you are still before opening, the same order applies in how to open a restaurant, from the kitchen side.

Applied to a pub, the same sequence is shaped by wet and dry sales and the Sunday trade, set out on the pubs and gastropubs page. For independent restaurants, see menu engineering for restaurants.

Increasing restaurant sales: FAQs

Keep reading. Sales levers differ by section: desserts (how many tables order one), starters (sharing plates) and breakfast. See also menu profitability by section.