There are plenty of things to consider when running a restaurant. Even the bones of the business – promoting your brand, keeping the quality of your food high, managing staff, being sustainable and keeping costs low – are more than enough to fill your business. When these are a priority, adding more tasks and responsibilities might be something you want to avoid. However, while offering seasonal menus can take a little more planning, it can actually help you achieve many of your primary goals.
Today, we’ll explore why seasonal menus are still as relevant as ever for Victoria eateries, and walk you through how to design menus that keep customers coming all year round. We’ll also outline some of the benefits of switching up your menu when a new season rolls around.
Designing seasonal menus
The art of creating appealing seasonal menus isn’t as complicated as many think. First of all, you should partner up with a great Melbourne-based printing service with a track record of working with restaurants like yours. Quality should always be your top priority, making it essential to work with a professional printing service that can follow your brand guidelines, uses high-quality materials and can print visually striking menus that can aid in keeping your branding cohesive from season to season whilst still ensuring your seasonal offerings are uniquely compelling.
We highly recommend switching up your physical and digital menus when a new season rolls around. While it’s possible to stick to a year-round single menu, revitalising your menu each season appeals to more customers throughout the year, and can provide you with plenty of opportunities to create social media and promotional content tailored for every season.
For restaurant owners and managers, it’s also well worth sitting down with your chef and head waiters to brainstorm some dishes to bring to the table when the next season rolls around. Your chef will likely be beaming with new ideas to try, your waiter can weigh in on what customers have been loving and you can refine the ideas from the specifics of what’s easily available from local suppliers.
Benefits of creating seasonal menus
Offering a seasonal menu involves mixing and matching your dishes depending on the time of year. For example, you might serve a warm chicken noodle soup or an eggplant parmigiana in the autumn, while a prawn and mango salad might be better suited to the summertime.
Pairing these plates with wines of the season makes for a dining experience that matches the climate and leaves your patrons feeling satiated and satisfied. In short, seasonal menus work by catering to your audience’s changing desires throughout the year. Below, we explore the main benefits of seasonal menus.
Keep customers interested throughout the year
If you own a restaurant, you'll know full well the importance of keeping customers coming through your doors every month of the year. Because of costs like rent or property taxes, employee salaries and utilities, your revenue needs to stay strong at all times.
Offering a seasonal menu is a great way to make sure your business runs smoothly all year long. People typically crave different sorts of dishes depending on the season. For instance, customers might seek warm, hearty dishes in the heart of winter, while fresh, zesty food might be more popular during Australia’s sweltering summers.
Seasonal menus also ensure that your restaurant never gets boring. People typically enjoy trying different kinds of food. If you serve the same few dishes all year long, some of your customers might get tired of eating at your restaurant and turn to your competitors instead. By switching up your offerings throughout the year, you can ensure that your restaurant is always fresh and exciting, allowing you to build customer loyalty.
Serve good, high-quality food, all year round
Whether you’re a new restaurant or one that’s been in business for decades, the quality of your food is ultimately what will determine your success. No matter how good your marketing efforts are, customers will only come through your doors if they like what you serve.
Switching up your menu throughout the year and using seasonal ingredients is a fantastic way of ensuring that your dishes are always fresh. It allows your chef more creative freedom to explore new and innovative dishes without the pressure. If a dish on your seasonal menu becomes a standout for customers, you can keep it long-term and begin to create loyal fans. Relying on out-of-season ingredients can lead to quality issues with the food you serve.
When you tailor your dishes according to the season, it becomes much easier to manage the quality of your dishes, too. You'll be able to source your ingredients from local producers as they stock in-season produce, allowing you to choose suppliers whose quality you can trust. Seasonal ingredients can also be taken straight from the farm to the kitchen, meaning they won't be full of preservatives.
Sustainable and cost-effective
Among the most important benefits of seasonal menus is that they allow you to operate sustainably and lower your overall costs. As we mentioned earlier, serving in-season food makes it easier to source from local suppliers. This reduces your carbon footprint – you won’t need your raw ingredients flown in from halfway across the world. When you source locally, you can also choose suppliers that meet certain sustainability standards.
Operating sustainably is good for both the environment and for your business. Today, customers are incredibly concerned about their ecological footprint, so you’ll likely become an ethical choice as well as a tastebud-orientated one.
Besides allowing you to operate in a more eco-friendly manner, seasonal menus can also help you decrease your costs. While you might need to pay a little extra to print different menus for each season and change up your offering, these expenses are usually offset by the fact that you can rely on nearby suppliers rather than spending inordinate amounts of money on shipping fees.
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Many successful restaurants across the world offer seasonal menus, and it’s not hard to see why. You’ll have the seafood and newly acquired white wine for the warmer months, and hearty, mean dishes with bold red, as and when your customers desire them.
For Victorian cafes and restaurants, maintaining a seasonal menu allows you to take full advantage of the rich and diverse produce and ingredients that are available at every time of the year. Seasonal menus also provide dynamic opportunities to partner with local suppliers and farmers, ensuring you can serve the best food at optimal prices and with only the freshest produce. Suffice to say, although it takes a bit of effort to plan and print multiple menus throughout the year, the benefits of seasonal menus are well worth your consideration.