These days, restaurants are not limited to operating solely from their premises. Diversifying your restaurant business can lead to increased growth and sales, providing a beneficial way to support your business and customers. By expanding your offerings, you can attract new customers, increase revenue streams, and adapt to changing market trends, thereby enhancing the overall resilience and sustainability of your business.
But in what ways can you, or even should you, diversify your restaurant? Diversification opens the door to new culinary experiences and adventures, both for you and your customers.
Food Festivals and Events
Food festivals, markets, and events are not just for small outfits or new vendors. They are opportunities to step out of your comfort zone and share your culinary expertise with the local community. This can be particularly beneficial if you’re considering expanding into a new area. A local food market or festival can help you gauge demand and give people a taste of what you have to offer.
While off-site food sales can be a great way to attract new customers, ensuring seamless payment processes is crucial. When selling food off-site, it’s essential to consider how you’ll handle payments. You should look for these features in a restaurant POS system to ensure you can seamlessly integrate off-site payments with those taken for in-store orders.
Prepared Meals/ Meal Kits
Have you considered selling prepared meals people can heat and eat at home at a later date? Sure, people can order food on a takeout basis, but offering meals that can be stored or cooked another day, similar to convenience foods or ready meals, can help you tap into a new market. People who don’t want to order takeout but want easy, delicious meals they can put in the oven or heat up can be a great option for you to consider. This takes the stress from quickly delivering hot food for immediate takeout orders while still catering to those who want to enjoy your food in their homes.
Alternatively, you could supply meal kits with everything you need to create your meals at home, which you can deliver, or customers can pick to recreate their favorites.
Corporate Catering
If you’re a high-end dining establishment, you can offer to cater business functions or events to engage a new audience you might not otherwise reach. Even if you don’t fit into this category, you can offer businesses a meal delivery service or deliver food to an event or workplace for the entire team to enjoy lunches, host clients, and more. For example, if a business is having a fun day for the staff or hosting a charity day for families and you serve lunch-type foods, i.e., burgers, hotdogs, nachos, etc., then a food truck can be perfect so you cna sell your food on-site for all attendees.
It is worth researching the types of businesses in your local area that could benefit from what you do and enquiring about partnering with them to offer your services.
Collaborations
Collaborations with different chefs in your area, other local food businesses, for example, or even influencers or social media recipe creators to create content, special meals, new dishes, menus, or anything else. This way, you can rely on each other’s existing audience base to deliver new and exciting offerings to people and boost your visibility.
It’s important you choose correctly. Ensure each party’s services and audiences complement each other and offer something new that combines the best of both providers.
