How to Prepare for Large Groups of Customers, the End-of-Year Season and Offering Food Set Promotions that are Worthwhile and Earn Profit.

Nov 17, 2021
The end-of-year season is coming up. Since the government has eased restrictions on sitting and dining in restaurants, it’s time for restaurants to attract customers by using captivating promotion management strategies. However, if you don’t manage your promotions well or your promotions aren’t captivating enough, people won’t be interested. Today, MHA’s here to recommend some end-of-year season promotion management techniques by highly experienced restaurant guru Pornchai “Tai” Nitmethawong who will tell you how to offer promotions customers love, boost sales and pose no risk of losing money.

Can you not offer end-of-year promotions?

The answer is yes. However, if other restaurants are offering promotions during this period, the risk of you losing customers to them is high because the other restaurants are offering more interesting options, especially during the holiday season when you need to  boost sales. However, not every restaurant can offer seasonal promotions. It mainly depends on the restaurant type and consumer behavior.

How to Start Offering Promotions

First, you have to understand the nature of each restaurant type, because each food type has different costs, each customer has different behaviors and each season has unique characteristics, so you can’t offer the same promotions all the time.

For the end-of-year season, the main focus customer groups are large groups including friends, families and work groups, because it’s the time for New Year’s parties, especially since parties haven’t been held in a long time due to Covid. This makes customers, especially company parties, want to party even more because they’ve been feeling cooped up for a long time. So, if you’ve got space for holding parties and events or karaoke rooms, or you have a food garden, use this opportunity to offer promotions to companies and shops. You’ll increase your sales more than other restaurant types because you’re more equipped for holding parties.

Why should you focus on customer groups such as companies, shops and families?

Naturally, companies and shops hold New Year’s parties for their employees. Some companies want to hold the parties on-site, but many choose to hold them at a restaurant instead, because it’s convenient in terms of food, space and clean-up management. They may have a budget set aside for treating their employees every year. Plus, party planners want the good stuff. Good food, service and worthwhile promotions. That way, when the employees and executives attend the party, they won’t lose face. They’ll feel like the party’s worthwhile and enjoy it after a year’s worth of hard work. In addition, it’ll make the employees love their organizations even more.

On the other hand, families also want to celebrate the end of the year, because it’s one of the few times in the year when the entire family gets to meet and do activities, eat good food, talk and enjoy each other’s company.  Particularly in the case of large families, it’s hard for all of the members to gather in the first place. As a solution to the trouble of having to find a place, cooking food and cleaning a lot of dishes, holding family parties at restaurants is a popular option and people are more willing to pay for this than usual.

Therefore, party promotions are interesting for this customer group, because it’s easy for customers to choose the menu. For example, you can offer a rather interesting food set for a party of ten consisting of seabass fried in fish sauce + seafood tom yum + vegetable stir-fry with shrimp + yam sam krob + cooked rice, for a special price.

Nevertheless, a problem with food sets is that customers sometimes don’t want to eat every dish on the menu. Some dishes won’t be touched by the customers in the group at all. When this happens, the customers tend to not order that particular set. A solution is to use arrange the sets using the same model as ‘Laem Charoen Seafood’ where food is arranged into sets, but the type of dishes can be selected. It’s better than offering fixed menus.

Examples of Laem Charoen Seafood’s promotional food sets for 888 baht. The sets include the following:

  • Dish 1: Select 1 of the following 4 dishes: Seabass fried with fish sauce, seabass topped with chili, fried seabass with garlic and crispy fried seabass.
  • Dish 2: Select 1 of the following 4 dishes: Fried clown featherback fish-paste ball, ricefish salad, cabbage stir-fried with fish sauce and steamed mackerel curry. 
  • Dish 3: Select 1 of the following 5 dishes: Crab Roe Relish, Chinese oyster omelet, glass noodles stir-fried with egg and shrimp, clams stir-fried with chili paste and shrimp stir-fried with asparagus.
  • Dish 4: Select 1 of the following 6 dishes: Squid stir-fried with salted egg, seafood clear soup, green curry with fish balls, spicy soup with chopped shrimp, salted fish dip and spicy seafood soup.

If you consider each option, you’ll find that the list categorizes the food by type and cost-profit. You can choose the high-cost, high-profit fish dish as the main dish first and then distribute the menu according to suitability. Otherwise, you can use this model and adjust it with top ups, stimulating customers to order more food to max out the prices and redeem other menu items such as desserts or beverages to go with the menu.
However, with this kind of promotion you need to first consider and understand the food cost and pricing and then you can calculate the costs and profit and handle promotions safely without losing money. You can learn about food cost and pricing in “Professional Price-Setting Techniques” by Pornchai “Tai” Nitmethawong. In addition, you should understand whether other costs that fluctuate over time, such as the rise in fuel prices, affect the ingredient costs.

Or, if your restaurant has karaoke rooms, try offering karaoke as a freebie if the headcount reaches a certain number. This should help attract more companies, shops and families to hold parties at your restaurant. But you need to ensure that parties are in compliance with current Covid-19 measures.
Another interesting fact about parties is that buffet restaurants are perfect for parties for foodies, binge-eaters and customers who emphasize worthwhileness. There are many companies and factories that treat their employees with meals at buffet restaurants. So, promotions that would attract a lot of attention are ones that make them feel like it’s worth their money like an order 4 and pay for 3 promotion or promotions that offer soda + ice freebies if the number of customers reach a specified number. Moreover, offering separate private rooms can attract even more interest.
shutterstock_1376048102.jpg 813.16 KB
People tend to drink alcoholic beverages at the end of the year. Try offering a promotion in collaboration with beverage companies or a no corkage fee promotion can help stimulate business for your restaurant and boost food sales. Also, don’t forget to hand out gift vouchers or discount coupons for the next time they use your services to stimulate repeat business after the season is over.

However, other customer groups like couples and minor customers may not be of major concern during the end-of-year festivities. That’s okay, because there are many other periods and festivals where you can offer promotions for these groups.

For small-scale restaurants such as single-dish or short order restaurants and street food stands, if you’re not prepared to offer promotions such as food sets or discounts, offering a free, inexpensive dish on special occasions or quantity discount where customers can buy other dishes for a special price can help stimulate sales. On the other hand, activities can be interesting. You could hold a lottery for a prize or discount when customers buy a certain number of products. This can make your restaurant lively without costing too much money. It’s also good for boosting sales, especially for customers who go to restaurants normally without any celebrations or group dining.
For restaurants that have considered it and find that they can’t offer promotions because of the high costs and low profit making them want to avoid the risks, try adjusting your restaurant’s management system first, because the reason restaurants sometimes earn low profits is due to improper management and no standard, such as poor ingredient management, ordering so much food that there are leftovers and they spoil, over-trimming ingredients, not having fixed recipes, not checking your stock, etc. You can learn about restaurant standard management in “Systematically Creating Standards for Your Restaurant”, and then try to improve your restaurant during this time first. It may help you earn more profit and help you plan promotions to boost future sales.
A restaurant is like a tourist attraction. There are low and high seasons, or peak months and slow months, according to the restaurant type. For example, a large-scale restaurants’ peak months will be during holidays when there are a lot of customers. This spans about 3 months from November to February and is a period to earn a lot of profit. Meanwhile, the sales for the other 9 months can make you lose money, although the average yearly sales can still yield high profits.

On the contrary, street food shops can have good sales for 10 months. but the sales will decrease from November to January because this is when people are more willing to pay and eat at more expensive restaurants to celebrate the end of the year with family and friends. So, if after consideration you find that you can’t boost sales because it goes against consumer behavior, it’s better to go on the defense or use small promotions as a gimmick. For example, you can hold a raffle or give importance to using LINE QA to gather members and give out coupons to create a customer base and communicate with the customers in the future.

You can use this period to develop your menu to ensure the best-selling, high-profit menu items stay with your restaurant for a long time. Perform an analysis to find menu items that should be cut and create new, even more captivating menu items that can sell better and earn more profit. You may begin to see the profit right after developing the menu items. At any rate, we recommend that you learn about how to develop menu items in “Menu Engineering: How to Develop Menu Items to Increase Sales and Profits!” with Pornchai “Tai” Nitmethawong.
Or, if you want to create new menu items and design a menu to meet customer needs, constantly inventing new menu items, offering menu items in line with trends, offering sets to increase value for each set, designing advertisements inside and outside of your restaurant and on tables as well as designing a new menu and the recommended dishes page and arrange a menu to sell well, you can learn more about it in “Design Captivating Menus to Earn Like a Pro” also by Pornchai “Tai” Nitmethawong.

Remarks: Pornchai “Tai” Nitmethawong has over 10 years of experience in the food business industry and has worked with world-class brands such as McDonald’s, the Ichitan Group, Gateaux House and Sap E-Lee, and also worked as the operation manager for King Kong Yakiniku Buffet. Currently, he is the co-founder of the True Friend Restaurant Facebook page and a restaurant consultant.
Explore more topics
โปรโมขั่นเมนูอาหารอาหารปีใหม่เมนูปีใหม่เทศกาลส่งท้ายปีPromotionsMenusNew Year’s FoodNew Year’s MenuEnd-of-Year Season

Keep reading

Get inspired by content for restaurants.

View All Articles
What categories interest you?