Three Daddies will provide fully delivered menus into your businesses. We have experience of hundreds of menu launches for a variety of clients and will work with you to understand your operations, assess your staffing and equipment, and use that information to deliver tailored menus of unique recipes. The end result will give you the best tasting dishes, deliverable within agreed service times, and to maintainable levels of consistency. This is how our unique approach works:
Getting to know you
- ID Please – vision, ethos, inspiration, back story – we want to understand what makes you tick and why you’re doing this! A great business needs a clear identity, and that has to flow through the menu as well as the style of the business. We want to understand that, and help you develop it if necessary.
- Get the maps out – geography matters when it comes to eating out. Location is key, and food trends can be very regional – what works in London may not perform the same way in Doncaster! We will get to know your sites, understand the local dining preferences, and use that to form a picture of what is likely to work for you. This will partly be about understanding your specific customers, but also we want to see who else we could be getting in to your business in the areas in which you operate.
- From micro, to macro – regional, provincial, local – this is all significant, but we also want to be locking in the latest trends from around the globe. We want you to be seen as leading, trend setting and visionary, so we use sophisticated tools to assess the influence rating of bloggers and writers all over the place, and pull together a picture of emerging trends of styles, techniques and ingredients, and will use this to give your menus a bit of visionary magic.
- Know your limits – It’s all very well saying you want to serve the best dry-aged steaks in the city, but if you don’t have a proper meat fridge and a wood fired chargrill then you’re going to be outclassed! We want you to be delivering menus in a way that exceeds your guests’ expectations in terms of taste, look and service times, and to do that we need to work to the realistic capabilities of your staff, your equipment and your kitchen layouts. Operational deliverability is absolutely key.
Developing for profit
- Streamlining – Any chef worth their salt can write a nice recipe. That’s not the challenge. The tricky bit is developing a flow of batches and recipes that all fit together to deliver a profitable, low-waste menu that will be practical to deliver and is going to bring guests through the door in droves. We will start by assessing your storage facilities, your ingredient basket and existing batches, sub-recipes and recipes. The aim is to give you a menu that generates as many dishes as possible from the smallest range of ingredients and batches as we can – that will maximise efficient use of space and maximise profit, whilst minimising wastage and prep time.
- Testing – Once initial recipe concepts have been developed, we will arrange a sequence of curated tasting sessions to ensure you are involved and have an opportunity to give your feedback and input. Tasting sessions will be accompanied by full commercial information including margin forecasting and stock impacts.
- Refining – once concepts have been signed off, they go to a more rigorous final stage. All elements of a dish are meticulously weighed and portioned, so we can give you recipes that are guaranteed to perform every time, and are intuitive and logical to create for your teams.
- Menu profitability pack – we will provide a full menu efficiency report, showing how your new menu compares to your old menu in terms of cash margin, GP, number of ingredients and amount of prep.
- Menu Writing – developing the recipes is tricky, but a great recipe has to have a great name, otherwise it will not sell. We will provide full menu copy, with recommendations on design, layout and placement, in order to get the most out of your new recipes.
Launch
Developing a great menu is only half the trick. Getting it into the sites is another matter! We want your teams to engage with any new changes and recipes, so we will provide a full system of resources and information, enabling you to make your new menu launch the best one ever. You can expect to receive the following:
- An introduction to your new menu – welcome pack, information on ingredients, provenance, seasonality, and tips for optimising consistent delivery.
- Menu Training Sessions – A guide for your operations team to deliver perfect menu training prior to launch, including detailed scripting & logistics
- Golden rules – for perfect delivery of this menu
- Operational guides – to minimise wastage and maximise service efficiency, including detailed information on what ingredients and batches need to be depleted prior to launch, and what new stock to begin ordering and prepping, and when.
Execution
Delivering a great menu is complex, and your teams need great quality, clear simple guides in order to do so. We will work with your teams to provide the following tools to ensure great menu delivery, and to ensure that your systems and processes are optimised to deliver the same standards moving forward, setting you up for future growth.
- Preparation and Storage – Best Practice Guides
- Cookbook – including step by step multi-image methods, minimising the use of text where possible.
- Allergen & Dietary Suitability Guides – assuming you have comprehensive recipe/ingredient data, we are able to help you generate fantastic menus and guides with which guests and staff can understand allergen and dietary information for all your dishes. We can also advise you on how to future proof your operation with ingredient and nutritional information.
- Plating Guides – including exploded diagrams of built dishes (burgers, sandwiches etc) where applicable.
- Kitchen Mapping – optimising the kitchen layout to the new menu, ensuring ease of delivery and training.
- How to Guides for Key Components – high volume high risk items and production methods.
- Training Videos – for dishes and methods.
- Culinary principles – we can provide bite-sized guides and videos on culinary techniques and tips/tricks. Invaluable as a training aid!