Techniques That Enable You To Improve Your Restaurant Design

I can remember good food. What I don’t remember is eating good food in a restaurant whose sense of style isn’t even the least appetizing. But maybe it’s because I don’t eat in those restaurants.

Here are five restaurant design tips that will help you recreate a cozy and inviting dining environment.

1. Speak to all five senses
Diane Chiasson says,

When done properly, food merchandising encompasses everything your customer feels, sees, smells and hears. It not only creates greater eye appeal but also increases the perceived value of a product, therefore achieving higher sales.

A general rule in effective restaurant design is to establish a mood that fires up all the senses. Foodservice is more than just trying to sell a product–you’re also selling a social experience. Such an environment serves to complement the main attraction.

2. Location, location
Opening a take-out joint in Bel-Air or a fine dining place in a slum neighborhood is a proven recipe for financial suicide.

Good restaurant design is about knowing your neighborhood’s eating habits and serving them what they want. Design your interior based on what you think jives well with the community outside. You might need to hire a restaurant consultant for this one.

3. The importance of food color
Colors have psychological effects on your customers and, most importantly, their appetites.

Lots of red and oranges are ideal if you serve hot and spicy foods, very Mexican. Neutral colors are good for a more traditional feel. On the other hand, black and gray colors are reserved for fine dining and high brow establishments.

4. Be flattering with the lighting
Never underestimate the power of natural lighting. Use natural lighting as much as possible, whenever possible, and avoid dark spots and corners in your dining area. Good lighting makes all the colors–and flavors–of the food stand out.

5. You must have personality
Above all else, your restaurant design/theme must have personality. The restaurant design is your first attempt at communicating with your customer (food only comes second). So okay. Your menu may be exquisite. But what will really set you apart from other restaurants is, you guessed it, having a great personality.

A consistent restaurant design, good food, and a friendly group of staff are the keys to a successful restaurant business venture.

These are simply general guidelines on how to pull off a successful restaurant design. I suddenly remembered this quote from American Beauty,

…in order to be successful, one must project an image of success at all times.

Perfect. The same goes for running a restaurant business. If you want customers to come eat at your place, show them a successful restaurant operator - show them a respectable and dignified restaurant design.

Restaurant Promotion Ideas: See How Easily You Can Attract Customers Even During The Recession

I know these are tough times, with the recession and a worldwide pandemic going on. And both are perfectly good reasons to stay home and have dinner in the safety of your own kitchen.

As an entrepreneur, you need to step up your restaurant promotion ideas. You need to be able to grab a megaphone and tell your customers, “Here’s ten reasons why you should eat out at my restaurant rather than stay home and eat meatloaf.” When business is slow and shops are closing down for good, as the Pantene commercial puts it, it’s your time to shine.

I’m thinking why not develop low-cost yet delicious menu choices to attract diners to your place? It won’t be easy, but with less and less people eating out, you have all the time in the world.

I got this wonderful idea from Must Have! Menus when it announced that it was developing recession specials menus for cafes, bars, grills and restaurants looking to serve budget-conscious customers.

Jim Williams, the president of Must Have! Menus, says this about their new restaurant promotion idea,

“The idea behind our recession special menus is to provide a marketing vehicle for daily deals that will appeal to those of us with less discretionary spending money right now.”

I personally think it’s a great way to try and keep your restaurant business afloat during slow times. If there’s anything we learned from Ms. Diane Chiasson, it’s the use of bright, eye-catching colors and food sampling that’s the key ingredient in making this new restaurant promotion idea work in your favor.

It should be noted that simply preparing inexpensive meals isn’t going to be the end of it. You need to get the word out. You need to be able to come up with a good marketing plan to advertise this new restaurant promotion idea as much as possible.

If you already have an email newsletter campaign in place, use that to your advantage. You can also offer free dessert coupons to patrons for referring your place to their friends who ordered one of your recession specials.

The recession specials menus highlight a daily deal for every day of the week, promoting food that people love to eat at prices that are lower than they are used to seeing.

These times are tough, I know, which is why I think offering budget-friendly meals to your patrons is a fool-proof strategy for your restaurant business. It’s only a matter of time before other restaurants realize the beauty (and potential profitability) of this idea and begin to follow suit. Go ahead and milk this restaurant promotion idea while you still can.

What Everybody Ought To Know About Food Visibility

These days when I walk into a restaurant, whether it’s commercial or otherwise, I’m always amazed at how the interior is a mess and that nothing contributes to the selling of food. The lighting is bland, the décor unattractive, the food shields block more than they show.

This is what experts in the foodservice industry calls “visual pollution,” and it’s become more of a problem as restaurant owners continue neglecting interior design as a way to cut down on costs.

Reggie Daniel says about visual pollution,

“For example, in many of the food courts or other types of cafeterias I’ve been to, I see bulky food shields over the food, blocking the sight line and creating shadows. It’s unappetizing to say the least.”

Fact is visual presentation is every bit as important as the taste of the food on the menu. This was discussed in detail in another article where I talked about Diane Chiasson’s Food Merchandising tips. Simply put, nobody wants to order something that doesn’t even look good in the first place.

Visibility sells. That’s the main thing, and restaurant owners need to remember that when they go about designing, or redesigning, their restaurants. Anything that creates visual pollution needs to go out. Focus on simplicity and promote a visual sense of cleanliness and purity in the dining area. If you’re going to use props, use ordinary kitchen items as they’re easier to relate to fresh food more than anything.

How do you distinguish what’s visual pollution and what isn’t? That’s easy. Something is visual pollution if it doesn’t put emphasis on the food.

One thing I particularly want to point out is the importance of using natural lighting to illuminate the food displays in and around the dining area.

Fluorescent bulbs consume electricity, and if you look closely they make ham appear green. I don’t know about you, but green-colored ham doesn’t do anything for my appetite. So avoid “office whites”, what fluorescent bulbs are called, and use natural lighting to maximum effect. I mean, hey, it’s free, what have you got to lose?

Finally Reggie says,

“By simplifying the décor, operators can put a greater emphasis on the food. Think of the old adage, ‘We eat with our eyes.’”

I believe in the second part, too. If I’m a customer and I’m going to order anything on your menu, I want to at least make sure it looks good and appetizing.

Green-colored ham? Thanks, but no thanks.

Four More Tips To Increase Revenue With Proper Food Merchandising

In the last article, we talked about five effective ways to improve sales through proper food merchandising, a restaurant marketing strategy advocated by foodservice specialist Diane Chiasson. But the list doesn’t end there. Here are four more tips from the expert.

1. Use merchandising and cross-merchandising to boost sales
Here’s a good question to get you going. Did you know that food sampling and cross-merchandising increases the average consumer’s transaction by more than 75%? Make sure your products are visible from every possible angle. Pair relevant food items together, such as sandwiches and potato chips and soups together, or cheese and yoghurt and fresh fruits.

Diane says,

Customers often enter an eating area with no clear choice of what they want to eat, so by selling paired add-on items, you stimulate the appetite, increase impulse sales, and boost sales, as well as enhance your diner’s experience.

2. Use signage and point-of-sale materials to reinforce your brand
So you finished designing your display areas. Now you need to create the appropriate POS materials and signage to complement your theme and promotion. Simply put, restaurants with proper merchandising and POS materials have higher sales and perform better overall than those without.

3. Stimulate the customer’s appetite with good lighting
Diane says about good lighting,

Lights are not used to just illuminate a space, but must also be used to focus on food items, displays and merchandising areas, and used to create a specific mood or theme within your space

Anyone will tell you that the eyes have as much to do with stimulating the appetite as the tongue. Which is why lighting is right up there as one of the most essential elements of designing the interiors of a restaurant. More than anything, the food should always dominate the displays in and around the restaurant.

4. Be consistent with branding
The last thing to remember is that you need to be consistent with your branding, and one way to do that is by understanding your brand and the message you want to put out there. Think long term. Refrain from making sudden changes to your messages and brands. If you do this, you might even get the chance to start your own private label line.

These tips should put you in the right path to being a successful restaurant entrepreneur. I’ll end the article with a final quote from Diane,

I really believe that you, as a restaurant operator, can create the opportunity to add or sell something extra to your customers not only in the eating area, but for customers to take home such as homemade specialty desserts, sauces, etc.

Five Amazing Strategies To Proper Food Merchandising

There are countless ways to increase your sales as a restaurant operator. This blog website is proof of that. Every article here is after all about boosting sales and improving your services. For this article, I’ll be talking about yet another great way to increase sales – proper food merchandising – through the words of Ms. Diane Chiasson.

Here’s what Diane has to say about proper food merchandising.

“With visual merchandising, I always try to bring food to life through eye-catching food displays, where visions of freshness, color, quality and quantity are used to create a total eating experience for customers – essentially making a “feast for the eyes.” When done properly, food merchandising encompasses everything your customer feels, sees, smells and hears. It not only creates greater eye appeal but also increases the perceived value of a product, therefore achieving higher sales.”

According to Diane, stimulating all four senses – not just the taste – is essential, almost indispensable, to proper food merchandising. Here are five amazing tips from the expert herself.

1. Evaluate your workspace
Being a restaurant operator has much the same with being a painter: you need to evaluate your workspace, or canvas, before you begin any type of project. Take into consideration the walls, floor and ceiling, and how they affect the traffic flow and interior lighting throughout the store.

2. Choose appropriate themes and colors
It’s decision time. You need to create a display with a theme, a special promotion or a message—something, a layout that’s easy to identify and connect with your target customers. This message is important and should not be overshadowed by excessive decorating. Diane says,

“When you decide on what props, displays, food items and decorations you want to use, always choose items that are vibrant in color and texture, are eye-appealing and mouth-watering, and convey freshness, quality and quantity.”

3. Use relevant props and displays
Take a good look around the kitchen and your operations to see if there are any items you can use for display. For example, if you operate a restaurant that serves pizza and pasta, you can use cutting boards, large flour sacks, rolling pins, the chef’s top hat, etc. for display around the dining area. All these promote a sense of “freshness” that customers love.

4. Fire up the senses
This one is so important that it deserves repeating. Stimulating all five senses is the winning formula in running a successful food business. What your customers smell, hear, see and touch is just as important as the taste of the food on their table.

5. Make use of food sampling
Food sampling works both ways. It’s a cost-effective way to give customers a taste of what your menu is like, and it also encourages customer feedback. Food sampling is one of the most inexpensive means of data gathering and food advertising. Diane has this to say about the practice of food sampling,

“I have applied the sampling technique in several different types of foodservice operations, and have always experienced great success from it. But be sure to use only attractive, eye-appealing and well-identified fresh food items to sample.”

Diane Chiasson is an expert in the food and retail industry. She’s been in the industry for more than 25 years.

Diane is the first foodservice merchandising specialist in North America and currently the only one working in Canada. Her experiences on running food service operations range from small restaurants run by families and independent operators, to large food chain franchises and operations, even hospital and university cafeterias, supermarkets and convenience stores, casinos, hotels, etc.

She is currently the president of her own firm, Chiasson Consultants Inc. in Toronto. She’s been there and done everything!

Check back on us this week for more food merchandising tips.

Diane Chiasson, FCSI, president of Chiasson Consultants Inc., has been helping foodservice, hospitality and retail operators increase sales for over 25 years. She provides innovative food and retail merchandising programs, interior design, marketing and promotional campaigns, and much more. Contact her at 416-926-1338, toll-free at 1-888-926-6655 or chiasson@chiassonconsultants.com, or visit www.chiassonconsultants.com