According to research from Mintel, 75 percent of consumers enjoy spicy foods to some degree, with 29 percent happy to turn up the heat on the menu as high as possible. Is there room to add some spice to your menu options? The National Restaurant Association predicts that variations on sriracha will be among the top trends on menus in 2023 – and sriracha’s moderate spiciness can be a safe way to weave more heat into your menu. Consider using it in marinades for chicken or dressings on salad, in condiments like ketchup and mayo, or even on your cocktail menu to add some zing to your beverage options. Comfort food continues to be a big draw for guests right now. As you serve up warm winter dishes, consider what items help you generate the most benefit from your inventory and labor. What is simple to prepare without skilled staff? What is a good for a crowd – yet also presents well when frozen and served later? What will allow you to use ingredients that you also use in salads, appetizers, sides and other entrées? Elevating your menu items doesn’t require complex combinations of ingredients. The addition of a single premium ingredient can transform an ordinary appetizer into something memorable or justify a higher price point for an entrée. In fact, making these small enhancements to your menu is an easy way to help you make a popular item that much more profitable – and allow it to earn its place on your menu. The National Restaurant Association recently published its annual What’s Hot forecast for the coming year, highlighting the ingredients and approaches it expects to see in the industry in 2023. Included in these trends is an anticipated continuation of the blending of dayparts as consumers spend more time working from home or from places other than the office and eating at odd hours as a result. So in addition to regular mealtimes, the in-between times – happy hour or snack times, for example – continue to be important to attracting guests. Restaurants that may have played down those times of the day before may now be looking for menu options to lift business during those periods, not to mention staff to cover the orders that come in. At the same time, however, one of the top three macro trends in the 2023 forecast was menu streamlining. More than before, restaurants face having to do more with less when it comes to the ingredients they weave into the menu. An ingredient must work hard – not simply as a featured player in an entrée, but also as a supporting player in several other dishes in different menu categories. Yet those dishes must be different enough to make the menu sufficiently interesting to guests that they are motivated to order from restaurants at a time when their money isn’t going as far. Restaurant operators are doing a delicate dance right now to find the right mix of dishes on their menu. The ingredients that can elevate a dish – but also disappear into it by becoming something new when combined with different spices, sauces and textures – can help operators spread their inventory as far as it needs to go right now. Recent research from the NPD Group found that breakfast traffic has been growing at U.S. restaurants and was within 1 percent of recovering its pre-pandemic levels. Quick-service restaurants capture the vast majority of breakfast traffic – 87 percent of it – so if you’re looking for ways to build business in this daypart, consider how you might entice guests with offerings that can be enjoyed on the go, or which can travel easily to home or office. That’s particularly true as many people have resumed their pre-pandemic schedule, along with the eating habits that go with it. |
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