How to Improve Food and Beverage Sales at Your Restaurant

Are you stuck trying to come up with ideas on how to improve food and beverage sales at your eatery? We’re here to help. Here are ten tips you can implement right now without spending a lot of time or money.

How to Improve Food and Beverage Sales: 10 Actionable Tips

1. Offer food delivery and pickup

Wondering how to increase food and beverage revenue? Simple, just open your restaurant to a new revenue stream: online ordering.

There’s only so much you can sell daily if you only focus on dine-in, especially if you own a small restaurant with little table space.

Expand your business online by enabling delivery and pickup, and your sales will skyrocket. You can even sell drinks to-go, such as beer and wine. If you plan on selling cans of beer, make sure you ensure beer can quality.

All you need to sell your food and drinks online is a simple online ordering system that is free to use and simple to set up.

Follow the instructions below to enable online ordering at your restaurant for free in just ten minutes:

Our online ordering system unlocks a slew of other useful features that will help you sell even more, such as:

• Scheduled orders so you can make money 24/7
• Free table reservation widget
• Food pre-orders for table reservations
• No-contact delivery and curbside pickup
• Promotion templates

2. Implement tableside ordering

To serve customers faster, you need to eliminate the time spent waiting for the menu, for the server to take the order, or for them to bring the check.

You can bypass all of that with a QR code menu with order and pay-at-the-table functionality. Customers can simply scan the code, browse the menu, order, and pay for their food, without ever interacting with a server.

And the best news of all? Implementing tableside ordering doesn’t cost you a thing with GloriaFood:

3. Offer menu bundles

If you’re wondering how to improve food and beverage sales at your restaurant, there’s no strategy better than grouping them in affordable menu bundles and combo offers.

Customers are always looking for good value, whether that is a meal bundle containing two main dishes and two drinks at a fixed price or a discount on a main dish and drink combo.

To learn more about increasing the average order value using combo offers, check out the video below:

4. Allow people to customize their meals

Forget about creating an interminable menu that customers need to spend minutes studying. The trick to selling more food and drinks is to create a limited menu and introduce customization options.

Enable customers to add toppings, choices, add-ons, and sides to their order so they get exactly what they want. This is an excellent upselling and cross-selling technique that will persuade them to spend more.

Here’s how easy it is to customize your menu with choices and add-ons using GloriaFood’s online menu builder:

5. Cater to dietary restrictions and preferences

Another benefit of dish customization is that customers can choose exactly which ingredients they want. If they don’t eat meat, for instance, they can forego that.

Offer variety by adding at least one vegetarian and vegan option to the menu, as well as dairy-free and gluten-free options. Add menu icons to label dishes as vegetarian, gluten-free, nut-free, etc.

As for drinks, make sure there are a couple of non-alcoholic soft drinks and cocktails on the menu.

To cater to the health-conscious crowd even more, add allergen and nutritional information to the menu to enable them to make informed decisions about what they order.

6. Create takeaway-friendly signature drinks

One way to boost your beverage sales is to come up with creative cocktails besides the classic ones that everyone sells. Ask your bartender to brainstorm some original drinks and give them fun names such as pickle beer or farmhouse ale that will surely draw customers’ attention.

Don’t let clients who like to order at home feel left out. Make your drinks takeaway-friendly by selling them bottled or in a mason jar.

Read more: How to increase beverage sales in restaurant

7. Offer discounts and promotions

How to improve food and beverage sales when everything else fails? Add a difficult-to-resist promotion to the menu!

Think about your own purchasing behavior. Aren’t you more likely to order something when you get a good deal out of it? So are your customers. Here are a couple of promotion ideas you can experiment with:

• 5% discount on the total cart value for orders over a certain value
• 10% off any dessert or drink
• Free delivery for orders over a certain value
• Buy one, get one free promo
• 5% discount on the total cart value for orders paid online
• Free drink on all orders over $20

Learn how to create these promos and more using GloriaFood’s promotion templates:

8. Add snacks to the menu

If you’re looking for creative ways to sell more drinks, look no further than snacks. When customers nibble on salty snacks, they tend to order more drinks. Plus, they often get hungry for actual food and might end up ordering an entire meal.

Offer classic drinking snacks like nachos, pretzels, peanuts, popcorn, or fried pickles, which are just enough to get customers thirsty and hungry for more.

9. Train your servers to upsell and cross-sell

Online, that job is already done by choices and add-ons. In the restaurant, your servers need to motivate customers to order more by suggesting a drink that goes well with their food or asking if they would like a side of fries with their order.

For that to work, they need to know the menu inside out to be able to provide informed suggestions. Ensure they know how every menu item tastes so they can properly describe it to the customer.

To take your team’s sales skills further, consider implementing AI-powered sales coaching. It can help servers master proven selling techniques while tracking their progress through real customer interactions.

Motivate employees by offering bonuses and rewards for the person who sells the most that week. It’s a win-win situation!

10. Draw customers’ attention with professional food images

A good food photograph can make the difference between a customer adding the item to their cart or them moving on. Don’t underestimate the power of food photography to turn your menu into a rockstar.

Add high-quality images of your dishes to your menu, website, promotions, and social media. They will make customers crave your dishes faster than you can say “cheese.”

Summing up

Learning how to improve food and beverage sales will make your restaurant more popular and contribute to its long-term success. With the help of affordable food and beverage technology, marketing, and a dedicated team, you too can boost restaurant sales without breaking the bank.