Discover how to increase food sales during the winter months in our latest guide. Read on to discover more.
As the weather cools, customers can opt for the comforts of their couch. Adding delicious, winter-warming comfort foods to your menu is a great way to generate interest, increase foot traffic, and encourage sales. Here are our top tips on capitalising on sales this upcoming season.
Focus on Comfort Foods
During the colder months, consumers gravitate towards hearty comfort foods. Foods such as waffles, crepes, pizza, toasties, Dutch pancakes, and jaffles are nostalgic and comforting. They are also cost-effective to make and deliver high margins, making them a winner all-round.
The commercial cooking equipment required is compact and affordable, making it accessible for most businesses. You don’t need a large space or to radically change your infrastructure to start offering these menu items.
Have health-conscious customers? Jacket potatoes are making a huge comeback (now viral on TikTok), and are both comforting and nutritious.
Reduce your Food Bill and Wastage
When adding more menu items, cost and wastage can be a concern. The great thing about foods such as jaffles is that they are incredibly versatile.
With just a few ingredients, you can create a variety of menu items and flavours. Our Development Chef can assist you with developing a clever menu to make the most of your food shop, and to offer variety whilst keeping wastage to a minimum.
Lean on Food Suppliers
You don’t need to prepare everything yourself. Food suppliers such as PFD and Bidfoods offer an ever-growing range of frozen and pre-prepared foods to make food prep just that bit easier.
One of our current favourites for winter is the apple pie bites from Golden Fan. These are a great one for anyone who has a Perfect Fry automated deep fryer and is looking to add a wintry sweet dish to their menu.
Quick Service
Whether you are offering food from a food truck, a cafe, a service station or a pub, customers want service to be quick.
When adding new menu items, service times can be reduced with high-performing equipment that’s easy to use and keeps productivity up.
Meris’ extensive range of reliable commercial waffle irons, commercial crepe makers, jaffle makers, potato ovens, and commercial sandwich presses has been designed for operators with minimal hospitality experience.
You can also check out our pizza ovens that cook delicious and authentic pizza in less than 90 seconds!
Choose Commercial
It can be tempting to purchase a domestic waffle maker or sandwich press, but they can come with issues. Inconsistent cooking results, slow heat-up times, and regular breakdowns are a common occurrence as they are not designed to meet the demands of commercial use.
While the initial outlay may be more, commercial cooking equipment offers the reliability, consistent results, and performance required to keep up with customer expectations.
Buy in Season
A menu featuring seasonal ingredients will boost product quality and reduce costs. More and more customers are interested in sustainability and supporting local growers. Showcasing local and in-season produce in your winter menu can help draw a crowd. This season’s apples, pears, quince, rhubarb, citrus and root vegetables all pair exceptionally well with a winter-warming menu.
Our team is here to help! From commercial food equipment solutions to menu development, we can help you create a highly profitable winter menu your customers will love.
For more information on how to increase your food sales this winter, contact Meris today on 1800 265 771 or via our contact form.
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