What can the Food Service individual do to increase student participation and incremental sales?
There is no simple answer to this question. To make this happen there are multiple steps to consider. The most important step in the process is to set clear short, mid and long term goals.
Of course, all of us would love to hit a home run at our first at bat. Odds are that’s not a very realistic or easily attainable goal. Here are just a few examples of what your goals might look like:
Short term goal
An example of a short term goal would be to increase your incremental sales or reimbursable meals by 2%. It does not seem like a lot but it will add up.
What if you had 500 students in your school and only 200 were eating. That means you have 300 students not dining with you. Your short term goal could be to get 2% of the 300 customers that do not participate in your program to dine with you on a weekly basis.
So your target would be six new customers per day. Let’s say you have an off week and you only get eighteen new customers for the week. Multiply eighteen times four weeks in the month and that gives you 72 new customers. Then you can take your 72 new customers a month times 3 months and you have 216 new customers plus the 200 you already have dining with you and voila, you have 416 students dining in your cafeteria.
Mid term goal
Your mid term goal can be a little different. If you are trying to figure out how to increase breakfast participation you would want to set a stretched but obtainable goal over a couple years.
For example your goal could be to increase the number of breakfast carts throughout the district. You might have three carts operating and your goal could be to get to twenty-five carts in two years. This will help you increase breakfast participation and help support your school district in educating our future leaders.
Long Term goal
Setting your long term goal should be aggressive enough to push your staff. If your staff is not “comfortable with being uncomfortable” then you need to have a conversation with them. We are in the business of feeding kids, so for every meal that is left in the freezer or cooler it is not doing us any good. We need to put it in our customer’s stomachs. Your minimum participation increase should be 5%-8%.
In order to achieve this goal, you will need to determine the value of that 5%-8%, and create several achievable goals that will allow you to maximize profits and increase student participation in your lunch programs.
In conclusion you have to give your staff clear and obtainable goals. If you do not pay attention to anything that I have written thus far please pay attention to the following statement: it is imperative that you celebrate when you achieve your goals. Letting your staff know that they achieved this goal because of all their hard work is better than giving them financial rewards.
To assist you in monitoring your goals regularly, click here to download our free Goal Board!
Here’s to you accomplishing your goals and feeding more kids. We are dedicated to bringing your customers to the table.
Kern Halls, Chief Innovator of Ingenious Culinary Concepts, turns empty dining halls into gold mines of student activity! By seeking out and combining just the right “ingredients” to accomplish what many call impossible: Halls gets students to “want” to dine in your cafeterias!
For his FREE report, outlining Marketing Tips to help you generate additional revenue TODAY, a $197 value, please visit http://www.ingeniouscc.com!