How to Add a Food Offer to a Business in Three Easy Steps

By Phil Scoble

Introduction

Adding a food offer has become a vital part of any hospitality business in 2020 – as businesses need to have multiple streams of potential income – both on premises and takeaway – to ensure they keep money coming in whatever the lockdown restrictions.

So we’ve put together an easy to follow guide to adding a food offer to a business without one. 

Three steps to adding a food offer

If you are looking to change up your business and add a food offer to help deal with turbulent times, we’ve got you covered, read our guide to adding a food offer anywhere: 

1/ Know your offer 

Talk to your customers, look at your competitors, and understand what food offer is likely to go down well – this will guide what equipment you need and how you market your business too. 

2/ Choose your equipment types

Once you’ve got your offer worked out – you now need to source equipment. To get the lowdown on what setups you need for different types of food offer, check out our example kitchens, which we’ve put together for an unbelievable amount of offer types. 

3/ Set it up for success

The key is adaptation – how can you take the model you see in our example kitchens, or the setups you’ve seen in action elsewhere, and making it work in your premises. So get the tape measure out, look at the equipment you need and work on creating a kitchen / production setup that can 1/ fit into your business and 2/ help you achieve an efficient production. Take a look below to see how to structure your design: 

Integrating food into your business

To integrate a good food offer into your business, plan for three separate stages of catering: 

1. Prep
2. Production
3. Pass 

Prep

Remember: Prepping right= fast service + happy customers

Make sure your prep area is clear and set up to work, with ingredients and utensils to hand. When a meal is prepared right it’s quicker to get it through production and out to your customer looking pristine…

Production

Production requires the right equipment, setup right – we recommend taking training often offered with a new piece of equipment to find out everything it can do and ways to get around any teething problems.

Pass

A good servery  – with heated lights for hot food – boosts the quality of your service and can help you to keep customers happy in a busy session. If you’re offering takeaway a servery can be vital if you are waiting for customers to come or delivery drivers to return…

Bits everyone forgets

We don’t want to put a dampener on your plans, but there’s a few bits and pieces that you will need to consider before you go ahead and add a kitchen to existing businesses:

1/ Ventilation

You have to make sure you have the right ventilation. Get a professional to look your premises over before you buy any equipment!

2/Permits

Even in our COVID times, when rules have been relaxed somewhat, do some quick searches on what you will need in terms of permits in your area – normally the county council or unitary authority will be in charge of this. Give them a quick call to head off later dramas.

3/ Marketing

The ‘make it and they will come’ business model has rarely worked – get news of your offer out through any means necessary. We suggest at the very least a leaflet campaign, a facebook page and some online advertising. Also, doing something for charity and calling your local paper can do you wonders too…

Conclusion

If these tips make you think you could add food to your business, check out our guide to designing your own kitchen here.

If you’re ready to add a food offer to your business now, check out our equipment collections, which will have something for every size of business owner…