Can Menu Management Software Improve Your Restaurant’s Sustainability?

Scale Your Restaurant While Reducing Your Carbon Footprint

Restaurant menu management looks a lot different today than it did five or six years ago, and restaurants continue to build on the efficiencies and sustainable practices developed over those years. Many consumers today seek more environmentally conscious offerings from everywhere they shop — restaurants included — making these advances necessary to continue doing business.

Ensuring your menu items, menu descriptions, item pricing, nutrition and allergen information, and other pertinent menu information is accurate creates a better experience for your patrons; it also improves the way your restaurant or chain of restaurants operates.

Let’s take a look at the environmental impact of restaurants and ways menu management software can improve your restaurant’s sustainability.

Improve Operational Efficiency

The daily operations of a restaurant consume a lot of energy. Transportation of ingredients, keeping those ingredients in temperature-controlled environments, high-usage kitchen equipment, and the simple acts of preparing food and providing heating, cooling, and lighting for employees and customers all add to your carbon footprint.

A lot of that is unavoidable, but effective restaurant menu management software is your best friend when it comes to facing sustainability challenges. These digital tools allow you to streamline a variety of tasks and collect vital information about your business to inform future decisions.

Understand Your Menu Data

Your menu data includes every menu item, description, price, nutrition fact, variation, and modification across every menu — and that data is valuable. Menu management software collects and tracks that data for important insights.

For example, you can look at historical menu data within your software to understand food selections, pricing decisions, and the impact those choices have on average check totals to empower your decision-making in the future.

When you’re operating multiple restaurant locations, the need for comprehensive data tracking grows. Relying on a random assortment of spreadsheets and artwork files shared across stakeholders via email leads to misunderstandings and mistakes that can hurt your bottom line and cause mistakes that impact your patrons.

Menu management software makes it easy to scale your restaurant while maintaining accurate, correctly formatted menus, fully branded for your establishment.

Accurately managing menu data prevents both time and food waste that reduce your restaurant’s sustainability by allowing you to precisely plan for and order supplies.

Reduce Food Waste with Data from Your Menu Management Software

Globally, about $2.6 trillion per year is lost because of wasted food. Most of that occurs during meal preparation and distribution. That wasted food — between 22 and 33 billion pounds each year in the United States alone — ends up in landfills where it contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Restaurants looking to do what they can to improve those outcomes often turn to menu management systems supported by data.

Having robust data points at your fingertips allows you to analyze what your restaurants are selecting on their menu and more accurately forecast demand. This can help your restaurant prepare the right amount of the right food, and minimizes how many leftovers you end up throwing out at the end of the day. Good software allows you to customize the data points and reports you can run, giving you the highest level of control and insight into your operations regardless of how many restaurants you’re managing.

Choosing the Right Menu Management Software

With so many options available, finding the best restaurant menu management tool for your needs can feel overwhelming. MenuNet from Trabon Group is a database-driven management system for menus with a personalized dashboard containing your specific food and drink selections and prices.

From that dashboard, you can make any needed changes or updates, and the software will render menus in real time, readying them for print. With API integration, MenuNet allows you to publish those updates to your digital menu channels. This includes the ability to leverage location-specific menus and to ensure consistency across your brand.

Having a single source for menu management streamlines overall restaurant operations, improves your menu-planning abilities, reduces food waste, and saves you time, money, and frustration.

Whether you’re launching a new concept or looking to streamline an established operation, our proprietary restaurant menu management software works hard for your business. Learn more about MenuNet by talking to Trabon Group today.