Rapid Dish Development: The 7 Steps to Quickly Develop New Menus

As covered earlier in this blog series, before starting Sous Chef, we had a catering company called 2Forks.

More menus, more problems

After freeing up our team by automatically generating our shopping lists and prep sheets, we were ready to resume looking for new opportunities to grow our business. Our core strategy to get additional customers was to work with partners like Eat Club, ZeroCater, Platterz, and Caviar.

As a provider to these partners, we quickly found that competition was stiff and customers’ preferences were finicky. We would spend weeks developing a new dish only to have it never ordered. The development costs were piling up, eating into our company’s profit margin. We needed to find a way to quickly create new dishes that customers would love and that would allow us to stay ahead of the competition.

Move quick, fail fast

After many long talks with our chefs, we decided that instead of adding dishes to existing menus we would build new menus around a concept and do it quickly. This was the general outline of the process.

Step 1 — Quick brainstorm of ideas

Here is how we applied our rapid dish development to a menu of quinoa bowls. We decided that the total weight of a dish would be 18–20 ounces. Eight to ten ounces would be a base of our quinoa mixture while the remaining eight to twelve ounces would come from toppings and sauce.

Next, we quickly wrote down a list of items that we frequently used in our kitchen. Finally, with a little creativity, we mixed and matched items to create a lot of concept bowls, quickly.

Step 2 — Document your recipes

With our new concepts sketched out, we immediately documented our recipes. This documentation forced us to get a rough estimate of what the weights of each individual item could be. Often, after cooking and final plating, these quantities would change, but at least we had a starting point. Since all our recipes were linked to our costing information we could see whether a dish would work for the margin we were trying to achieve.

Step 3 — Costing information

Next, we needed to do a sanity check on the rest of the dish. The additional costs of delivery meals are commonly overlooked. Unlike restaurant meals, where you can reuse plates and utensils, delivery-only food must factor those items into the cost of the meal.

Since dishes on our menu were priced between $9 and $15, these costs could significantly eat into our profit margin. The $0.28 for the items below represented 3.1% of the total cost of a $9 dish and 1.9% of a $15 dish:

• Ramekin for the sauce: $0.10
• Fiber bowl and lid: $0.15
• Sticker: $0.03

Step 4 — Cook all the dishes at once

We would select 10 dishes at a time and our chefs would cook them. Having 10 at once allowed us to judge them in comparison with the other dishes. We were looking for the ones that stood out.

Step 5 — Structured feedback

And now the fun part: we’d gather the team and start eating. We provided a review sheet that asked for feedback on taste, appearance, and composition. By structuring the feedback we could compare all dishes fairly. The best dishes tasted great, looked good, and traveled well. Dishes that did not meet our expectations did not make it past this step and were removed from the development process. If a meal passed this step we would do a final labor calculation.

Step 6 — Understand labor cost

For every dish that we put on a menu, we anticipated that it would be made in batches of hundreds at a time. If we didn’t have strong confidence in how we had calculated cost of goods and labor, we would not move forward with a dish. By considering equipment and staffing constraints we were able to have a complete picture of our labor cost. Then we were ready to ship the meals to customers.

Step 7 — Ship

When new dishes were ready for shipping, we would find a group of friendly customers. In exchange for free or discounted meals, we asked for feedback. With this feedback, we had a good clue as to which dishes had the potential to be winners and which ones needed additional work.

In total, this process took us about a week. We were able to increase our dish development from one or two meals a week to 10–20 a week. This speed helped us find winners faster and get more dishes onto our menus. Since everything was documented in Sous Chef, our reports were automatically generated, allowing us to produce any dishes at scale as soon as they were on the menu.