Restaurant Seasonality: How to Plan for Year-Round Success

According to the National Restaurant Association, the food industry is expected to have a net worth of $782 billion in 2022.

Although $782 looks to be a good number with high prospects for the game players in the industry, there’s a big problem. These numbers are seasonal, not equally spread throughout the year!

That’s where the restaurant seasonality dilemma comes in. It is a situation where your restaurant will have high vs. low sales days over different times of the year. Precisely, it’s the seasonal draft of customers and online orders where seasonality comes into effect.

To stay afloat, restaurants have to create a year-long seasonality strategy. This strategy has multiple levels to spearhead sales tactics for any given season/ month of the year.

If you are looking to plan for long term restaurant seasonality success, take a look at the following tips:

• Due to a shift in the food demand through different seasons, have a flexible menu. Never ever focus on a one-off food menu solution, and expect it to pull off sales the same way throughout a 12-month performance tenure.
• Use social media to promote seasonal food offers. Some items sell like hotcakes in the winter season, while others perform better during the summer.
• Always refer to last years’ data to analyze your sales and performance stats. Given then current year’s seasonality strategies may not be working, you can fall back on last year’s data to see where things went wrong. Doing so is essential from a scalability point of view.

Having said that, planning in advance for a slew of seasonal challenges is part of the game. Food business owners have to be on their toes to maximize sales and customer satisfaction percentages. Therefore, employ an ‘out of the box’ mentality to develop new and creative ideas to do more.