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Planning Your Menu
Planning a profitable dessert menu has involved a lot of guesswork. But answers to some of the most common questions can be found in the results of research.
Does my dessert menu really impact my sales?1
• The dessert menu influences the restaurant choice for about
1 in 5 restaurant customers (21%)
• The impact of dessert menus is slightly greater in QSR,
family-style and casual dining restaurants
What do customers consider important when
choosing a dessert?1
• Favorite dessert type
• Indulgence
• Sharability/Something that everyone will like
• Comfort food
• Complement to after-dinner drink/coffee
• Creamy
• Light, not too heavy
• Twist on something familiar
• Multiple components
• Hot and cold elements
• Something completely new and unique
• Textures: gooey, chewy, crispy, crunchy
How many items should I offer on my dessert menu?1
• Expanding offerings from one type of dessert to three types
nearly doubles reach (from 25.5% to 46.2% customer
participation)
• Incremental reach comes from offering four, five and six types
• After offering six types, the reach plateaus at 55%
What type of dessert items should I offer?
• Overall, the most popular restaurant desserts are: pies,
cakes, ice cream, cheesecake, sundaes and milkshakes1
• For all restaurant types, the best five to six dessert line-ups
start with cheesecake, ice cream and pies1
• Ice cream is a component of three of the top six
dessert types1
• Based on year-round behaviors, ice cream surpasses pie1
• To learn more about popular dessert types, visit the
Top Dessert Flavors page1
• Consumers at family-style restaurants tend to buy:2
- More traditional desserts
- More multi-component desserts
- Desserts with hot and cold elements
Best menu line-up by restaurant type:1
The importance of shakes and add-ins:
• An increase in shakes/malts/floats was the biggest driver of
increased dessert servings2
• Add-ins are one way to “spice up” these drinkable
dessert offerings2
• Shakes provide an opportunity to increase traffic during
lunch/dinner meal occasions3
• Add-ins present an opportunity to increase traffic during PM
snacking occasions and increase sales of anytime desserts3
• Dessert add-ins represent the largest share of QSR ice
cream servings4
• Frozen sweets dominate QSR desserts4
• Shakes and add-ins make up almost half of this frozen
sweet category4
1. Synovate, Restaurant Dessert Form/Flavor TURF Analysis, January 2005
2. NPD Group Study, YE March 2007 3. NPD/Crest, 52 weeks 1/07
4. NPD/Crest, 2006 |