Winning the hearts of customers was always a tough task. In today’s world, where people have a global palette and dietary preferences, pleasing customers is like being in hot water. The only resort for restaurants and food businesses is to grant customers the power of customization. 

By making this move, it’s easy for food businesses to cater to customers with diverse food choices and gain an edge over their peers. Sadly, to achieve this is an uphill struggle. It's hard to phantom how much effort a restaurant has to make to have a menu that pleases all sorts of customers.  

Trying to attain this can consume all of the resources and work hours. But, we have a secret weapon using which you can easily ace this. Scroll down to read about it and understand why customizing menus is the need of the hour.

Customized Menus - The Success Driving Factor For Restaurants

Before discussing the art and science of designing a customized menu, let’s explain it. A customized, personalized, or customizable menu is a type of menu that restaurants use to cater to a wide range of customers. These menus have food options according to specific preferences, dietary requirements, and tastes.

It’s an elaborate menu that doesn't force their guests to choose from a pre-designed menu. It grants great flexibility to the guests and turns them into loyal customers.

Depending on the restaurant's willingness, customization options can be highly varied. Restaurants can allow their guests to choose toppings, sauces, sides, dressings, and other components of their dishes.

Presently, customized menus are the most viable weapon to promote a healthy lifestyle, a great strategy for retaining customers and attracting health-conscious diners. 

Promoting a healthy lifestyle in fine dining or casual dining experience is a new concept, but it’s picking up pace. Introducing this concept requires hyper-personalization, and when you move in this direction, here is what you need to consider in the process.

• Provide nutritional information for each of the listed menu items. Mention calorie count, fats, carbs, protein, and quality of other components in a loud and clear manner. Healthy options should be well highlighted to get noticed immediately. 
• Portion control is one of the many practices that healthy diners adopt. Hence, restaurants have to include the option to control the portion of their meals. They can choose from smaller or larger services to relish a meal without guilt. 
• Make some space for ingredient substitutions in your customized menu. For example, plain bread should have gluten-free bread as a substitution and meal options with meat or tofu. 
• Include special diet filters like vegetarian, vegan, low-sodium, or gluten-free. 

By implementing these customization choices, restaurants can portray themselves as a place where fine dining and healthy eating experiences blend effortlessly.  

As people are not becoming too conscious about what they eat, customized menus work like a charm for restaurants and food joints. They can attract a huge number of customers.

However, having such a menu is not a piece of cake. Restaurants must pay attention to many things simultaneously to bring a powerful and engaging customized menu into existence. 

Customized Menus Are a Tall Order

While creating customized menus is a rewarding move, restaurants have to make a huge deal of effort before relishing these rewards. Here are some key challenges that will be in your way as and when you plan to prepare a customized menu.

Restaurants have to learn the nitty-gritty of balancing the complexities involved in the process. Having too many options can confuse customers and backfire on restaurants. Restaurants must balance multiple options and the effortlessness of using a menu.

Maintaining taste and quality consistency is a hard job for restaurants. The staff has to be trained on multiple variations of a single dish.

If you’re planning to include allergens and dietary restrictions in the customizable menu, then you’re up for a great challenge. For food options like nut-free, gluten-free, vegan, and many more, restaurants must do careful ingredient sourcing.

These challenges must be addressed carefully if you want to ensure that customized menus bring joy, not pain, to your restaurants.

The expert choice uses an order management system that allows menu customization, lets you create digital versions of those menus, and shares the menu with the customers over a single click.

OrderEm is a great choice to make here. Let’s break down its laudable menu customization abilities next for you.

Customized Menu Creation is a Cakewalk With OrderEm

OrderEm is an end-to-end order and online store management solution that businesses like restaurants, bakery shops, retail stores, marketing agencies, and many more can use to streamline key workflows.

From setting up an online store to managing online orders, it can help you handle many things. But, presently, we will only talk about its customized menu capabilities that can help your restaurant to a great extent.

Steps To Create Customized Menus With OrderEm

Here is what you’ve to do to have a powerful and highly customized menu.

Step #1-  Go to your OrderEM account and access the Dashboard.

Step #2- On the left side of the page, you can find all the restaurant locations listed. Select the restaurant location for which you want to create a customized menu.

Step #3- Scroll down and select ‘Menu/Item/Products’ from the dropdown menu.

Step #4- You will be able to see a list of food items that are already there for your restaurants. To customize your menu and add new items, click ‘ Add a Category.’ Provide details like Category Name, Description, Delivery Hours, Image, etc.

Step #5- Click 'Save Category' and return to the category listing.

Step #6- Click on the newly added category to add items. Provide the asked details and save the changes.

Step #7- To provide more options like Vegan or Gluten-free in an item, click on that item and click on 'Add Item  Option.'

Step #8- In the pop-up window, provide the option details and click 'Save Option.' You have to add the item option and the price you want to charge for the customization.

You can edit sides, sauces, toppings, and many other items on your menu. Once you're done with editing, click on 'Save Option'.

If you’re using Clover for your restaurant and want to import the menu from there, still OrderEm is helpful, as it comes with Clover integration. This is how you can make it happen.

Step #1- Access your OrderEM account, click on your restaurant and location, and then select ‘Menu/Items/Products’.

Step #2- In the Add Menu section, you can see the ‘ Import from Clover’ option if the integration is active.

Step #3- In a while, you will be able to see the menu items in your OrderEM dashboard.

Step  #4- Click on Add/Edit Category and follow the above-mentioned process.

That’s it! A highly customized menu is ready. You can also create digital no-touch menus.

Final Say

When you’re catering to health-conscious diners, having that boring menu with no customization choices will not please them. Give them the power of customization with healthy choices and rule over their hearts.

To make the process of menu customization, we recommend using OrderEm.  It allows you to add new categories and their price details seamlessly. Customize as much as you want and construct new success records.