Easy Meal Prep Newsletter for March 2008 highlights whats new in Webistes and Softaware for Meal Prep.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
What's New in Websites and Software for Meal Prep Businesses
The capabilities of the software for running meal prep businesses continues to improve. The following are features and innovations for you to know about if you are investigating what's next for your website and software.
• Professional-looking home page. It's important to have a great looking store and it is also important that your web storefront looks professional. This home page needs to be aesthetically pleasing, relevant to your business, informational, and simple. If you get the home page looking correct, then a lot of the rest of your website will fall into place.
• Pricing models and flexibility. An increasing number of meal prep businesses are moving to single item or "a la carte" pricing instead of bundled pricing. This makes it easier to ensure that you can provide both lower cost dishes and ones that require higher-cost ingredients. A la carte pricing is also better for stores that do a lot of retail sales (pick up, grab n go, and take n bake). We have recently been seeing more and more a la carte pricing systems that give customers the choice of ordering multiple sizes of entrees in the same order.
• Images of the food. The adage in the restaurant industry is that if you have photo of a dish, it will sell better. An increasing number of meal prep stores are adding images to their website for the same reason. In some cases, the the only image is of the featured dish of the month on the home page. Others have images of some, but not all of the dishes. An increasing number of stores provide a picture of each dish as part of their system. Professional looking food photos have the most impact. If your budget is constrained and plan to take the photos yourself, we recommend that you look at the sites that have high quality photos and see what you can learn from these images to get the right lighting and composition for your food to look as enticing as possible.
• POS (Point of Sales systems). This is currently a big area of development in the meal prep industry. POS + internet integration is a complex problem with many possible solutions. The meal prep industry started with software that was optimized for web-based transactions. The pizza and other parts of the restaurant industry started with systems that were designed for phone-in and in-store orders. There is now a major move afoot to integrate these capabilities.
• Customer order analysis, communication, and loyalty. Well designed software for a meal prep business includes tools for understanding customer buying patterns, measuring marketing campaign effectiveness, linking to your email marketing and direct mail programs, and tracking and managing your loyalty and referral programs.
• Search engine optimization. It is important that your store and signage are visible. Similarly, it is important that that your website can be found by your target customers. Making sure that you have the right tags and content on your web pages can make a big difference. Many software suppliers can help you with this or can recommend someone that can provide this service.
Not all of these capabilities need to be in one software product that you purchase. Many meal prep businesses have implemented successful systems with separate suppliers for the front end website, the ordering system, the POS, and the email marketing function. The key is to ensure that there is one central party (typically your ordering system software supplier) that takes responsibility for ensuring that each piece of the system works well with the others.
The capabilities of the software for running meal prep businesses continues to improve. The following are features and innovations for you to know about if you are investigating what's next for your website and software.
• Professional-looking home page. It's important to have a great looking store and it is also important that your web storefront looks professional. This home page needs to be aesthetically pleasing, relevant to your business, informational, and simple. If you get the home page looking correct, then a lot of the rest of your website will fall into place.
• Pricing models and flexibility. An increasing number of meal prep businesses are moving to single item or "a la carte" pricing instead of bundled pricing. This makes it easier to ensure that you can provide both lower cost dishes and ones that require higher-cost ingredients. A la carte pricing is also better for stores that do a lot of retail sales (pick up, grab n go, and take n bake). We have recently been seeing more and more a la carte pricing systems that give customers the choice of ordering multiple sizes of entrees in the same order.
• Images of the food. The adage in the restaurant industry is that if you have photo of a dish, it will sell better. An increasing number of meal prep stores are adding images to their website for the same reason. In some cases, the the only image is of the featured dish of the month on the home page. Others have images of some, but not all of the dishes. An increasing number of stores provide a picture of each dish as part of their system. Professional looking food photos have the most impact. If your budget is constrained and plan to take the photos yourself, we recommend that you look at the sites that have high quality photos and see what you can learn from these images to get the right lighting and composition for your food to look as enticing as possible.
• POS (Point of Sales systems). This is currently a big area of development in the meal prep industry. POS + internet integration is a complex problem with many possible solutions. The meal prep industry started with software that was optimized for web-based transactions. The pizza and other parts of the restaurant industry started with systems that were designed for phone-in and in-store orders. There is now a major move afoot to integrate these capabilities.
• Customer order analysis, communication, and loyalty. Well designed software for a meal prep business includes tools for understanding customer buying patterns, measuring marketing campaign effectiveness, linking to your email marketing and direct mail programs, and tracking and managing your loyalty and referral programs.
• Search engine optimization. It is important that your store and signage are visible. Similarly, it is important that that your website can be found by your target customers. Making sure that you have the right tags and content on your web pages can make a big difference. Many software suppliers can help you with this or can recommend someone that can provide this service.
Not all of these capabilities need to be in one software product that you purchase. Many meal prep businesses have implemented successful systems with separate suppliers for the front end website, the ordering system, the POS, and the email marketing function. The key is to ensure that there is one central party (typically your ordering system software supplier) that takes responsibility for ensuring that each piece of the system works well with the others.
Download the Features PDF