On Tuesday I decided to take my wife on an impromptu lunch date. We headed to downtown Vancouver and were thinking of a place to eat. She had heard me tell her about the amazing sandwiches at Meat + Bread and wanted to try it out for herself. As we enjoyed our fresh roast meat sandwiches, we found ourselves analyzing why their marketing works so well. Their key? They’ve limited their menu items and perfected them. Then they let their product do their marketing.
My friend Jon introduced me to Meat + Bread 4 years ago. Jon is a foodie and knows his Vancouver restaurants inside out. I tasted their signature Porchetta sandwich and fell in love. It was delicious. The Italian roast pork was soft, juicy, and flavourful. They add crispy bits of pork skin on top to add extra flavour and crunch. It reminds me of Chinese-style roast pork. I remember telling Olive about the sandwich 4 years ago.
Earlier this spring and I was at a conference in downtown Vancouver. My friend Matt and I were looking for a place to eat and I remembered Meat + Bread. I hadn’t been there in 4 years, but the sandwich was so good I was still craving it. We ate there and the sandwich was just as delicious as I remembered it. I told Olive about the sandwich again. Fast forward to our lunch date. Living in the suburbs with young kids, my wife doesn’t get to go downtown often. Out of all the amazing restaurants that downtown Vancouver has to offer, my wife wanted to go to Meat + Bread.
Less Menu Items = Better Food
Meat + Bread’s menu is simple. They have 3 main sandwiches, and 1 special sandwich. They offer the 3 additional items of soup, salad, and ice-cream sandwiches. Lastly, they have 5-7 specialty drinks and one type of chocolate bar you can buy. The top 500 restaurants in the USA have an average of 75 menu items (source: USA Today). Meat + Bread has 14. And half of them are drinks.
With less menu items, Meat + Bread can focus on perfecting the food they do serve. I noticed when eating the sandwich that everything stayed together very neatly. The sandwich fit perfectly in it’s box. The taste was delicious. This is great for marketing because people talk about amazing food. Instead of having to put together splashy marketing campaigns, Meat + Bread focused on perfecting a few signature dishes. Then they let their product do their marketing. As we were waiting in line, people were snapping photos of the food and sharing it on social media. Heck, I’m blogging at it and I’m not even getting paid!
Less Menu Items = Increased Efficiency
The great thing about less menu items is that it increases efficiency. With less menu items, you need less space to store the food. It’s easier to train your staff because there are less meals to learn to prepare. I watched their staff work and it was an efficient operation. During the course of 5 minutes, they prepared 15 sandwiches.
Meat + Bread is only open from 11am – 4pm from Monday to Friday. It’s not open for very long. Being a bit of a math nerd, I wanted to estimate how much money this business was making by opening only 5 hours a day, 5 days a week.
Here’s the math:
– 15 sandwiches in 5 minutes is 180 sandwiches in an hour.
– The sandwiches are $9 each. With a conservative estimate that 1 in 3 people buy another item, the average person spends $10. So that’s $1800/hour for peak hours.
– Estimating that there are 2 peak hours in a day (when there is a line up), and the rest of the time there is half the amount of demand, the restaurant makes $6300 in revenue a year.
– If they are open 250 days a year (10 days closed), then that’s $1.575 million of revenue a year.
That’s a pretty good business. And they’ve got two restaurants. So double that revenue.
Okay, blogging about this sandwich is making me hungry. I can literally hear my stomach growling as I upload the photos of the sandwich. Time to go eat a snack.