I am in the process of working out my menu and have a question. I had originally planned to do 12",14" and 18" pizzas. But from working in 2 other places I noticed that 14" pizzas seem to be the biggest seller. Is this true for everyone? So I was thinking of maybe just doing 10" and 14" pizzas instead.I could have some pizza bundles like 2 14" pizzas,breadsticks and a 2 liter or maybe buy a 14" speciality pizza and get a 10" cheese free. What does everyone think?
I recommend looking at your market and seeing what everyone else is selling. It can be a hard fight to educate and sell the value of an 18" ‘large’ when everyone else is selling 14" ‘large’. See what others are doing and look to see if there is a use/need for other sizes. Maybe that 18" would be a ‘super family size’ specialty you offer as a part of your USP (unique selling points)
good advice from Nick, as usual. We’ve seen this question a few times from people who have different sizes than the rest of their competition. Customers don’t really look at sizes rather they prefer names so make sure you look carefully at your market and main competition and go like for like even if you don;t agree with it.
We have large 14, medium 12, small 10 and one of our competitors has large 12 and medium 10. I have name and size on my menu they just have name. Over the years I’ve had many customers tell me my prices are much higher than xyz and even after explaining that their large is only the same size as our medium I believe a lot of customer don’t understand.
Regardless of what you call them you most shops will sell more ‘large’ pizza’s rather than any other size by quite a margin.
It irritates me when the likes of Domino’s & Pizza Hut 10 1/2" and Eagle Boys 11 1/2 " call them large and we, like most indies have a 13" large.
Yes some people say your large is dearer than the others but still don’t get it even when we say ours are more than 30% bigger, or buy 3 of ours and you have to buy 4 of theirs, so who really is cheaper?
Dave
Perception is reality. Figure out what size pie the customer expects to receive in relation to the name and go with that - fighting customer expectations is a losing battle.
We opened with with 8" small, 12" medium and 16" large. After only a few times trying to explain the reason why our “large” was so much more expensive than Brand X’s large, we quick shoehorned a 14" into our selection. The 14" became the large and the 16" became the extra-large just like everybody else in town.
My experience also leads me to suggest that after matching up the sizes, you should cut each one into more slices than your competitors - this will give you an advantage with the “how many slices is your large pizza” crowd. Just think of the marketing potential:
“…Why yes, our large is a bit more expensive than Brand X’s, but ours has 10 slices and theirs only has 8!”
“Oh, well that makes sense then. I’ll take two”
We call our 18" an Extra-Large. Its great if you run a slice operation to cut your slices out of this. I would never consider selling this as a large. People do not understand how much more pizza a 18" is than a 14", nor will they understand why it is so much more expensive than anyone else.
Great points.
Case in point in “perception is realty”. We top very heavily compared to other joints but there are many who just compare the price of a large to the price of a large. They may have to eat two of someone else’s pizzas to equal ours but they just don’t see it that way when ordering.
We have X-large which is 16" and large which is 14". I have noticed also that we seem to sell almost 3 times as many 14" then we do 16" pizzas.