Making the Most of Christmas

"Make hay while the sun shines!" Read how to apply this well worn adage to Christmas

Making the most of moments when people are in the frame of mind to buy is a simple concept. For a food business of any type, Christmas is presents a massive opportunity to grow your sales and connect with your customers – as long as you are organised!

The gift of Christmas

For many cooks and chefs and food businesses using Cookaborough, their Christmas menu is the most successful one of the year. Last year, they collectively generated over $500k of sales. Importantly, they also told us that Cookaborough ensured it was their smoothest one yet.

If you have always wanted to add Christmas to your meals offering but never knew how, Cookaborough makes it ultra easy. It's essentially the same as publishing a weekly menu, just with a different offering and extra cut off dates, pickup and delivery options. So if you're planning to offer a Christmas menu, now is the time to publish one! People are starting to plan earlier and earlier and many food businesses already have Christmas menus up and running.

If you still need some convincing to run a Christmas Menu and experience a gift that keeps on giving, read on to see how Cookaborough can help to make it a great stress-free success!

Easy-peasy?

While fulfilling Christmas menus might not be easy-peasy – it's hard work after all! – a few features of the platform really help offset a lot of the stress for both you and your customers at this busy time of year:

• Creating  items such as ‘Christmas Packs’, 'Chrissie Picnic Packs' and ‘Hampers’ to help drive higher order values
  
• Creating custom delivery or pickup zones just for Christmas
• Offering different pick-up & delivery days and time slots to avoid the ‘all at once' rush
  
• Setting order deadlines for each pick-up/delivery day to allow time for production
• Setting stock limits by item to avoid over-selling
• Automated order summaries by total and by day, making kitchen management easier
• Assisting with design of marketing collateral materials to help your customers get to the menu and place their orders
• Attracting customers that may not know about you who are willing to give you a try who may become regulars for your weekly meals

Easy for your Customers: Helping your customers tick off Xmas

• The ability to build a beautiful looking Christmas menu for your customers to view
• Offering pre-orders early to tick off the job of Christmas 'catering' so they can get to other fun Christmas planning
• Integrating with your website for a seamless experience
  
• Clear order deadlines, pickups and delivery options at checkout
• Emailed order summaries for the customer's easy future reference
• Offering budget Xmas options which still look festive and celebratory but don't break the bank
• If your customers are, or have family members who are HCP or NDIS participants, you make it easy for them to have a delicious Christmas

TIP: COLLABORATE WITH SPECIALIST PRODUCERS
collaborations with other artisans making christmas-worthy produce is a nice idea – they don't have to be a butcher, baker or candlestick maker but they could be! other ideas are wineries, pudding makers or  chocolatiers. You might also like to have a sustainable theme to christmas, working towards no waste, ETHICAL meats or sustainable fisheries.

What's on a Chrissie menu?

If you haven't done a Christmas Menu before, it's sometimes hard to predict what you might be able to manage on a menu, but with the ability to capture pre-orders and enough lead time, the world is your oyster!

It really depends on what you think your customers will enjoy, and allow enough choices of main meats or vegetarian options. If you can manage it, salads are always a hit.

Here is a great Christmas menu from meal delivery and caterer Claudia from Dinner is Served in Ballina, NSW and another by specialty chef The Valley Table in Kangaroo Valley, NSW

And an example of a last year's Christmas Menu by Jodie and Steve from Ebden and Olive in Albury, NSW

And the images below are a current Xmas menu by Ally from For the Love of Food, in Victoria.

TIP: theme your christmas
you might like to theme your christmas around something like: making it easy without breaking the bank, taking care of all the tricky bits of Christmas so your customers can do the best bits, or a sustainable theme, such as working towards no waste, ETHICAL meats or sustainable fisheries

Silly season extras

If you really want to make the utmost opportunity of the silly season you could also offer Race Day Picnic Packs, pre-Christmas get-together packs and Office Party options to your weekly menu. You could even add a Catering Menu - if you haven't done one of these before have a look at this video to show you how. Or put together a range of different packs to suit what you are capable of supplying! Here is a great one from Fair Feed in Melbourne.

TIP: add silly season things to your weekly menu!
add celebration packs to your weekly menu or create a silly season catering menu to really make the most of people socialising

Promoting your Menu

Once you have your Menu live, make sure you are ready to shout about it! Places to promote your Menus include:

• Adding a Menu link into your Linktree/ Link in Bio on Instagram as well as your Facebook About section

• Creating a special social media post (using this link to access Canva templates)

• Printing on-site posters (using the Canva link to design them) + including QR codes in the design

• Customising your customer communications through the platform by creating a special message in Customers > Messages > Create message

• Including a specific banner on your Website linking to your special Menu

Timing is everything

When it comes to making the most of Christmas, planning and timing is key. If you go too early or leave it too late, you’ll miss the moment! Think about when people start to plan how they’re going to celebrate a particular moment and time your launch accordingly.

Letting your customers know that you’ll be launching a Christmas menu in advance is a good idea even if it's not quite ready yet. It’s a good prompt to get them thinking about their plans for the moment and puts you top-of-mind in their planning.

Christmas planning is starting now so... get in touch if you need any advice!

Maximise other moments with Cookaborough

Managing and making the most of moments is easy with Cookaborough. Our platform has been designed and built specifically for food businesses, with features and functions that provide the perfect solution for making hay while the sun shines!

TIP: Moments Multiply!
In all special moments like christmas, the number of orders that you receive will increase significantly as more people choose to outsource the occasion than spend time preparing it themselves.  This is great for business but what makes it even better is the size of each order will also increase significantly, so it's a double bonus. THINK ABOUT OTHER MOMENTS YOU CAN OPTIMISE WITH A SPECIAL MENU.

If you need more information please get in touch via enquiries@cookaborough.com

So are you ready to get started? We have developed a FREE downloadable guide and planning template for other moments to make sure your food business is ready to turn the next moment into sales. Download the free guide below.