Selling out drops 🔥
The goal for most pop up food businesses is so sell out whenever they post a drop. Knowing that you’ll always sell out everything from a drop helps you plan your schedule and forecast earnings with more confidence. While all the marketing and promotion you do for your business will have a huge impact on sales, there are also some key behaviors we’ve learned from successful Hotplate chefs that help build a business that’s primed to sell out weekly.
CONSISTENT SCHEDULES
Part of what’s great about running a pop up food business on Hotplate is your ability to be flexible and make your own work schedule; however, we’ve learned that businesses with a consistent drop, pop up, and pickup schedule are able to grow more quickly and have more repeat customers. Especially without a physical storefront, it can be harder for customers to understand and remember how they can get your goods. However, if they know “Every Wednesday at 6pm I can order bread”, they can begin to form a habit around your schedule.
The biggest businesses on Hotplate:
Open orders on the same day and time every week
Close orders at the same day and time every week (or when they sell out)
Offer pickups at the same location and time every week (or have a consistent rotating locations schedule)
Add their schedule to their social media bios, Hotplate storefronts, and all marketing materials
If you’re making an active effort to grow your business, consider committing to a schedule for a month or two and track how your sales improve, or if more customers become regulars.
Here’s a great example of how Holey Dough and Co communicate their schedule on their IG:
HERO PRODUCTS
Myth: more options = more customers
When it comes to your menu, more options isn’t always best. We hear all the time from chefs who feel motivated to provide lots of options in order to serve more customers, but we’ve found that businesses that offer fewer options get more sales on average.
Consider launching with only 1-2 menu items, with minimal to no modifications.
Become known for something
Many successful Hotplate businesses build a following around one “hero” product - the thing they make best. Anchoring your business around one item makes it easier for customers to quickly understand what you do, and for you to become locally well known for that particular food. Create a reputation for having the best X in your city. For example, in Los Angeles, if someone wants to buy Challah, they know THE place to go is Challahdad.
Fewer choices = faster checkout
In interviews with customers of Hotplate businesses, we’ve heard that having too many items, menu sections, or modification options can lead to decision paralysis: the customer is too overwhelmed with options and feels like they can’t dedicate the time to make an informed decision, so they abandon checkout altogether. By giving fewer options, you’re actually going to make life easier for your customers, and their experience ordering from you will feel more enjoyable!
Create seasonal variations
Many of our chefs who sell one main food create variety by adding a weekly or monthly special flavor. For example, our ice cream businesses will offer a “flavor of the month” and bagel makers will offer rotating weekly cream cheese options.
Some examples:
MENU SECTIONS
Similar to the reasoning behind having few menu items, we also recommend you limit menu sections to 2-3. Fewer sections makes the drop menu easier to understand and navigate. You want to limit how much a customer will have to scroll to see all the options.
Many of our successful businesses have 2 sections: ”Favorites” and “Specials” (or similar). Here are a few examples of what that looks like:
LOW INVENTORY & SLOW SCALING
This lesson may feel counter intuitive, but when you’re just starting out, we recommend that you set very low inventory. Even a quantity of 2-3 per item can work to your advantage (even if you operationally can produce more). The reason to keep inventory low is to increase your chances of selling out, and being able to announce that you sold out.
Most Hotplate businesses gain popularity or notoriety by developing a reputation of selling out quickly. Limited quantities create urgency for customers to order as soon as your orders open. It also incentivizes customers to subscribe to SMS notifications so that they don’t miss out on an order. The perception of scarcity also works in your favor - you want people fighting over what you’re selling, and feeling like it’s a little hard to get.
Here’s a strategy we recommend, especially to new businesses:
Drop 1:
Start with an inventory of 3 for each item
Edit your drop text to mention you have limited quantities (more on this in the next section)
When you sell out: post an IG story that you’re sold out for the week, and invite followers to subscribe so they don’t miss out next time
Drop 2:
Increase your inventory to 5 for each item (if you sold out last week)
Edit your drop text to mention that you added more due to popular demand
Post an IG story when you sell out
Optional: add more inventory before orders close to allow more people to order (you can edit inventory at any time, even if the drop is live)
Drops in the following weeks:
Increase your inventory a little bit at a time, in response to demand. If you sell out quickly, add a lot more. If you sell out slower, maybe increase gradually. The goal is to consistently sell out your drops in order to build buzz around your business, even if you’re still only selling a few items.
Selling out can be uncomfortable
Something we hear from chefs often is that they feel bad when customers are upset that they can’t get an order. Our instinct as chefs is usually to push ourselves to the limit in order to feed as many people as possible, but we challenge you to let customers be upset…just for a bit. Think about it: the cookies “you just can’t get your hands on” tend to taste that much better when you finally score an order. Play a little “hard to get”….we dare you.
Add inventory retroactively
If you have a lot of customers begging to order, you can always increase inventory even after a drop is published. Many chefs will let their first round of inventory sell out completely, announce the sell out on social, then “surprise” customers by adding a small amount of additional items.
Examples of good sell out stories: Neighborhood Bagels
Neighborhood Bagels started as a small bagel pop up out of a home kitchen in Miami. They started with extremely low inventory which consistently sold out and announced each sell out on social media. Over 6 months, they’ve developed a reputation as one of “Miami’s Best Bagels”, grown their SMS subscriber list by hundreds, and are able to sell out bigger and bigger inventories. Here are some examples of stories they posted along that journey:
DROP TEXTS & REMINDERS
Did you know that you can customize the notifications that automatically get sent to your subscribers? These texts are not only a great place to inject your brand and personality, but also a space for you to communicate important information like changes in pickup location, quantities, and flavors.
You can edit your drop message (and all other text notifications) in your Settings.
Our most successful chefs edit their drop texts every week before publishing a drop.
Here are some examples of how our chefs use customized texts to convey important info:
