Content:
Let's start
By Yana Koster,
August 24, 2015
My kitchen
By Yana Koster,
August 28, 2015
My menu
By Yana Koster,
August 28, 2015
Managing my orders
By Yana Koster,
August 28, 2015
Brief food photography tutorial
By Julia Chigrin,
August 31, 2015
My kitchen
By Yana Koster,
August 24, 2015
Your virtual kitchen is a place where you can create your dishes, save them for the future use, offer your creations to consumers, edit, duplicate, or delete them, share your offered dishes on social media, and (in the near future) more.
Let’s pretend you’re a complete novice on the Yumbird platform. If have created your profile but didn't get the references from your social media contacts just yet, you will be able to create your menu but not offer the dishes to the public. Still, you can try and create a dish or two just for practice or for the future use. The following guide will help you create your first dish and avoid some unnecessary mistakes. Remember the wheel inventing? This wheel was already invented, so hop on for a ride!
CREATE A NEW DISH: THE BASICS
Dish name:
Title your dish, make it sound yummy.
Avoid a name that is too long, it will get cut-off on the listings page.
If you plan to make a minimum number of items to consist a single order, group the items in a single order rather than show a price for one and then require the customer to order 3.
Example 1:
3 Organic Sugar Roll Buns
Example 2:
Gluten-Free Blueberry Pie
Cuisine:
Use one word the pinpoint your dish geographically or culturally. Avoid long multi-word descriptions like mediterranean-african-aleut.
Example 1:
Russian
Example 2:
Creole
Pricing:
Set a reasonable price for your dish.
If your dish consists of more than one item, set the price for the whole combo.
The price is totally up to you, but give it some thought before you go public with your offer.
At the very beginning you may want to keep the prices rather low, just to cover the ingredients, taxes, and platform commision.
Please remember:
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The consumer will see and pay the price you set for the dish.
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Prices shown to the consumer include sales taxes and 10% Yumbird commission.
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It is your responsibility to pay sales tax and income tax. Tax calculators can be found here.
Photos:
Include at least one photo of your dish.
If you’re going to have more than one, the first photo will be the featured one – the one that will represent your dish on the marketplace and the ordering screen.
Additional photos will be accessible to the consumer in the form of photo gallery. Don’t include more than 5 or 6 photos in total. It seems like a good idea to have the feature image of the serving suggestion, and add 2-3 photos of the cooking process and 2-3 photos of dish details. See more in our food photography tutorial.
Examples:
1 of 6
Photos courtesy of Ksy Putan, Julia Lisnyak, www.ru-kitchen.ru
Dish description:
Be creative, advertise your dish here.
Be brief yet descriptive.
If your recipe is unique, authentic, famous, or family favorite – don’t forget to mention it.
If one order includes more than one item, repeat it here, too.
Example:
I adapted this century-old Russian recipe for modern times, keeping its simple ingredients and using the top of the line convection electric oven. The result is always delicious and mouthwatering. Organic ingredients: wheat flour, sunflower oil, sugar, yeast. One order consists of 3 buns.
Spice level:
Please check one.
Diet features:
Check as many as it fits.
Today’s food consumers have a wide variety of eating habits and preferences, based on diet, ethnic, religious and other grounds. Provide your clients with more information about your dish. In the future releases of the app, the consumer will be able to set the diet preferences in their profile, so they will only see the dishes that match their taste buds.
How does the food reach the consumer:
You can offer delivery or pickup options, or both. When the consumer places the order, they will be notified on its progress. How? You will complete order checklist, letting the consumer know when you:
Accept the order
(it can be done any time, but the sooner the better. If possible, don’t make the consumer wait for your acceptance)
Start the order
(meaning you have started cooking, or packing, or writing a poem about the food)
Have the order ready
(either it’s packed and waiting for being picked up, or it’s packed and out for delivery)
Completed the order
(it was picked up or delivered)
What is next?
In this and previous articles we went thru your first steps on Yumbird platform. So now when your dish is ready, you can save it to your menu, edit it, or (oh, no!) delete it. If you’ve already went thru the onboarding process with your Community manager, you will also be able to “save and offer” your dish. In the next articles I’ll talk about going public on Yumbird and managing your orders.