In order to find revenue, or total sales potential, you will need to determine what menu items you plan to serve, the serving sizes, and what your estimated daily sales by menu item will be. You should be conservative in your estimates and be careful to research other restaurants in your area. You can poll existing customers or walk by traffic to get an idea of engagement and interest for the idea before moving forward.
Menu Items
Determine the menu items you plan to offer and be specific in terms of flavors, add ins, serving method, and price point. With a soft serve machine you have many options for menu items:
Cup: you can serve in a cup of various sizes ranging from 4oz to 16oz or more. You can add toppings, mix ins, or floats.
Cone: you can serve in a cake or waffle cone, or unique and trendy options like taiyaki. Each can be offered in various sizes.
Shake: you can use your soft serve machine to make milk shakes, too! Just add milk, flavoring syrups, or other mix ins and blend with a commercial blender, spinner, or mixer. Determine the shake sizes and how much product will be used for each size. Will you offer toppings or other mix ins?
Daily Servings
Be careful to estimate the daily servings for each menu item. You will enter each menu items selling price and the calculator will provide you total sales per day, and per period which you can enter in the top of the sheet. If you are closed holidays, or certain days of the week, be sure to calculate a reasonable and conservative monthly period, perhaps based on a 22-28 day month in order to get accurate numbers.
Costs
In the costs section of our profit calculator you will enter product costs. A good method to calculate the product costs is find out what the finished product cost is and divide it by the total number of ounces in the bag or container. All soft serve machines will actually yield a higher volume of product than you put in, this is called overrun – the second tab of the calculator has a sheet which can be used to determine overrun and actual yields. Keep in mind that you will inevitably have waste, which is not accounted for in our sheet. Other costs to consider are electricity, labor, and storage costs. These will be unique to your operation but should be included in your decision.
