Tag: Menu

Over the years I’ve seen hundreds of menus, both as a customer and an advisor, and here are 7 of my thoughts on how to engineer a menu, taken from what I have seen and read in my travels.

The idea is to engage customers to spend more, and on the dishes you choose, and believe it or not, these work!

1. Look at your item positioning on your menu – there are places the customer’s eye goes to — so put your best stuff there.
2. Similarly consider using some boxes to highlight high margin menu items in an attempt to improve sales.
3. I don’t like the use of $ dollar signs. You want your customer to think about the dining experience, and not just the price of the item.
4. Along the same lines, think about whether you want cents in your pricing, eg. $9.95. If you have a fast food restaurant or takeaway then it may be appropriate; showing cents makes the customer think more about the price. Fine if you’re selling Burgers, but perhaps not if you’re selling Lobster.
5. I’ve always liked the number 9 (and studies back me up here). So I wouldn’t think about charging $20 for something, when I could just as easily charge $19 and increase the sales of the item … profit margin permitting.
6. Another counter-intuitive way to make a menu seem more affordable is to put something very expensive on it. Yes. Really. It’s called comparative pricing, and good restaurants use this technique to maintain margins on their big sellers. For example, if they want their customers to buy the $29 Oysters, they put the item next to a Seafood Platter for $79. They don’t sell many of the platters, but they sell a lot of Oysters. The same thing can work for wine lists — but ensure you put some cheaper items near the top as you want your customer to find something they can afford, rather than nothing at all.
7. Consider embedding your prices in the menu listing. Instead of:

Roast Chicken                                  23

Filet Mignon                                     32

Just move those numbers left:

Roast Chicken  23

Filet Mignon  32

The easier it is for your customer to make a decision, the less time they’ll spend on it and the less they’ll second guess their choice.

These are just my thoughts on some menu engineering techniques, but it should give you an idea or two.

Many restaurant owners want to blame everyone except themselves when they don’t reach their profit goals. It’s the competition, or the location, or the weather, or the season that’s affecting their profits, not anything they did themselves.

But if you want to look for extra sales and profits, I would suggest looking at your menu.

Restaurant owners are usually proud of their menus, and are sometimes averse to changing it. But it’s possible to actually build more success into your menu. Here’s how:

• Look at what’s selling. Do a careful study of what customers are buying and what they are not. If an item or items are not working, be ruthless — scratch them off your menu.
• Identify your signature items. You should have at least five items on your menu that generate buzz — that appear on social media, in restaurant reviews and in word of mouth. If you have at least five signature items, you need to create them. Go into R&D mode — cook, test and cook again. If you can land a handful of Sigs, buzz will go up, sales will go up and hopefully, so will profit.
• Think about the size of your menu. You need to have a large enough menu to entice and excite customers, but not so many items that you merely confuse them. An overly large menu can hurt a restaurant in several ways:
  • It forces you to order too much inventory, some of which will spoil;
  • It puts too many demands on the kitchen. It’s hard enough to cook 20 things well, let alone a hundred;
  • It confuses the customer. People don’t know what to choose. It causes them to choose items that may not be your best. Also, they will think (accurately) that you can’t do that many things well.

So what’s the right number of menu items? It depends. A good burger stand might get away with just 10. A chinese restaurant is going to need a lot more. In general, 25 items should be more than enough: for example, 7 entrees, 12 mains and 6 desserts. Over 30 menu items, and you should really be thinking about cutting back.

How to cut back:

• List out your five most popular items. Keep those.
• List out your five most profitable items. Keep those.
• Delete your least profitable and least ordered items.
• For anything else that falls in between, keep a balance of items based on price, taste and difficulty in preparation.

Try these steps and hopefully you will see profit improvement … no matter what the weather is outside.