It is the first thing a customer sees when they come to the restaurant. They sit down and they look at the menu, and that menu has a lot of tricks up its sleeve to subtly manipulate what the customer is going to buy. The art of menu design has been a staple of the restaurant industry and has been designed to not just look pretty, but also to sell what the restaurants want to sell.

Menu Engineering strategies are pretty cool, and they can be used during times of crisis as well. In this world where the costs of food are rising, some common menu engineering strategies can help keep customers spending their money at your restaurant without any issues.

Limit Choices By Pairing Down Your Menu

With the increased food costs, one of the best ways to save money is by paring down your menu. If something is too expensive to reliably make, then take it off the menu until it is. Or have a rotating menu that can adapt to the changing food costs and seasonal foods as they become available to buy.

Making your menu scannable with limited choices actually helps customers decide what they want to have. We’ve all had the paradox of choice (where there’s 400 channels on TV and still nothing to watch), and customers don’t want that in a menu. They want something scannable and easy to read, and if you control the easy choices then you know they will buy something profitable.

Bracket Menu Items

Whenever you bracket menu items, you are especially telling the customer that there are two versions of the same dish available. One that costs {$31} and one that costs {$26} for example. Now the customer doesn’t know how much smaller the 26 dollar dish is than the 31 dollar dish, but since the cheaper price makes the second option more attractive, they will pick that option.

The customer thinks they are getting a good value, while you are selling the dish you wanted to sell the entire time. Additionally, you can also use the price nesting method, which lists the price in the same font as the meal, rather than being separate. Instead of drawing the customer’s eyes to the price, you have made it more likely that they will skip over the price and move towards the meal description which will get them hungry!

Promote Best Sellers

Have a page that features your best sellers, daily deals, and limited time items near the front of the menu. You want this page to pop and be bold and colorful, because this is what is going to get the customer’s attention. Now, your best sellers might be your highest profit items, but if they are in the customer’s faces, then they are more likely to give them a good look with hungry eyes.

Organize Your Menu With The “Menu Matrix”

Many restaurants organize their menu with the “Menu Matrix” that puts all their food and drinks into categories. First, you take every item on the menu and run it through these two equations:

            Food Cost Per Dish = Total Cost of Ingredients Per Serving

            Contribution Margin = Menu Price – Item Cost

Once that is done, people will make a matrix with the X axis being how expensive the food item is, and the Y axis being how much was sold over a time frame. If you do it right, you’ll get four corners:
           

• Stars (upper right): High profitability and high popularity
• Plowhorses (upper left): Low profitability and high popularity
• Puzzles (lower right): High profitability and low popularity
• Dogs (lower left): Low profitability and low popularity

Then you can make your changes. If the “Stars” menu items bring in a lot of money and popularity, you need to make them the center of attention because your customers love them. Plowhorses are crowd pleasers, but you might want to see about making them less expensive to make. Puzzles are dishes you need to find a way to sell more off, possibly through a social media marketing campaign. The dishes that are dogs might need to be removed from the menu all together.

By understanding what dishes sell really well, and how much it costs you to make them, you can get a really good look at where all the money is going.

Make Your Menu Pleasant To Read

Finally, while a plain white menu might work well at a high end establishment, you want your menu to be much more fun than that. Experiment with photos, colors that connect to your restaurant, and bold fonts that draw the eyes towards certain menu items. You can even reduce the size of your menu to about two panels as well, allowing your customers to see all the information without being overwhelmed. No one likes flipping through a big menu and hunting for all the options in a tiny font after all.

Additionally, separate things like the dessert menu and the drinks menu from the actual menu. Not only does it make the menus much easier to read and hold, but it also lets customers look at the desserts and drinks with fresh eyes. Which means there is the greater possibility of a sale.

Manipulate Your Customers Through the Menu

The menu is the first thing that your customers see when they sit down at your restaurant, so don’t be afraid to use it! A well crafted menu can make even a small selection look wonderful, and it can guide the customers towards those high profit items that you want to sell! A few hours or days crafting menu engineering strategies can be extremely helpful for your bottom line, and can help handle those offset food costs.

Once the food costs go back down, you can change your menu again or keep the new look around. But it is true that people eat with their eyes, and when they sit down at a restaurant, they are going to have to devour your menu!