A report says it takes 109 seconds for any customer or diner to read a restaurant menu.
Within this time frame, they can go through the entire menu, read descriptions & check prices before they decide what to order.
A restaurant menu has become the most important sales tool today. And it, therefore, should be thoughtfully laid out, well-organized and concise. Each drink & dish mentioned on it must be strategically listed to serve maximum profit. And it can only be possible when you devise an effective & scalable menu engineering process. It will help you to maintain a balance between your high & low-cost food items by featuring them strategically on your restaurant food list.
Table of Contents
What Is Menu Engineering?
Also termed menu psychology or designing, it is a process of considering how your restaurant card or list will look like. It is a psychology of deciding how the food items need to be presented, priced & ordered.
Deciding how many pages should be on your menu, placing items in it, and whether to use a $ sign in its pricing are some deciding factors a restaurateur must always consider.
How To Engineer A Menu?
It is essential to correctly engineer your restaurant rate card; for that, it is vital to have a firm grasp of each item’s price, per-serving cost, and contribution margin.
Restaurateurs need to categorize items, see which contributes more profit and which does not, and decide whether to remove those not serving much profit from the list altogether.
In a nutshell, it is a series of exercises ensuring every drink and dish featured on the restaurant’s list is popular, profitable, or both.
How Does Menu Design Restaurants Help?
Menu engineering helps eliminate poor-performing items, saving you from unnecessary costs. It is also helpful in highlighting more profitable food items in the card. And it is also beneficial in creating a system of regular analysis of your restaurant card, helping a restauranteur or manager keep it optimized.
What Is The Four Menu Designing Matrix?
Plowhorses
Plowhorses means working on food items that have high popularity and low profitability. The objective of the dishes or drinks falling into this matrix is to make them more profitable by lowering their costs and increasing their card price.
Stars
Stars mean working on high popularity and high profit serving food items. Their inexpensiveness makes customers order them frequently. It is best to leave such dishes or drinks untouched.
Puzzles
Puzzles mean working on low-popularity food items with high profitability. When engineering any dish or drink in the restaurant list with low popularity & high profitability, then always try to pinpoint why they aren’t selling. Always focus on whether they are noticeable on the card or not. Do brief descriptions need to be added with their name to make them more compelling and attention-grabbing or not? Or should it be promoted on social media handles like Instagram?
Dogs
Dogs mean working on food dishes or drinks that are less popular and serve low profitability. Such food items can take the valuable place of other dishes or drinks and hence, need to be either removed from the list or reworked for better prices and ingredients based on the feedback received from the customers.
Conclusion
Engineering a restaurant’s rate card or list is a challenging task. A restaurateur can never work on it overnight, and it will take time to decide everything. So, there must always be an extended timeframe when decoding psychology or designing a rate card, and everything is well-organized in the most strategic way.
