Menu Engineering: Ways to Boost Revenue by Changing your Restaurants Menu

Menu Engineering for Restaurants

The most significant piece of article in your restaurant that helps you bring in sales is your menu. Creating and designing a menu is not just a case of simple formatting. A lot of analysis and thinking goes into the strategic placement of each item. This process is called menu engineering and, it helps you make the most out of all the dishes you serve in your restaurant. Menu Engineering for Restaurants has been adopted by all the major restaurants and, with good reason. All the major restaurants that adopted menu engineering saw at least a 15% growth in profits when compared to their previous menu. 

Before getting started with the process of menu engineering, some prerequisite data is necessary. 

The first thing to do is to price out all the items on your menu. This tedious process includes considering all the ingredients that go into making a dish and calculating that cost. Once that cost has been determined, we can calculate the food cost percentage(FCP) as follows:

FCP = Cost of Goods/Selling Price of Dish

After calculating the FCP cost for all items on the list, we plot them on a graph to measure their popularity and profitability. The x-axis refers to the profitability of each item the y-axis denotes the popularity of each item.

Your Cloud-Based Point of Sale System for Restaurants will keep track of the number of times a particular has been sold. This number is considered as the popularity value of a dish. 

Based on the popularity and profitability of each item, we can categorize them into four different categories. 

• Plow Horse 
• Star 
• Dogs 
• Puzzle 

Plow Horse

A plow horse is a dish whose profitability is low but, its popularity is very high as many customers order it. These dishes are crowd-pleasers and enjoy higher popularity when compared to their profitability. Taking these items out of the menu is not advised. Instead, you can try creating a combo around it by pairing it with a high profitability item. 

Star

These items as the title put it, are considered the stars of the menu. These items have got it all going for them as they have a very high margin and are favored by most of the customers. Featuring these items in a prime location and keeping it unchanged helps it drive more revenue to the restaurant. 

Puzzle

The items are called puzzles for a reason. They have high profitability margins but, for some reason, they are not as popular with the crowds. A thorough analysis of their poor performance will shed more light. Trying to upsell these dishes after changes are implemented will help these dishes gain more popularity in the long run. 

Dogs

These items suffer from the worst of both worlds in the fact that they have very feeble margins and their reputation is not that great with the customers. These items should not be taking center stage and instead relegated to where the customer will pay the most limited attention. A small group of people still love to order these items and, hence it's advisable to keep them on the menu. 

Designing your Restaurants menu

The next step involved in Menu Engineering is designing the final menu based on the menu items which have been categorized based on their performance. It is necessary to keep in mind that the average customer only glances at the menu for a total of 109 seconds and then makes their choices for the evening based on that. 

Designing a menu can be done only by the following people:

• Owner of the restaurant  
• Restaurant Manager
• Chef or Server 

Since these people have a deep understanding of the restaurant, it is better to collaborate and create the final menu. 

Here are some tips to follow while outlining your menu. 

Using Visual Cues

Using visual cues to attract customers to a particular part of your menu is a powerful and proven way to sell the stars in your menu. The visual cues can be in different forms based on the importance of the item. It can be a colorful box highlighting a particular item or a distinctive formatting style to help it stand out. You could also add it under a unique category like "Chef's Special" or "New" to bring some attention to that menu. 

Displaying the price of the dish 

Here are some of the ways Menu Engineering helps shift away from the customer the price of each dish. 

1. When designing a menu, do not use trailing points that guide the customers to the price. It inherently makes the customer focus on the price more than the name and description of the dish they are looking at ordering. If you are thinking of setting up an online food ordering website we've also got that covered for you.
2. Another way not to display prices in your menu is to group them as a column. It might look orderly, making it easier for the customer to compare prices for different dishes.
3. Not adding currency signs next to the dish's price makes the customer think less about the cost and more about the food.
4. Another way to lure customers into making a better choice is by trying "bracketing." Bracketing refers to the method of listing two prices, one being higher and the other reasonably priced for different portion sizes of a dish. The customer might go for the lower-priced portion after looking at the price for the bigger serving.

Areas of Attention on Restaurant Menu

Menu Engineering helps you highlight areas of focus where you can place each of the star items in your menu. The customer's eye movements shed some light on this aspect. 

• Focus on the Golden Triangle  - They are the top left and right corners combined with the center of the page which, grabs the most attention.
• Make sure that the first and last item under each category is the star item of that category as the customer pays the most attention to the top and bottom of each section.

Other General Tips to Follow

Here are some more general tips to follow while engineering your restaurant menu to drive up revenue

• Use photos sparingly or not use them at all. Use pictures for only special items on your menu.
• The same goes for descriptions in your menu. Descriptions are reserved for expensive items on your menu and, they're there to guide customers to confirm their choices by eloquently describing the dish.
• Limit the number of menu options and keep the menu concise. Choose a reasonable size to display all these menu options.
• If you have a lot of menu items you can try using separate menus for lunch and dinner. It helps the customer to make their decisions quicker. You can also try having a special menu for dessert items given after the end of the main course.

Once you successfully follow all of the above steps and tips based on Menu Engineering, you can test out the menu in the real world and notice the customer's reaction. 

Testing your Restaurant Menu

We can analyze the new restaurant menu by comparing the sales for a given time between the new and the old menu. It is done by using data from your Cloud-Based Point of Sale System by going into the analytics page of your POS. Having a Cloud-Based Point of Sale System helps make comparisons more effortless and brings about better analysis. Installing a restaurant order-taking app at your restaurant is another way to streamline operations. 

While you're here, you can check out some of the other articles on our blog section about the restaurant industry. Feel free to contact us if you need more information.