Menu Engineering - Make More Money From Your Menu

19 November 2024 - Inn Express

Your food or drinks menus are not just a list of products you sell, they’re a silent salesperson that should be an important marketing tool that increases your revenue. There’s a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to a customer reading your menu, with the right parts nailed you can really capitalise on menu psychology, resulting in more sales! In this guide we’ll explore menu engineering and actionable steps to take your food and drinks menu to the next level.

What is Menu Engineering?

Simply put, menu engineering is the process of designing your menus to increase revenue and profitability. At the start of any menu engineering process, we must first group the products we sell into four categories.

• The Stars- These are your high profit items, that are also popular.
• Plow Horses- These are low profit items that are popular with your customers.
• Puzzles- Puzzles are high profit items that are less popular.
• Dogs - Low profit, low popularity.

Many would argue that ‘dogs’ have no place on your menu. We must then work out what to do with the other 3 categories. Our advice would be to promote your Stars, re-think your Plow Horses and push your Puzzles!

The Menu Engineering Process

Look at your sales data to divide each of your menu items into the four categories we previously mentioned. This will be the foundation of all the work you’ll put into menu engineering, spend some time getting this right.

Work out the profit you make on each item and its rate of sale, you should start to get a pretty good idea of what category the items are in once you know these two things.

Once you’ve completed analysing the data and grouping your products, we can move onto optimising your menu layout. Here are just a few of our menu layout tips…

• Eye Movement Patterns – Multiple studies have shown that customers eyes go straight to the top right corner of a menu, we suggest you place your ‘Star’ menu items here where possible.
• Highlight the profit – Use a bold font, an arrow or a box to draw attention to the items you want to sell. Whether that be your Stars or your Puzzles.
• Ditch currency signs – Although a small detail, ditching the currency signs can make a customer disassociate with the fact they’re parting with their hard-earned cash. As a result, some customers may spend more than they usually would!

 

Pricing Strategies

Pricing is imperative to menu engineering success, get this right and you’re halfway there! Some strategies we’d recommend are as follows…

• Psychological pricing – Use prices like £9.99 instead of £10.00, one of the oldest tricks in the book but it still works!
• Peak pricing – List a high-priced item at the top of your menu, this gives the illusion that all the other items below are reasonably priced, and the customer thinks they’re getting an affordable alternative.
• Combos – Combine items to encourage the customer to order more. For example you could offer a discounted cocktail with main meal.

Menu Descriptions

Menu descriptions are incredibly important too! This is why copy writing is such an in-demand skill, one that can drive revenue for any business.

We suggest evoking emotion and using words that intrigue the customer when describing your food and drink items. Some examples could be ‘delicate’, ‘crunchy’ or ‘succulent’.

Secondly, you can also tell a story on certain menu items, mention things such as the products origin or the way it was prepared. For example, you could say locally sourced ‘x’ made with ‘y’.

One final way of maximising your menu descriptions is to showcase value. Mention premium ingredients or a benefit to the customer. This will justify higher prices too so you can make a higher margin.

Menu Engineering For Bars

Menu engineering is primarily used in restaurants; however, it can be just as effective for bars and is often neglected. We would advise you categorise your cocktails into the four groups we mentioned, then highlight the stars heavily. You can also use happy hour optimisations to increase sales on Plow Horses (high profit, low popularity items). Lastly you could feature signature drinks that are unique to your venue. If you can, make these items high margin too!

Measuring your Menu Engineering Efforts

Once you’ve done the work you will be eager to see what your results will be. This can be analysed in a few different ways. You can look at your customer’s average spend compared to what it was before the new menu. You may also notice that your sales are evenly distributed across more items instead of just the ‘Stars’. Of course a great indicator for any bar or restaurant is monitoring the business’ overall profit margin.

Apply these techniques today and see how they impact your revenue, with the right execution you should see some positive results in this competitive industry. Which is why it’s so important to make the most out of each customer once they’re in your venue.