Hospitality Business
Food Solutions
Beverage Solutions
Catering Equipment
Hotel Solutions
Furnishings & Decor.jpg)
Restaurant operators have an average of three minutes to impress customers with their menus. Make the most of that precious time by creating a menu that effectively markets your restaurant.
Your menu is a crucial ingredient in the recipe of your restaurant’s success. Layout, design and arrangement play key roles in promoting your items and guiding your customers’ decisions. An interesting and user-friendly menu compels the customer to read it. It is also key to your brand identity – how customers view your restaurant is as important as the food you serve. The menu sets the mood and tells your customer what they can expect – something fun, relaxed, upscale, or sophisticated.
There are many factors that could bring customers to your restaurant. A strong reputation may pique their curiosity; an advertised promotion may spur them to visit; a striking exterior may grab their attention or sweet scents from the kitchen might draw them from around the corner. But even with all of the marketing opportunities there are to persuade a customer to try your restaurant, once customers have come to you, the most concise outline of your marketing plan is the menu.
The menu comes before employees, before point-of-purchase promotions and before data capture. An effectively-designed menu will entice guests to buy the items you want them to buy. And you achieve this by strategically engineering the menu’s layout, design, graphics, format and price points to stimulate the selection of highly-profitable items. The most powerful menus are those that successfully, but subtly, weave those important factors into a pleasing presentation that can drive home your restaurant’s message in just minutes. A professionally-designed menu can save you time and money, increase your profits and complement your eatery. It can also provide and promote the image you need in what is most certainly a highly competitive market.
Menu designs vary as much as the restaurants they serve. The chic downtown bistro spotlights its signature espressos and cappuccinos on a large single sheet punctuated by bold graphics and garnished with copper-foil trim. The family restaurant highlights its value-for-money specials on a laminated foldout menu sprinkled with mouth-watering food photography. The themed restaurant emphasises its specialty burgers and sandwiches on a die-cut menu. At the sophisticated and exclusive restaurant a maître d' comes to your table with a chalkboard of the daily-changing menu and specials. While they are all vastly different they do have something in common: the need to accomplish an objective beyond simply listing the food available. Menus should define the concept and operation, align the customer's expectation with the experience, and perform as a powerful marketing tool. How well a restaurant's menu carries out those functions can determine customer satisfaction, a restaurant's profitability and even an operation's ultimate success or failure.
Maximizing the impact of your menu during those three precious minutes that guests typically spend with it begins by understanding the greater function of a menu. A truly effective menu can sell much more than just the dishes you serve – it can promote your entire operation. Your menu is part of an ensemble of ambience-enhancing elements that act in concert to achieve the right atmosphere for a restaurant and draw in customers. The menu should fully express the style of your restaurant. Look at the menu as an extension of who you are and what you are about. If the menu is not properly designed and developed, it can have a detrimental effect on the overall impression guests have of your restaurant.
Despite the power menus can have, most restaurateurs think, "Who cares about the menu? Guests have to order something anyway”. That may be true, but every effort should still be made to ensure that the item ordered is the most profitable one on the menu and that the menu itself shows your food – and your restaurant – in the best possible light. A good menu will sell, it will make patrons hungry, and if they can't decide among three different items, you have a better chance of getting them to return.
Obviously, the first step in putting together a winning menu is developing your food-and-drink offerings. The quality and variety of a restaurant's food certainly helps determine whether it is worthy of a customer's investment. To whet diners' appetites and keep quality standards high, restaurateurs and chefs search for that perfect menu mix that maintains the delicate balance between innovation and tradition, healthfulness and indulgence, delicacy and robustness – all the time keeping a close eye on constantly changing tastes and trends.
Ask people what they want, what they like and what they don't like. Find out how much they are willing to spend, how large portion sizes should be and how value is perceived. A good menu mix requires solid research and creativity. You have to have options for your guests – and by talking to them, you can achieve the proper mix. When items clearly appear to be poor sellers, unprofitable or unpopular with consumers, be ready to delete them promptly from your menu. Be equally ready to add new items that customers crave. The most successful restaurants are those that keep up with the current food trends and eating habits. Keep attuned to what's selling and what's not selling, and then make the necessary adjustments.
Once you have discovered your customers' menu preferences, it is time to decide what to feature on your menu. An attractive menu with appealing dishes by itself will not automatically boost sales. To do that, you need to determine how much a menu item costs to make. Once you know your restaurant's food costs, you can begin maximising your menu's profit potential.
Although customers spend only a brief time with a menu, it is important to recognise how menus drive profit and cash flow by guiding the guests to what to select, not just showing them what selections you have. Careful pricing is a vital step to marketing with full force, so be sure to cost out your recipes and don’t just put random prices, or the same prices as your competition, on the menu.
With strategic prices in place, the next step is to decide how to lay out the menu items to reinforce the layered messages of the marketing plan from pricing to presentation. An effective presentation mingles artful nuances such as placement, sequence and size to capture the guests’ attention and lead their eyes to important items.
Because people don’t read menus, they scan them; you need to put the biggest-contributing items in the places where the eye goes first. Profit is always driven by marketing; selling your target customers your most profitable items. The eye follows a certain critical path in the brief time that a guest holds the menu, so position and placement of the most profitable items in eye-catching spots are critical to merchandising them effectively. For instance, on a one-page menu, the category you want to sell the most should be in the centre, where the eye would naturally fall. For a two-page menu, the eye would first fall on the top of the first page and then to the top of the second page.
Since most customers order sequentially, appetizers, salads or soups first, then entrees, it makes sense to place the items in a traditional sequence. Bigger items on the second page, after your appetisers, in the visual ‘sweet spot’, will get the most attention. The more you bring attention to that item, the more important it looks and the more you sell.
One way to draw attention to important items is with images, icons, pictures, boxes or colours; the other way is with copy. Creative descriptions, bold headlines or titles can explain what an item is and why it should be noticed. A story can be used to give that special item a context to boost sales. Are its origins exotic? Is it rooted in history? Not all of those devices are appropriate for every restaurant, however, and one should be careful of visual overload.
To minimize an item, remove boxes, remove copy and place it in a not-so-sweet spot. The item is still on the menu, but the customer has to search for it. We don't want to take it off the menu, because we might lose that customer.
Other subtle techniques restaurateurs can use to boost menu profitability include removing leader dots if your menu uses them to guide a guest's eyes to prices. Leader dots compromise a menu's profitability by encouraging customers to order solely on the basis of price. Put the price at the end of the copy instead.
Size is another factor used to grab attention and subtly affect your customers’ impression of the menu. A small menu, anything that isn’t 81/2 inches by 11 inches, may catch people’s attention. A larger menu, on the other hand, may be harder to handle on several fronts. There’s more work for the kitchen and little focus for the customers. It is advisable for restaurateurs to go with smaller menus and use more white space to cut down on the time the customer has to spend reading, the time they spend at the table and the cost spent on printing.
The creativity and detail you put into the menu reflect the care you put into your food. It is the first contact you have with the customer and the only thing in the restaurant, besides the staff, that uses language to impart a message to the customer. The descriptions of the menu items, the message of your marketing plan, need to be crystallised.
To get to the point, limit descriptions to 10 words or fewer, but make sure to leave some room for imagination. If there are questions, an educated staff member can help fill in the gaps. Besides knowing the details about the items on your menu, your staff should also be able to identify key sales opportunities – it helps when servers know which items are profitable.
Educated staff members also ensure that your menu is being fully utilised. For example, servers can cite the use of brands in explaining items to customers. Brand names, which have primarily been used to promote beverages, are being used more and more in other categories. Using a brand name in describing a product quickly tells the customer that the product is high quality, and justifies a higher price point by the customer’s recognition.
When describing exotic or unusual items, be aware of your word choices, especially when using certain culinary terms. No one wants to be insulted, especially when they are paying for the privilege. The same is true of a wine list. Offering customers the option of ordering by bin number provides an easy solution, and it helps in terms of organisation, too.
It is especially important to spell menu-item ingredients correctly. If you cannot spell an item, how can a customer trust that you will know how to prepare it? Finally, while the mechanics of spelling and word choice need to be considered, the artistry of the description cannot be ignored. Items need to be described so they sound physically attractive. An experienced copywriter is essential for writing a description that is creative, accurate and attractive.
Even if every detail is attended to, the menu’s place in the overall scheme of the restaurant cannot be overlooked. Presentation on the plate is important; the presentation on the menu should be just as important as it shows the concept, it sets the mood, and essentially it sets the table. For fine-dining restaurants, the importance of the menu’s image goes beyond an artistic presentation to validating the restaurant’s expertise and authority. Remember, the menu has to be able to command the price of the food.
Once the server has walked away with the menu, something that bears the name of your restaurant should remain on the table. A nice clean look is good for your image, but the repetition of a theme also reinforces the name of the restaurant into the customer’s memory. If you are going to have matchbooks at the bar, take the extra step of having your name put on them. The same is true for coasters, beverage napkins or table tents.
A menu is just one part of the whole atmosphere of the restaurant. It is worth your while to put money into the design of your menu, though the most important thing that should go into the planning of your menu is thought. It doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg, good designers welcome input from restaurateurs. A good designer can take a restaurateur’s ideas, put them to paper and assemble them in a format that will be an economical and attractive fit with the image of the restaurant.
Professional menu designers warn restaurateurs to proceed with caution when designing their own menus. Even though do-it-yourself menu software can slash design and printing costs, it does not replace expert design advice. Inexpensive clip art, borders and spot colour do not necessarily build a good foundation for an effective or professional menu. If you don't have an eye for design, a grasp of proper layout principles or an understanding of the psychology of a menu, software won't help you. Use a professional designer to establish a basic design template, even if you want to keep the menu simple. A designer can offer invaluable guidance on paper colour and weight, typefaces, and graphics – subtle adjustments that give any menu a professional look and boost its effectiveness.
Experts say it is important to solicit thoughts and ideas from others, but if you have a vision, go with it. There is no real right or wrong, as long as it’s done tastefully. And there’s no one solution for any restaurant, only guidelines. The most important characteristic a menu should have is it should be reader-friendly and not too cute. Don’t get carried away with concept, menus still have the big responsibility of selling your food as well as your image.
User Login
