Menu Psychology
Menu psychology is the study of how a restaurant’s menu organization affects customer spending. Restaurants use these principles to influence menu design, prompting customers to make quick decisions without considering price.
- Limit Choices: The “paradox of choice” suggests that too many options can cause anxiety. Limiting choices per category to around seven items helps streamline decision-making and reduces customer stress.
- Make Your Menu Scannable: Ensure your menu is easy to read by using clear headings, bullet points, and ample spacing.
- Use Appetite-Stimulating Colors: Colors like red and yellow can stimulate appetite and subtly influence choices.
- Use Photos Sparingly: While photos can entice, using too many can clutter the menu. High-quality images of select items can enhance appeal without overwhelming customers.
- Create Color Associations: Different colors evoke specific emotions. For example, green can signify healthy options, while blue can be associated with seafood.
- Invoke Nostalgia or Humanize Dishes: Naming dishes with nostalgic references or personal stories creates an emotional connection, making them more appealing.
- Include a Separate Dessert Menu: A separate dessert menu can tempt customers to indulge, increasing overall sales.
- Select an Ergonomic Menu Design: Menus should be easy to handle and navigate, guiding customers through options effortlessly.
Learn to Use a Menu Matrix
The menu matrix is a technique used to organize and analyze a menu, offering a comprehensive overview of each dish. It helps gauge the popularity and profitability of menu items, boosting sales and minimizing food waste. Typically, the matrix is structured in a spreadsheet or database format, aiding menu engineers in implementing insights efficiently.
How to Use the Menu Matrix
Utilizing the menu matrix to map out your items offers a straightforward method to determine performance ranking. This tool monitors both popularity and profitability. Begin by selecting a specific timeframe to track items. Record sales volume and profit for each item. Plotting this data on a graph entails using the Y-axis for volume sold and the X-axis for profit. Learn more here.
How to Engineer a Menu
Research indicates customers tend to choose one of the first items that catch their eye. Given that guests typically spend only 109 seconds perusing a menu, designing it for easy discovery of key items is crucial. Follow these steps to strategically engineer your menu and enhance profitability.
- Utilize the Menu Matrix: Analyze your menu items to identify the most popular and profitable. Structure your menu around these top-ranking items.
- Evaluate Pricing: Use insights from the menu matrix to fine-tune prices, ensuring optimal profitability.
- Highlight Profitable Items: Use visuals like photos, graphics, or shaded boxes to emphasize profitable items, limiting highlights to one or two per section to avoid overwhelming customers.
- Arrange Menu Sections: Place high-selling items in The Golden Triangle zones—center, top right, and top left corners—to capture attention immediately.
- Arrange Lists: Position the most profitable items at the top and bottom of each section to enhance visibility and ordering frequency.
- Make Expensive Items More Appealing: Enhance the perceived value of high-margin items by introducing a decoy item nearby or positioning it next to pricier options to make them seem more reasonable.
- Bracket Menu Items: Offer two portion options without specifying sizes, pricing the larger portion higher to imply better value for the smaller portion.
- Use the Price Nesting Method: Present prices subtly after meal descriptions using the same font size to discourage price-focused decision-making and promote focus on descriptions.
Avoid Common Mistakes
Familiarizing yourself with menu engineering best practices is crucial, but so is avoiding common pitfalls. While a well-crafted menu can boost profits, these errors can reduce customer spending. Stay vigilant and avoid these mistakes:
- Ending Prices with .99: A price ending in .99 can seem cheap or gimmicky to many consumers.
- Dollar Signs: Currency indicators remind customers they’re spending money, which can make them feel they are spending more. Soften the price by eliminating the dollar sign.
- Price Trails: Dotted lines connecting items to prices often shift focus away from the dish description and highlight the price instead.
- Price Columns: Placing prices in a column helps guests compare prices easily and encourages choosing the cheapest item.
Online Menu Engineering
Modern restaurants rely on user-friendly websites and efficient online ordering systems. Crafting the perfect physical menu differs from designing an optimal online menu. Explore best practices for online menu engineering below.
- Mobile Responsive: Create a mobile responsive menu so viewers don’t have to pinch and zoom to view your menu on their smartphones.
- Picture Heavy: Unlike in-person menus, studies show that items with photos get more orders on online menus. An interactive online menu that provides a picture when you click on a menu item is ideal.
- Few Choices: While you don’t want to overburden physical menus, patrons are more tolerant of expansive menus in person than they are of mobile menus. If patrons have to click through too many pages, they will likely navigate away. Organize items under different tabs so patrons can view the sections they’re interested in without having to scroll through multiple pages. Keep each tab scannable.
- Promote Best Sellers: When patrons click on your online menu, feature a best sellers category full of your most popular, highest profit items at the top.