Menu Design

The menu is the single most important piece of marketing collateral for any restaurant. A well-designed menu can consistently increase profits for any restaurant (whether an independent or national chain) by as much as $1,000 per month, per million dollars in annual revenue. Re-engineering and designing menus is vital to this process.

We help with quantitative analysis led by data scientists; incorporate findings into new product, pricing, presentation, and positioning recommendations. Working with your designers, we provide menu engineering insights (placement, descriptions, menu psychology, behavioral economics, industrial engineering principles, etc.) to showcase and improve menu merchandising, resulting in an immediate impact on same-store sales growth and meaningful margin improvements. After the menu engineering analysis takes place, these are some of the specific restaurant menu design ideas to consider:

• Use colors to nudge guests to buy certain items: Based on the “meaning of colors” you can conjure up feelings and motivate behavior. For instance a limited use of red can call attention to high-margin items you want to move. Orange stimulates the appetite while brown communicates nature and earthiness. Color variations for example, a lighter background calls attention to high margin items and attracts the guests attention to them which can lead to a significant shift in menu preference scores.
• Food Photography: For some concepts it makes sense to put high resolution photos of menu items in the actual design. More commonly you see this practice in fast-food through to lower price- point casual dining operations. Photos are one of the best merchandizing techniques you can incorporate into your menu but it must be done tastefully. There must be a “truth in advertising”.
• Nested Pricing: We have all seen those Chinese restaurant menus with the dot-dot-dot leading from a generic menu item name on the left to the price on the right. This encourages customers to view your restaurant as a generic commodity and read from right to left instead of left to right. The goal is to get customers to scan the unique item names and well-written descriptions and make their choices based on what sounds/looks good; considering the price secondary not primary. Nested pricing is where the menu price comes after the description and is “nested” into the description using the same size font. The price should appear two spaces after the last sentence of the description (without a dollar sign). Nested pricing is one part of a broader set of restaurant menu pricing strategies.
• Don’t Use Dollar Signs: When dollar/currency signs are used on the menu they become the most repeated item. The currency sign symbolizes money and therefore communicates the restaurant is just a business out to make a profit. Without a currency sign, guests still understand that any numerals beside a menu item are the food price. This makes for a more subtle communication of the price of the item and keeps the guest focused on the experience itself more than the cost.
• Menu Translation: If more than 15% of a prospective audience speaks another language you should strongly consider menus in that language.
• Digital Menu Boards: Digital menu boards are particularly popular at QSR’s and fast-casual operations, but there are still uses for casual dining operations with printed menus. Digital menu boards can be used for promotional messaging (remember the old chalk boards when you walked in an Applebee’s?), training, and for zone merchandizing. At the time of designing the menu, restauranteurs must now take into consideration design techniques for printed output and digital menus (static output and animated digital output).
• High Rent Areas: Think of your menu as a property development and yourself as the master developer. Where would you put the high-rent condos and where would you hide the necessary but unattractive utility stations? Every inch of your menu should be paying its fair share of rent. For those menu items worthy enough to get the high-rent areas on the menu, they need to be paying what the space is worth or surrender it to another menu item that can pay a higher rent. For example, the Golden Triangle of your menu should be where you put high-margin signature items.
• Do not highlight too much at once: If everything is important nothing is important. look at how the big guys do it – whether on the QSR side like Starbucks or the high end of fine dining. If Starbucks has something special, every bit of in-store marketing is focused on that one item – from the bathroom posters to the window clings. And in the fine dining restaurant, if the chef has much to be proud of, he doesn’t have all the items listed off, he instead creates a very special chef’s tasting menu. The more you focus on one item, the more special you make it.
• To Go Menu: People are more on the go today than ever before. It is important that your menu is able to go wherever your customers go. This could mean an email-friendly version of your menu, a menu that is visible on an iPhone or Android mobile browser, a menu that can be faxed (yes, some people still use it) and some would even go so far as to make sure that a customer can “Tweet” your menu.
• Menu Pricing: Pricing is both an art and a science. The science part should be rooted in achieving target theoretical food costs and profit margins. The art part of it though is how to make the science part more appetizing and appealing. Price the menu in such a way that it cannot be easily compared or price shopped against the competition.
• Brand Personality: The way a brand walks, talks, dresses, acts and behaves are all characteristics described in the Brand Personality. Is your brand playful, whimsical, and funny? Or is your brand serious, refined, cultured, and sophisticated? Once you have accurately articulated the brand in your overall brand platform and defined its personality, decisions, and ideation around items such as the menu (menu templates in particular) and production have a comparison point to evaluate against.
• Restaurant Brand Positioning: Once you have zeroed in on what makes you “different” as opposed to “better” the next job is to reinforce that message at every touchpoint possible. Applied more specifically to menu design, restaurant branding means communicating what makes your restaurant different in a way that also expresses the personality and promise of the restaurant. The approaches, therefore, are dramatically different and entirely unique to each and every individual restaurant brand.
• Menu Engineering: One of the most important considerations with regard to designing a menu is to start from a foundation of knowledge and analysis gained through the complete Menu Engineering process. Design can help with aesthetics and even influence menu preference scores, but the real rubber-on-the-road for menu profitability is uncovered through Menu Engineering.
• Zone Merchandizing: A successful menu strategy for increasing frequency and check average is zone merchandizing; using your own restaurant as a marketing channel to influence your existing customers’ perceptions and buying behavior. To do this, identify the various zones or marketing channels within your restaurant. This includes zones such as windows, bathrooms, greeter station, televisions within the restaurant, the actual tables (for instance you may use placemats or table tents at the table to communicate via this zone) and even the staff area zone. As you have a new promotion or something important to say, rollout the message via your zones. The most effective approach to this is to use each zone to reinforce a single message rather than clutter each zone up with competing messages.