Your menu isn't a list of dishes: it is your main sales tool. Every day it influences what each customer chooses and so how much they spend and how much you earn. Most restaurants treat the menu as a table; the ones that grow treat it as engineering.
What it is
Designing the menu on purpose to guide customers to choices that are good for them and for you. It isn't manipulation, it is smart organisation. It crosses two pieces of information for each dish:
- Popularity: how much it sells.
- Margin: how much profit it leaves.
From memory to data
Ask any owner which dishes "carry" the business and they answer with confidence. Often they are wrong, because they answer from memory. The dish you love isn't necessarily the one that sells, and the one that "always goes out" may leave almost no margin. To decide with real information you need to know, dish by dish, what sells, and that data is in the sales reports of your POS or ordering system.
The four types of dish
- Stars (sell a lot, good margin): highlight them well.
- Workhorses (sell a lot, low margin): work on cost or price, or use them to sell extras.
- Puzzles (sell little, good margin): hidden gems. Give them more visibility.
- Dead weight (sell little, low margin): candidates to drop. They only complicate the kitchen and purchasing.
Tactics that work
- Visual emphasis: a box, a colour or a good photo draws the eye.
- Placement: people look most at the top and the centre.
- Fewer options, better chosen: too many options cause indecision.
- Descriptions that make mouths water.
- Price anchors: a more expensive dish makes the middle ones look like good value.
- Suggestions and extras to lift average order value.
- The dish of the day: a daily reason to order, and a simple way to test new dishes.
A digital menu takes this further
On a paper menu you apply menu engineering once. On a digital menu you can adjust it whenever you like and show dish suggestions at checkout, always, without relying on a busy waiter.
The common mistake
Leaving the menu unchanged for years, decided by taste. Tastes, seasons and costs change. Review it regularly and use last month's numbers.
How GetFoodies helps
The digital menu on your channel shows dish suggestions at checkout and is always at hand to adjust. The dashboard brings together your channel's orders and sales, and you can cross that with your dishes' costs.
Start by classifying
Take your menu and classify every dish into the four types, using last month's sales and margin. That simple table already tells you what to highlight and what to cut.