A restaurant’s menu is much more than a list of food items that it serves. This piece of paper has the potential to be your greatest marketing tool. It introduces potential customers to your brand and builds curiosity amongst them. It is a fact that an average customer spends 109 seconds studying your menu. Overall, the menu is the single most important document in the business. Purchasing, production, sales, cost accounting, labor management, and even the kitchen layout and equipment selection of a new facility, everything is based on the menu.
Thus, it is important to make your menu much more than merely a piece of paper with a list of the food items. A thoughtfully designed menu advertises your offerings and can increase your restaurant’s profit. And this is where menu engineering and designing play an important role.
What Is Menu Engineering?
Menu engineering is basically a framework that evaluates and optimizes the restaurant menu pricing and design to create a more profitable menu and business overall. This further involves categorizing all menu items into one of four menu engineering categories, depending on the profitability and popularity of each item. Menu engineering basically helps in:
- Eradicating poor-performing items and balancing the food costs.
- It further assists in highlighting more profitable menu items.
- Create a system for regular analysis of the menu.
- Keep the menu optimized to the current needs.
Menu engineering involves the following steps:
- Picking a time after which you would want to rework your menu. This either depends upon the seasonality or customer preferences.
- Costing your menu by calculating food cost per serving, calculating contribution margin, etc.
- Using various analytics to determine the menu item’s popularity.
- Categorizing menu items based on profit and popularity.
- Redesigning the menu to make it more attractive and serve more value to the customers.
- Analyzing and measuring the menu’s impact.
To run a restaurant successfully, a menu is one of the core components. Following food trends related to cultural preferences, tastes, healthy eating, and wellness help businesses plan and implement menu ideas successfully. If you are struggling with your restaurant business at any point, or if you are looking for professionals to help you with your restaurant business, then the ERC team can help you with it. At Enterprise Restaurant Consulting, we have a team of seasoned restaurant professionals, who work round the clock to provide you with any sort of assistance related to your restaurant business and make it a big success. For more details, you can get in touch with our team at 1-647-209-4153, and they will help you with all your restaurant-related queries.