Highlight Profitable Items on Your Digital Menu with Menu Engineering
What is Menu Engineering and Why Is It Important for Restaurants?
In café and restaurant management, a menu is not just a list for customers to place orders; it is your business's most powerful marketing and sales tool. Unlike traditional paper menus placed on tables, rapidly spreading digital solutions today provide restaurants with immense flexibility. This is precisely where menu engineering comes into play. As the art of correctly positioning items on a digital platform by analyzing them according to their costs, profit margins, and sales volumes, this approach can boost your profitability in a short time when applied correctly.
Understanding customers' eye movements and decision-making processes on a digital screen directly affects which dishes will sell more. Ensuring that each item finds its rightful place on the menu both balances the operational load in the kitchen and optimizes your turnover.
Properly Grouping Items on Your Digital Menu
The first step of menu engineering is to divide all the food and beverages you offer into specific categories. This classification allows you to clearly see which products you need to focus on:
- Stars: These are your popular items that have both a high profit margin and sell very well. You must protect these items and keep them in plain sight at all times.
- Workhorses: These are items with a low profit margin but a very high sales volume. They are generally the staple flavors that bring customers through the door.
- Puzzles: These are hidden gems with a high profit margin but a low sales volume. You need to highlight these items by strengthening their story or enriching their descriptions.
- Dogs: These are items with both a low profit margin and low sales. Completely removing these items from the menu or revamping their recipe is the most logical step.
Tip: Instead of including items from every category in your digital menu, make them shine by opening up special spaces for your high-profit dishes that fall under the "Puzzle" category.
Visual Hierarchy and Digital Design Tactics
When the human eye looks at a digital screen, it follows a specific route. The "golden triangle" rule in traditional printed menus works slightly differently on digital screens. Considering the habit of scrolling on smartphone screens, you should place your most profitable items at the points where the screen first opens and fingers focus most comfortably.
Appetizing and high-resolution photos that you add next to product names directly drive up the order rate for that item. However, putting a photo for every product can clutter the screen. You can direct the customer's attention to these flavors by adding professional visuals exclusively to your high-margin "Star" and "Puzzle" items.
Managing Perception Through Product Naming and Descriptions
One of the biggest advantages of digital menus is that you can update product cards whenever you wish. Instead of just writing a plain dish name, add short, appetizing descriptions that tell the quality of the ingredients or the story of its preparation. For instance, using the phrase "Signature Burger with Specially Aged Beef and Truffle Mayonnaise" instead of just saying "Homemade Burger" raises the perception of what the customer is willing to pay for that item. This gives you room to increase your profitability without encountering price resistance.
Furthermore, keeping currency symbols on price tags (such as USD, $) minimalist or avoiding complex fractional numbers ensures that the customer focuses on the value of the food rather than the amount paid.
You can choose a flexible and user-friendly QR menu solution to smartly highlight your profitable items and streamline your operations on your restaurant's digitalization journey.