6 Tips to Increase Your Restaurant Menu Profitability

As a restaurant owner, you try to cater to a wide range of customer tastes. But some items are more profitable than others. Increasing sales of these will improve your bottom line.

Here are 6 restaurant menu engineering tips, which nudge customers towards high-margin items.

1. Categorize Items Based on Profit and Popularity

Menu engineering is both an art and a science. Categorizing menu items based on profit and popularity is a successful way to improve your profitability.

Specifically, you should be using a matrix of four categories with different profitability and popularity levels:

• Plough horse: Popular, but have low profitability
• Stars: Very profitable and very popular
• Dogs: Not popular or profitable
• Puzzles: Highly profitable, but not very popular

The goal is to classify all of your menu items based on analyzing your cost and sales data using your POS records.

Now, you can categorize items to maximize profits and engineer your menu.

• Dogs: Consider ditching these menu items. If some items appeal to a specific customer segment, consider reducing your promotion of these items.
• Puzzles: Because these items are the highest profit margin food, you want to keep them. With the right strategy, you may transform these dishes into “stars.”
• Stars: Your most profitable food to sell. Use smart placement and highlighting to draw customer attention to these menu items.
• Plough horses: Your most popular items, so you’ll want to keep them around. But you may want to consider creating more profitable versions of these dishes.

Categorizing menu items based on popularity and profitability will allow you to use concrete data to make strategic changes rather than the hit-or-miss approach.

2. Highlight Items You Want to Sell Most

Once you have an understanding of how profitable and popular your menu items are, you can design your menu considering your customer base and their behavior.

• Do customers read your entire menu?
• What drives customers to your establishment?
• What types of customers order the items you want to highlight?

Here are some tips to successfully highlight menu items to appeal to your customer base:

• Use visual cues like a box around the item, photo, or asterisk to draw attention to certain items. Highlight a limited number of items to maximize impact.
• Place prices after the menu description, not in a separate column. Placing prices in a separate column draws attention first of all to the cost. Don’t use a dollar symbol.
• Choose the right menu design. Two-panel menus tend to be the best option because they are easy to read, give diners plenty of options, and they still allow you to influence customer decisions.

It’s also important to make sure that your menu is the appropriate size. Pay attention that highlighted items will take up more space on the page.

3. Downsize Your Items

Earlier we discussed the possibility of removing menu items that aren’t popular and don’t generate much profit.

Downsizing these items will get rid of clutter on your menu and allow you to better guide customers towards higher-margin items you want to sell.

The fewer items you offer, the greater the control you have over customer choices and profitability.

4. Use Customer Eye Movement to Your Advantage

Customers typically focus on certain areas of the menu, depending on the menu’s configuration. You can use these eye movement patterns to your advantage.

Here’s where customers will look first:

• One-panel menus: Top of the page gets the most attention, while the area just below the bottom of the page gets the least attention.
• Two-panel menus: Top right-side panel gets the most attention, while the area just above the bottom left-side panel gets the least attention.
• Three-panel menus: Top third of the panel gets the most attention, while the area just above the bottom of the first panel gets the least.
• Multi-panel menus: Top of each page gets the most attention, while the area just above the bottom of each page gets the least.

5. Place Your Most Profitable Menu Items Front and Center

When customers look at menus, their eyes are usually drawn to the middle first, the top right second, and then finally to the top left side.

Each menu page should place your most profitable food items front and center. These will be the first items customers see.

The bottom of the menu is a great place to listless important items, like sides, extras, dressings, and drinks.

6. Be Descriptive

Menu item descriptions should reflect their importance and play to the customer’s appetite. High-margin items like lobster and steak should have longer, enticing descriptions. For lower margin items, like pasta and hamburgers, it’s no need to go over-the-top with details.

When writing descriptions for high-margin items:

• Focus on what sets the dish apart from others. Describe the flavors and what makes the dish worth choosing.
• Humanize the dish. Is this a family recipe? Was this your favorite dish growing up?
• Use brand names. Include the names of well-known and respected brands in your description to increase the perception of quality.

Final Thoughts

Improving your menu profitability is crucial and should be an ongoing process. It’s important to frequently evaluate and analyze your menu to make sure that it’s performing as well as it should be.

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