How Restaurant Menu Software Can Be Your Secret Weapon

By Nick Leonard

As a diner you’ve probably faced this scenario more than once: You arrive at a restaurant, open the menu, and have no idea where to look or what to order. The shoddy menu design made ordering too complicated. But as a restaurant owner, how do you make sure your own menu is well designed, so that your customers can order food effortlessly?

Did you know you can subconsciously encourage customers to buy what you want them to buy? You can also discourage customers from ordering food you don’t want them to order. This is called “menu engineering,” and there’s technology out there to help restaurant owners harness its power and build strong menus. Menu engineering isn’t just about highlighting your best or most popular dishes. It’s also a way to point your customers toward the most profitable dishes so you can increase your margin and raise revenue by as much as 12 percent in your first year, according to Food & Drink Resources. If you’re not already optimizing your menu using restaurant menu software, now is the time to start.

What Is Menu Engineering?

Menu engineering uses Big Data to determine the most popular and most profitable dishes on your menu. Using that data, you can build a restaurant menu designed to promote dishes that bring in the highest revenue. Your menu is, after all, your most valuable marketing tool. Follow these steps to get the most out of it.

1. Study: First, create a list of your dishes and assign an exact cost for ingredients (you can exclude labor costs). Make sure this figure is as precise as possible because it could affect the accuracy of the results. Now, for each menu section, rank the dishes from the most profitable to the least. Now, similarly, make a second list that ranks your dishes by popularity, using data pulled from your POS system.

2. Categorize: Next, you want to create a matrix using “popularity” and “profitability” as the two axes. This will create four quadrants or categories:

• High profit, high popularity
• High profit, low popularity
• Low profit, high popularity
• Low profit, low popularity

Using the two lists from step one, plot each menu item on one of the four quadrants/categories. For example, if your lists (from Step 1) determined a certain salad is a highly profitable and hugely popular item, the salad will fall into the “high-profit, high-popularity” category.

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