Restaurant Menu Engineering
What Is Menu Engineering?
Restaurants sell items which have varying levels of popularity and profitability, and menu engineering helps you increase your profits.
Restaurant Menu engineering is the study of the profitability and popularity of menu items and how these two factors influence the placement of these items on a menu. The primary goal of menu engineering is to encourage the customers to order presumably the most profitable items, and to discourage them to order the least profitable ones. In simple words the goal is to increase profitability per guest.
The concept of menu engineering is rooted in work performed in 1970 by the Boston Consulting Group to help businesses segment their products in a way that facilitates analysis and decision making.
Menu engineering is not just limited to traditional printed restaurant menus, but are equally applicable to menus posted online, special menus placed on table tent cards, and items displayed on menu boards.
The Menu-Engineering Process
Our Menu Engineering Process involves the following:
- Recipe/Menu Costing
- Yield, food cost, contribution margin and Profitability
- Categorization of menu items according to profit and popularity levels.
- Menu design based on the theory of sweet spots, psychology of visual perception and attention by strategically arranging menu categories within the pages of the menu, and item placement within a menu category.
- New menu design test
- Analyse and improvise
Although you have a target overall food cost in your establishment, it is important to note that not every menu item will carry exactly the same food cost percentage. Some items are more costly than others, but our menu engineering plan ensures that your restaurant menu will have a range of prices that all the menu items fit into. Our menu engineering strategies help you to balance the menu so that the low and high food cost items work together to help you reach your target food cost.
Our well-executed initial menu-engineering process can help increase your restaurant’s bottom line profits by 3 to 5% on a consistent basis.
Get in touch with us today to know more about how menu engineering can help you increase profitability of your restaurant.