Description

Welcome to the Menu Engineering Course, a free online course that'll cover everything you need to know
when updating and re-inventing your restaurant’s menu.

If you run a restaurant, chances are you spend your days making sure your food is delicious, your service
is warm and attentive, your space is decorated just how you like it, your staff are engaged and happy in
their jobs, and your customers keep coming back. But every once in a while, it’s important to proactively
check on the final piece of the puzzle: your menu.

Course Outline
1. Welcome to the Course

PART 1: MENU ENGINEERING

1. A Quick Intro to Menu Engineering
2. Chapter 1: Open a Menu Investigation with Food Cost & Contribution Margin
3. Assignment 1: Get to Work with the Menu Engineering Spreadsheet
4. Chapter 2: Stars, Puzzles, Plowhorses, Dogs
5. Assignment 2: Chart the Path Forward

PART 2: MENU DESIGN

1. A Quick Intro to Menu Design & Menu Psychology
2. Chapter 1: Six Principles of Menu Psychology + Examples
3. Chapter 2: Six Menu Design Conventions + Examples
4. Chapter 3: Mega Menu or Multiple Menus?
5. Assignment: Mess with Our 17 Menu Templates

PART 3: YOUR MENU ONLINE

1. A Quick Intro to Your Menu Online
2. Chapter 1: Your Menu on Third-Party Delivery Sites
3. Chapter 2: Your Menu on Your Website
4. Assignment: Bring Your Online Presence into 2020

PART 4: YOUR MENU WHEN YOU'RE GROWING

1. A Quick Intro to Your Menu When You're Growing
2. Chapter 1: Going from One Menu to Two
3. Chapter 2: Your Menu when Franchising

FINAL TAKEAWAYS
1. Go Forth and Make the Most of Your Menu
 Welcome to the Course
Your menu is so much more than a list of the food you offer. In the restaurant, it’s your food’s first
impression, and when someone is ordering online, it’s your restaurant’s first impression. Because of this,
it’s full of opportunities for optimization — which basically just means that your menu could be working
a little harder to help you achieve your business goals.

In this course, you’ll learn to harness the power of menu engineering. You'll learn to analyze, improve,
and rearrange your menu items to bring in more profit, and you'll get a fully functional menu engineering
spreadsheet to help you along the way.

You’ll learn the basic principles of menu psychology and how to apply them when designing your menu,
and you'll get to play with 17 beautiful menu templates.

You’ll learn to optimize your online menu on third-party delivery services as well as on your website, and
get a push to bring your online presence into 2020.

Finally, you’ll learn about what to look out for on your menu when your restaurant is growing.
Let's get started! Hit Continue below.
 A Quick Intro to Menu Engineering
Menu engineering is the practice of empirically analyzing every item on your menu to determine their
profitability and popularity — and adjusting your menu to reflect your findings and increase revenue.

However, most people don't know where to start — or they can’t find the time. But we’re happy you’re
here now, because once you’ve analyzed your menu prices, food costs, and contribution margins, you
have a brand-new opportunity to make more money on your best menu items. By the end of Part 1 of this
course, you'll have identified your menu's stars, puzzles, plowhorses, and dogs, and you’ll know what to
do with them. You’ll also get a downloadable menu engineering spreadsheet to help you with calculating
the most important menu engineering metrics, like contribution margin and menu item food cost
percentage.

How Did Menu Engineering Start?

Menu engineering originated at Michigan State University in the early ‘80s, when School of Restaurant
Management Department Director Donald I. Smith gave Associate Professor Michael Kasavana 16 years
of handwritten business records and data from his restaurant, Chateau Louise.

After rifling through the massive stack of documents and trying to find ways to make the restaurant more
profitable, Kasavana noticed a correlation between periods of success and profitability when certain
changes were made to the menu.
He realized he’d re-engineered the menu for greater profit, and then he realized he’d come across a
framework that could help any restaurateur increase their business’s profit.

So Smith and Kasavana wrote a book on the subject, and almost 40 years later, menu engineering has
stuck around. In fact, it’s gotten way easier to do than it was in the ‘80s, thanks to huge advances in
restaurant POS technology.
Chapter 1: Open a Menu
Investigation with Food Cost &
Contribution Margin
Restaurant data is your friend, but pulling it together can feel like a chore. That’s a big part of
why fewer than 60% of restaurants even try menu engineering, explained Michael Kasavana,
who came up with menu engineering back in the ‘80s — but pulling together the numbers
needed to do menu engineering has never been easier.

“Most of the data you need to do a menu engineering analysis is captured by a point of sale
system,” says Kasavana. “Integrate the point of sale system data, export that into the menu
engineering spreadsheet, [and you can] do the analysis in a matter of seconds for some very
complex restaurant menus.”

The first thing you'll need to do is decide how often you can do menu engineering analysis
and update your menu to reflect your findings — and stick to that timeframe. Once a
quarter is great, but even checking on the metrics of each menu item twice a year can have a
huge impact on your sales.

But which restaurant metrics do you need to do menu engineering? Basically, you need to delve
into the details of your menu with a comprehensive food cost analysis.

Let's dive in. In this lesson, you'll learn how to calculate the foundational metrics of menu
engineering:
 1 Menu item food cost
 2 Total food cost percentage & menu item food cost percentage
 3 Total contribution margin & portion contribution margin
 4 Menu item popularity
Menu Item Food Cost
This is one of the two most important metrics that you'll need to do menu engineering. Food cost,
put simply, is how much of your money is spent on the ingredients for every dish.

Calculating individual menu item food cost to find out the cost of every dish is a painstaking
exercise when dealing with portioning multiple ingredients, but it’s important to do it regularly.
John Enny, who’s the Director of Marketing at xtraCHEF, an inventory management and food
cost software, says it’s crucial to keep an eye on food cost and how each of your dishes should be
priced, and make changes whenever necessary. “Plate costing is often only done once, if at all,”
he said. “However, the recipe may change. The prices of the ingredients and the labor costs to
produce a dish will surely change.”
The easiest way to do this is to calculate the food cost of a full batch of a dish — like mac and
cheese — and then divide it by the number of portions you get from that batch. Remember to
include cost of purchasing here, like delivery fees or other costs incurred while buying the
ingredients.

But for dishes like a bowl of sashimi over rice, you'll have to dive into the tiny numbers and see
how much you spent on each slice of salmon, each slice of tuna, that tablespoon of wasabi, and
the 2 cups of rice.

Here's the formula for calculating menu item food cost:

cost of each ingredient

+
cost of purchasing
Food Cost Percentage
Food cost percentage compares the cost of making all the food you served in a certain time
period, and how much money you made in that same time period. It can be measured on a
weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. This metric is calculated for you in our pre-
programmed menu engineering spreadsheet, which you'll find in the next assignment.

Food cost percentage is most commonly calculated for your whole business. Many restaurants
aim for a food cost percentage of 28%-35%, but businesses in this industry vary so widely that
there’s no perfect food cost percentage number.

Food cost percentage can also be calculated for each individual menu item, which is more
relevant to menu engineering analysis. By calculating this metric, you'll start to get an idea of
how profitable your menu items are.

Click the cards below for the formulas:

Total Food Cost Percentage
(total food cost
÷
total sales)

x 100
Menu Item Food Cost Percentage
(menu item food cost
÷
menu price)

x 100
Contribution Margin
Contribution margin is an efficient way to measure profit, analyze how sales affect your net
income, and ultimately explain how different factors of your food business react to changes. It's
basically the net amount of dollars you take to the bank thanks to each menu item.
This metric is the cornerstone of menu engineering, because it shows you, in dollars, how much
profit each menu item brings in. Note that contribution margin must always be calculated for a
specific period of time.
This metric is calculated for you in our pre-programmed menu engineering spreadsheet,
which you'll find in the next assignment.

It can be calculated per portion of a menu item, or as a total of how much profit has been
generated from sales of a certain food item over a period of time.

For example, if a pizza is sold for $10 and costs $3 to make, the contribution margin per portion
is $7.

And if you sell 100 pizzas in a week, the total contribution margin for pizzas is $700.

Click the card below for the formulas:

Contribution Margin Per Portion
menu item sale price
—
menu item food cost
Total Contribution Margin Per Menu Item
total revenue from sales of menu item
—
total food cost to make # of menu items sold
Menu Item Popularity
Calculating food menu items’ popularity is easy – all you need to do is find out how many of
each item sold over the course of a given time period.
Your point of sale should log this for you in a Product Mix report. In Toast Reporting &

Analytics, for example, you can look at quantity of each menu item, sales category, and

modifiers, as well as net sales for each.

It’s also a good idea to corroborate your findings with anecdotal info from your front- and back-
of-house staff. Ask around and see if a particular menu item has been extra popular lately.
Maybe your chef improved one of the sauces, or maybe one of your servers has mastered the
upsell for a specific item. It’s always important to get these anecdotal perspectives to
complement your hard data. They'll help you find the reasons behind different trends.
Food Cost Percentage vs. Contribution Margin

It’s important to compare your restaurant against its past success, and evaluate your goals based
on that historical data. Do you want to save more money or make more money? Depending on
your current situation, you may want to focus on food cost percentage or contribution margin.

For example, say you have two menu items: a sirloin steak you sell for $20 that costs you $10 to
make, and a pizza you sell for $10 that costs you $3 to make.
 a sirloin steak you sell for $20 that costs you $10 to make a pizza you sell for $10 that costs you $3 to make.

Click the cards below to find out the food cost percentage for these items below on the left, and
the contribution margin for both below on the right.
Food Cost Percentage for
Steak & Pizza
Steak: 50%
Pizza: 30%
Contribution Margin for
Steak & Pizza
Steak: $10
Pizza: $7

Sometimes it's better to sell fewer of a high contribution margin item than more of a low
contribution margin item. You’ll actually move the average contribution margin up, and
your total contribution margin up, by selling those high margin items.

Michael Kasavana
None of these metrics are solely indicative of restaurant success, but examined together, they can
help you make important food costing decisions, and guide your menu engineering analysis.
Assignment 1: Get to Work with
the Menu Engineering
Spreadsheet
Now it's time to get to work. Download and fill out your Menu Engineering Spreadsheet below
— and keep it handy, because you'll want to use it every time you do menu engineering analysis
in the future.

While you fill in the spreadsheet with your restaurant’s metrics — which you should mostly be
able to find in your point of sale — you’ll see the menu engineering worksheet and the scatter
plot graph change as you add more items and metrics. The graph and gray bar to the left of the
graph are what are referred to as your “Menu Engineering Dashboard,” where you can see some
quick statistics about your overall menu performance. Here are some important stats you'll
calculate:
 All Items Sold = The Sum of Number Sold column
 Overall Food Cost = The Sum of Total Food Cost
 Overall Menu Sales = The Sum of Total Menu Sales
 Overall Contribution Margin = The Sum of All Items' Contribution Margin
 Average Profit Per Item = Overall Contribution Margin / All Items Sold
 Average Number Sold = The Average of Number Sold Column
 Average Contribution Margin = The Average of the Contribution Margin Column
 Overall Food Cost Percentage = Overall Food Cost / Overall Menu Sales
Some of these menu engineering statistics are simply interesting to know — average profit per
item, for instance — while others are immediately actionable, and form the basis of the menu
engineering graph to the right.
This spreadsheet is built to tell you if your menu items are
Stars, Puzzles, Plowhorses, or Dogs, which are the four
categories of menu engineering. More on what each category
means in the next chapter.
You'll find more instructions in the spreadsheet itself. And remember to click "Enable
Macros" when prompted upon opening the spreadsheet, otherwise it won't work.
Time to dive in!

Menu-Engineering-Spreadsheet-2020.xlsm

148.7 KB

You might want to make a copy of the spreadsheet for foods in each of your different menu
categories — one for appetizers, one for entrees, one for desserts, for example — if you want to
get even more detailed and accurate in your analysis.
Chapter 2: Stars, Puzzles,
Plowhorses, Dogs
Welcome to Chapter 2. It’s time to draw some conclusions, get creative, and forge ahead with
creating a plan for your restaurant, now that you’ve filled out your menu engineering spreadsheet
and know the classification of each of your menu items.

But first, we'll go through each menu item classification – Stars, Puzzles, Plowhorses, and Dogs
– and show you what you can do with each one.
 STARS: High Profitability, High Popularity
 PUZZLES: High Profitability, Low Popularity
 PLOWHORSES: Low Profitability, High Popularity
 DOGS: Low Profitability, Low Popularity
STARS: High Profitability, High Popularity

Your Stars are your most popular and most profitable dishes. The ingredients used to make these
dishes are reasonably cheap and you’re constantly tasked with buying more inventory because
your guests won’t stop ordering the dishes they’re included in.

If you have a mac and cheese on your menu, it’s probably a Star.

Here are three things to do with your Stars. We’ll be using mac and cheese as an example.
 1
Your menu design should highlight your Stars. Place your mac and cheese in the
center or top-right corner of your menu — more on eye movement patterns and ordering
behavior in the chapter on menu psychology, within Part 2. Alternatively, use different
font sizes or visual callouts to draw attention to it.
 2
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Keep Star menu items consistent in taste and presentation.
Don’t change your cheese mix, don’t alter the breadcrumbs — keep giving the people
what they love.
 3
Promote them any way you can. If your data and your staff are telling you that your
guests love your mac and cheese, and the books are telling you it’s cheap to make, show
it off all over social media and in any ads you run. People online love a video of a cheese
pull.
PUZZLES: High Profitability, Low Popularity

Your Puzzles are your hidden gems. They're valuable, but they're diamonds in the rough.
Puzzles are items that are very profitable, but for some reason or another, customers don't order
them as often. An example here is a vegan cauliflower taco dish — cheap to make, with a high
contribution margin, but perhaps overlooked by guests.

Here are four things to do with your Puzzles to increase popularity. We’ll be using the vegan
cauliflower taco as an example.
 1
Improve the description you use to sell the item. Maybe your clientele is put off by the
word “vegan” — try just calling them cauliflower tacos and including a ⓥ symbol next
to the description. Liven up the description and mention that the cauliflower is marinated
and then fried until crispy, and dressed with your housemade hot sauce.
 2
Alter the item’s presentation or taste. Make changes — one at a time — to the
presentation of the menu item so that you can effectively keep track of which specific
change has made an impact. For example, you could invest in a few of those metal taco-
holders so the tacos can be propped up on a plate (never underestimate the impact of
making a dish more Instagram-friendly), or try adding guacamole to the tacos for some
richness, or changing up the batter for the cauliflower so that it’s crispier.
 3
Make the items part of a special for a period of time. Host a few Taco Tuesday events
where your taco offerings are front and center and offered at a discount, or offer a 10%
off discount on vegetarian and vegan items for a Meatless Monday. However you choose
to discount this item, be sure to promote the special far and wide so that this item is on
your guests’ radar far beyond the timeframe of the special offer.
 4
Tell your staff to recommend these items. Michael Kasavana recommends that you
should train your staff to push all high-contribution margin items. Your Stars are doing
well on their own, but it’s your Puzzles that can really be helped by a little push by your
FOH staff.
PLOWHORSES: Low Profitability, High Popularity

Your Plowhorses are popular items at your restaurant, but they're not cheap to make. They have
low profitability and high popularity. Fried calamari is a great example of a Plowhorse on many
menus.

Here are three things to do with your Plowhorses to increase profit — even a small increase
makes a difference, especially when it's an item that's frequently ordered. We’ll be using fried
calamari as an example.
 1
Negotiate with your vendors to get a better price if you buy in bulk, or shop around
for a new vendor. John Enny of xtraCHEF says “We recommend evaluating the
purchase history and volume of the Plowhorse ingredients that make up those popular
menu items, and using that data to negotiate lower pricing with your vendor. If your
vendor isn't willing to bargain, consider using your purchase data to shop around and
solicit new bids.”
 2
 Alter your portion sizes. Are customers leaving behind half a plateful of calamari
because you’re providing too much? Reduce the portion size slightly. Be careful here,
because if guests notice a marked reduction in how much they’re getting for the same
price, they might stop ordering them.
 3
Strategic pairing. Enny also recommends “pairing your Plowhorse items with a drink
(because most things go better with a drink) or some other higher margin item.” For
example, offer a combo deal of fried calamari, usually costing $13, and a beer, usually
costing $4, for $16.
DOGS: Low Profitability, Low Popularity

Your Dogs are the menu items that just aren't contributing to profit or profitability.

No one’s ordering them, the ingredients are costly, and they’re spoiling in your walk-in, so
keeping this dish on the menu is costing your restaurant money. A great example of a Dog menu
item is broiled oysters.

Here are three things to do with your Dogs to increase popularity and profitability, or cut your
losses and move on. We’ll run with the broiled oysters example.
 1
Rebrand and reinvent the item. Broiled oysters don’t sound as good as Oysters
Rockefeller, so try out that new name and add a few low-cost, high-flavor ingredients, or
sauces, or side dishes, to make the dish more attractive — going from broiled oysters to
Oysters Rockefeller may turn the sales performance of this item around.
 2
Only make it as a special or limited time offer. Instead of removing the dish from your
rotation entirely, offer it as a special one day a week. You can promote it on those days as
a limited time offer to spur urgency, and you'll only need to buy enough of the oysters for
broiling that you’ll need for one day’s worth of preparation instead of a full week’s
worth.
 3
Remove it from the menu. If rebranding, reinventing, and spotlighting the broiled oyster
dish doesn’t increase its popularity, remove it from the menu altogether. It’s not worth
raising the price to increase profitability, because if people are already not ordering it,
they won’t be drawn in by an even higher price.

Time to Make a Plan

Now that you have some options for what to do with each menu category, start thinking about
how you can apply these changes to your menu
Assignment 2: Chart the Path
Forward
Now that you have a better understanding of the characteristics of stars, puzzles,
plowhorses, and dogs, as well as ways to improve or reevaluate their place on your menu,
it's time to plot the path forward for your menu items.

We recommend that you experiment with your menu just like you do with the taste
of your menu items. Audit your menu at least twice a year to have an accurate list of the
Stars, Puzzles, Plowhorses, and Dogs in your restaurant.
If you notice that an item that was once very profitable has taken a dive, check on your
ingredient prices. “In addition to common culprits like waste and theft, one of the biggest
hidden factors driving up food cost percentage is price volatility. Price fluctuations often
go unnoticed, because the data is typically hidden in line-items on paper invoices.
Without the right tools, it's a challenge to closely monitor how increasing prices of
common ingredients can impact food costs and eat away at profits,” says John Enny
of xtraCHEF.

Your menu engineering spreadsheet can also help you compare sales periods side-by-side
with separate sheets to see where you're improving and where you're not. As the data
changes — and it will quarter by quarter, and year by year — you may find your
priorities change as well. Perhaps your focus is less on increasing sales, and more on
lowering costs. Whatever your goal may be, make sure to only focus on one at a time and
analyze your menu to ensure it’s helping you make progress on that goal.

Now, brainstorm with your chef to decide what to do with each of your Stars,
Puzzles, Plowhorses, and Dogs.

Copy the chart below into a document on your computer or in Google Docs, and either on
your computer or printed out on paper, fill it in with your action plan for each item. Then,
once you've made a change, let a month or two go by and check back in with your menu
engineering spreadsheet.

Checking in on what worked and what didn't is just as important as making the
changes to begin with. If changing the position of a Puzzle on your menu turned it into a
Star, the only way you'll find out about it is to do another round of menu engineering
analysis.

Ok — enough reading. Write out your action plan in the chart below!
 ITEM ACTION PLAN

STARS

PUZZLES

PLOWHORSES

DOGS
A Quick Intro to Menu Design &
Menu Psychology
There's so much that goes into designing a menu. You want it to be beautiful and
representative of your restaurant's brand, plus the design of your menu should also reflect
the findings of your menu engineering analysis.

And then you've also got to factor in how the human brain perceives the different
elements of your menu. In other words, it's time to learn about menu psychology.

We'll go over six of the most impactful ideas within menu psychology, and share
beautiful examples of some of them at work on different menus.

Then, we'll cover six more design conventions that will ensure your menu is making a
fantastic first impression. There'll be a few examples of great menus there, too.

Finally, you'll get to play with our 17 gorgeous menu templates and make them your
own.
Chapter 1: Six Principles of Menu
Psychology + Examples
Now that you know where all your menu items fall in terms of popularity and profitability, it’s
time to spring into action and adjust your menu design to reflect your findings.

Here’s a primer on the six most common psychology principles used in menu design.
1. The Paradox of Choice
“I think some of the largest gains that restaurants have made with menu engineering is realizing
they have too many items on the menu,” said Michael Kasanava.
He cited the 80/20 rule: often, 80% of a restaurant's sales come from 20% of its items. That
means you should take the time to figure out where the excess is, and what menu items are
bogging you down.
According to George A. Miller, a cognitive psychology expert, most guests may only remember
seven pieces of information (plus or minus two) at a given time. When looking at a restaurant's
menu, guests often have too many choices to process. This is called the paradox of choice. We
think that with more choices, we'll be able to make a better decision, but the reality is we end up
getting bogged down.

Make it easier for guests to scan your menu by offering around seven options per food category.

To combat the paradox of choice, menus typically categorize similar items together: a category
for pizzas, a category for appetizers, a category for salads, and so on. This helps guests
remember the highlights of each list.

It’s also true that having an excessive number of menu items can hurt sales: When it takes longer
for guests to place their orders, it slows down the table turn time, or the time it takes to get guests
through the line. The result is that you end up serving fewer guests during each shift.

Here’s a restaurant that does a great job combating the paradox of choice: REYLA in
Asbury Park, NJ. They have a beautifully curated menu, with only five or six choices per
section.
They also choose to omit the dollar signs in their prices — more on that in the next
section.
2. Dollar Signs, Decimal Points and Their Semantic Salience
Semantics = the relationship between signs and symbols and their meanings.
Salience = the relative prominence of something in a given situation.
Semantic Salience = how noticeable (and potentially important) a symbol's meaning is to a
situation or a decision-making process.
In menu design, this applies to pricing. It's not about what the menu items actually cost, but
rather how they're presented to the guest. Consider how symbols affect your menu price
presentation.

Here are a few ways to think about displaying prices:

$14.00 / $14 / 14.00 / $13.99 / 14 / 13.95 / fourteen dollars

All these ways of writing out a price have different connotations.

The Dollar Sign Question

Logically, a dollar sign tends to be associated with having to pay, and having to pay tends to be
associated with losing money, which never really feels like a good thing.

Your guests know that the number next to the menu item means price — it's not necessary to
include a dollar sign. Plus, it just adds visual clutter.

Round Numbers or Decimal Points?

There's a few things to consider here. First, prices ending in .00 can come across as somewhat
pretentious, so unless you're going for a very classic fine dining vibe, it's best to avoid this way
of writing out prices.
You might think it’s better to lower your price to 13.99 because it seems one dollar lower, but
doing so actually cheapens the perceived value your food. Prices ending in .99 do great in
stores when selling clothes or produce, but there's no need for it on most menus. The exception
here is if your big selling point is how incredibly affordable your food is, like in most fast-food
restaurants. For example, a cheeseburger can be $4.99, but a dish of peking duck for two should
be written out as $42 or 42, depending on your preference — but never $41.99.
Interestingly enough, prices ending in .95 can portray friendliness and familiarity, so if that’s
the vibe you’re going for with your restaurant, you can test it out and see if it changes anything.
What about writing out prices in words?
Writing out the price in words, as in "fourteen dollars" or "fourteen," generally comes across
as stuffy, so just like prices ending in .00, most restaurants should avoid this way of writing out
prices.
REYLA, in Asbury Park, NJ, shown above, goes without the dollar signs and without any
decimal points, which matches with their simple and clean menu.
When in doubt, leave out the decimal points and dollar signs.
3. Eye Movement Patterns

Eye movement patterns are a tricky science.

Most restaurant experts say that people's eyes will immediately go to the top of the page or the
top right hand corner. Others rely on the Golden Triangle, which says the eye goes to the middle,
then the top right, and then the top left.
However, according to a Korean research study in the Journal of Global Business and
Technology, a third of your diners are more likely to order the first item they see on the page.
And this San Francisco State study, using scanners and video cameras, revealed that guests read
menus like a book, starting at the top-left.
The menu at Alimentari & Vineria Il Buco, in New York City covers all these bases and puts
their Star menu items in the top right corner, the top left corner, and in the center.
4. Curtail Menu Competition

Michael Kasavana advises that you don’t confuse your guests with similar menu items in one
category. “Restaurateurs need to consider that items compete against each other in the same
menu classification,” he told us.

He explained that people don’t realize that having two different steak options will compete
against each other, instead of driving up profit or giving off the illusion of abundance. It’s best to
develop one fantastic steak dish to remove the competition.

Evolution Cuisine in San Antonio, TX, does a great job with this. Every dish on their menu is
unique, and no item is stepping on the toes of another.
5. Use the Full Power of Words

The names and descriptions of the dishes on the menu are what diners tend to base their ordering
decisions on, so you better be precise and captivating with your menu descriptions. Showing the
details and craftsmanship of how a dish is prepared will help diners appreciate it more.

A field experiment conducted by Dr. Brian Wansink at Cornell University found that not only
do descriptive menu labels increase sales of an item by 27%, but they also result in customers
feeling more satisfied with their meal. This also led to more favorable comments — assuming
that the item lived up to expectations.

When they compared dishes labeled with sensory descriptors like "tender," "succulent," and
"satin"; cultural or geographic terms like "Cajun" and "Italian"; and nostalgic terms like
"homestyle," "traditional," and "Grandma's," versus the same meals without those descriptors,
the items with descriptive labels sold 27% more.

Note: Unless your chef was once a professional copywriter, they shouldn’t be the only one
writing menu descriptions. Instead, let a copywriter or publicist lead the project, with the chef
and managers giving their guidance and feedback.
SuMiao Hunan Kitchen in Cambridge, MA does an amazing job with descriptions. Here’s one
section of their menu, featuring phrases like “daily catch tilapia”, “thirteen spices,” “wok-tossed”
— these are great descriptors that show the quality and care that go into each menu item. This
menu has a great balance of being descriptive without being heavy-handed or using language
that's off-puttingly flowery.

6. Social Proof

Social proof is the theory that people will adopt the beliefs or actions of a group of people they
like or trust. It's the “I’ll have what they’re having” effect.
This is an easy win on your menu — for items you really want to highlight, include a quote from
a customer, a family member, or even the chef. Or simply create a “Staff Favorites” section and
call out a few of your most delicious and profitable items.
Chapter 2: Six Menu Design
Conventions + Examples.
Now that you know about some of the most important principles of menu psychology, it's time to
learn about six more menu design conventions that will help you refresh the look of your menu.

Consider your brand as a whole when thinking about your menu. If a guest took your menu
home as a souvenir, would they remember it was from your restaurant without reading the name?
If your menu matches your restaurant branding, they 100% would. There should be a clear
aesthetic thread across your menu, your food presentation, your decor, and your social media.
Guests should be able to visualize your décor, type of food, price range, and whether you're
casual or upscale dining, all from your menu. If your menu doesn't match the branding in your
restaurant, you're missing out on an opportunity to make the guest experience that much more
memorable.
1. Prioritize Simplicity and Make Great Use of White Space
Any graphic designer will tell you that simplicity is always best: Keep your font size, paper
color, and font style simple, especially if you're designing your menu yourself.

When building your menu, use white space effectively. Don’t clutter your menu with too many
menu items or too much unnecessary information, but also don’t use so much white space that
the customer wonders where the menu actually is.

If you need to fill space, use pictures or include information about your restaurant hours, your
mission, your website, or your social links.

It's also important to make sure your font size is big enough to be easily legible, and use different
font sizes or colors sparingly to denote categories or to highlight items. Don't overcomplicate
your font size, paper color, or font style — leave that to a professional designer.

Going with a simple menu with a few brand touches lets the dishes and their great descriptions
speak for themselves.

Check out this menu from Audrey at the Hammer, in LA. They highlight their name in a creative
way — across all four corners of the menu — and use an Audrey seal of approval at the bottom.
Otherwise, white space around each section helps the reader process the information and choose
the most mouthwatering dish.
2. Design with All Senses in Mind, for All Guests
Think about the usability of your menu; will the low light in your restaurant affect your guests’
ability to read it?
The feel of your menu is also important. If you print flimsy menus that are overly susceptible to
wear and tear (food, grease, water stains), you'll have to spend that much more money replacing
them. Consider laminating your menu or using thicker, high-quality paper to print on instead.
Make sure your menu’s physical size isn’t too extreme. Too small, and some guests will have
trouble reading it. Too large, and it’ll be cumbersome to handle at the table.
Finally, think about your customers with different needs. If you have your menu up on a board
above a prep area, like in many fast-casual restaurants, guests with vision impairments might
have trouble reading it. Print a few copies of the menu to have on hand and offer to guests who
need it.
3. For a Standout Menu, Work With an Artist or Graphic
Designer
Working with a local artist, or a graphic designer, is a great way to make your menu memorable,
and you can ask the artist to help you draw attention to certain high-profit menu items.

Need another reason to invest in working with a graphic designer or an artist? If people love your
menu, you can even sell copies of it as a souvenir for $5. Some restaurateurs choose to make this
a new revenue stream (with a percentage given back to the artist or designer), or donate a
percentage of the profits of selling their menu to a community cause or charity.

Birdie G's in LA went all-in on the graphic design, working with graphic designer Sheila
Buchanan, who used beautiful color combinations and little birds dotted around to bring the
menu to life. They also emphasize different menu items with boxes, circles, and colors — more
on visual callouts below. Click through below to see two pages of their gorgeous menu.
4. Use Boxes and Lines for Visual Direction
Emphasize star and puzzle menu items with a box, a line, a different font color, or a picture —
but remember that the more often you implement these tactics, the less impact they’ll have. If you
want to attract the eye to specific menu items, a good practice is to only emphasize one item per
category at most.
Birdie G's, as seen above, has an amazing menu that uses boxes, colors, and even birds for visual
direction, and it’s extremely effective in attracting the eye to profitable and well-loved items on
their menu. Who wouldn't want to order the Hangtown Brei, seeing as it got it's own circle and
its own little bird to let you know it's so delicious?
5. Include Modifications
While your servers are likely trained to upsell certain items, the menu itself can also play a big
role in increasing check sizes — more on this in the chapter on third-party delivery menus in Part
3.

All potential modifications and add-ons should be listed on your menu. If there’s a burger on the
menu, note the options for bacon, mushrooms, and other offerings as well as the additional price
associated with each.

If it's right there on the menu, you won't have to rely solely on the servers and risk missing out
on easy upsell opportunities.

At Milo + Olive in Santa Monica, CA, the pizza section of the menu highlights all the available
modifications.
6. Use Photos to Help Guests Decide
Renowned menu engineer Gregg Rapp found that including a great photo alongside a food item
increases sales by 30%. Great photos can also help draw guests to foods they wouldn’t have
ordered because they didn’t know what it was.
However, it's less and less common to see photos printed on menus these days, as everyone has
access to photos of your food on social media, and printing full-color photos can be very
expensive.
The best way forward here is to include your social links on your menu, and you can even add a
callout like "check out our instagram for a preview of all our dishes."

On Evolution Cuisine's website, they have a photo gallery right under their menu. This is a great
way to show off your beautiful food without having to print it on your dining room menu.

A word of caution, though: Never use mediocre photos on your menu, website, or on social
media. Better to use no photos than bad photos. To learn more about great food
photography, check out this blog post.
Now, Consider How Your Menu's Divided
Head to the next chapter on choosing between multiple menus or one mega-menu.
Chapter 3: Mega Menu or
Multiple Menus?
Think about the last time you went to a diner. Maybe you were holding a giant, laminated, multi-
page menu that covers everything from breakfast to sides to drinks and dessert.

Think about the last time you went to a fast-casual chain. They likely had a large menu board
above the food prep area, with all the restaurant’s options available at all times.

These two mega-menu methods work well for fast-casual restaurants, but it leaves a bit to be
desired for many other types of restaurants.

You might currently only have one large menu, but it’s worth considering breaking your menu
up into several different menus and engineering each menu to work for the needs of each
category.
Menus for Different Services

For your guests, having different menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner can make a meal’s
experience feel curated, and reduce the burden of choice significantly. Even if your guests know
that your mega-menu is divided into lunch items and dinner items, having so many options is
overwhelming and can make them just order the same thing they always get.

In back of house, multiple menus can make back of house operations go more smoothly, as only
certain menu items will need to be ready for each meal service.

Finally, and most importantly — you can play with your prices by separating your menus,
and optimize each menu for greater profit.

If you have a fettuccine alfredo that’s super popular at lunch and dinner, you can charge $13 for
a lunch portion at lunch, and $16 for a somewhat larger dinner portion that comes with a side of
garlic bread.

Or, if you don’t want to charge more at dinner for the same (or a very similar) option, you can
always divide your items and create a different dining experience in each meal service. If lunch
isn’t as busy as dinner in your restaurant, you can offer high-contribution margin items like
sandwiches and soups. Then, at dinner, you can showcase your more elaborate items, like
noodles and grilled meats.
Chef’s Specials
Chef’s specials are a great way to get rid of inventory that’s got to go, and to create very high-
contribution margin items that’ll boost your profits — but it’s also an opportunity for your chef
and your cooks to get creative, and delight your regulars with something that’s only offered for a
limited time.
Most restaurants do just fine with servers telling guests the daily or weekly specials — but
there’s nothing more frustrating for a guest than when a server riddles off a list of specials and
doesn’t include prices, or if they’re said so quickly that they get overwhelmed and don’t bother
ordering them.

An easy fix for this is writing out your specials on a chalkboard and calling it a day, but
aesthetically this doesn’t work for every restaurant.

In a fine dining context, for example, it can be a nice touch to print a small card with weekly or
daily specials. It shows you want your guests to understand every detail about these limited-time-
only items.

Finally, it’s important to include your specials in your menu engineering analysis, because you
might realize that a special is a Star, and deserves a permanent spot on your menu.
Drinks and Dessert

You can certainly include a drinks section and a dessert section on your menu, especially if you
don’t have very many items on offer in either category. However, if you want to show off your
drinks program and entice your guests to order a dessert, having separate menus for drinks and
for dessert are the way to go.

A well-engineered drinks menu can also help you increase profit significantly. You don’t have to
go through a whole menu engineering analysis for your drinks menu — unless you’re a tiki bar
with tons of cocktails that have a dozen ingredients in them — but it’s worth looking at any
drinks menu through the same lens. Prominently feature special wines, cocktails, and beers that
are on the higher end of the price and quality scale, and de-emphasize your cheap beers and
house wine.

A server can also leave a drinks menu on the table after a guest orders food to encourage them to
peruse the drink options once they've reached the bottom of their first round of drinks.

Having a separate dessert menu to present to your guests after the meal can also encourage them
to buy a little something sweet to end the meal. If you have a pastry chef and a serious dessert
program, you’ll want to go through a menu engineering analysis for your dessert menu and use it
to inform the order in which you present your desserts on your menu.

It's Time to Get Creative with Your Menu

Hit Continue to play with our 17 beautiful menu templates and make them your own.
Assignment: Mess with Our 17
Menu Templates

Now that we’re inspired by a ll these amazing menu examples, think about what
changes you want to make to your menu.

Download and look through these 17 menu templates and edit them to show off your
menu items and branding, and see what works for you. Show your team different
examples of your re-imagined menu, and come up with a plan to make your menu
highlight your most profitable and popular items.
If you don't want to plan a complete menu overhaul, plan to test one change at a time.
For example, keep descriptions, font, and design the same, but change up which menu
item is highlighted in a box, or keep your descriptions, menu item order, and design the
same, but try out a whole new font.
Tests like this can increase purchase rate — for example, if you have a seared scallop and
wilted arugula dish that you're so proud of, but it won't sell, dig it out from the bottom of
the Seafood section and make it stand out with a visual callout like a box, a font change,
or an underline. Leave this change in place for a few months and then compare how the
item's sold since making this change.
A Quick Intro to Your Menu
Online
Online ordering and third-party delivery have become integral parts of running a
restaurant in 2020. If you haven’t explored offering online ordering at your restaurant yet,
you could be missing out on a big chunk of customers that want to eat your food from the
comfort of their own couch.

It’s okay to feel intimidated by the shift to off-premises ordering. We get it — how do
you make sure your hospitality and brand come across if the guest isn’t even setting foot
inside your restaurant? How do make sure the food stays good while in transit, and that
your menu stands out online?

In Part 3 of this course, we’re here to help you get to the bottom of these questions, in
terms of dealing with third-party sites and also on your own website.
Chapter 1: Your Menu on Third-
Party Delivery Sites
Delivery lets you reach new customers — make sure you do it right.

Why deliver, or offer takeout? In short, the people are clamoring for it.

Over the past three years, there has been a massive surge in the demand for delivery. A survey
conducted by the National Restaurant Association showed that in 2019, 60% of dining occasions
were off-premise.

Whether you choose to offer delivery through a third-party delivery app or via your own delivery
service through your restaurant website, you'll have to build out your menu online.

You want your guests to have the same experience looking at your online menu as they would
when looking at your printed menu while sitting in your restaurant. That means making sure your
brand is conveyed they same way on all menus — and that you’re highlighting your stars and de-
emphasizing your dogs, just like you would on paper.

Here are seven important pieces of advice for building out your menu on a third-party delivery
site.

1. Harness the Power of the “People Also Ordered” Module

On some third-party delivery sites, there’s the option to have a “people also ordered” module pop
up right before a guest is about to pay.

According to DoorDash, this module has a huge impact on ticket size and, conversely, sales.
“This is a simple and easy way to provide customers with additional tasty options while also
increasing your overall basket size.”
Using enticing photos in the "people also ordered" module has a big impact, too. “Through
testing, we discovered that conversion increased 14-19% when the add-on included
photography.”
2. Keep an Eye On the “Popular Items” Module
Most third-party delivery sites place a “Popular Items” module at the top of restaurants’ online
menus. This module is usually populated automatically, showing off the items that your online
customers have ordered the most.

However, because these are often the first menu items a potential guest will see — and we
learned that ⅓ of your diners will order the first item they see — it’s important to keep an eye on
this module and which items it’s featuring. The hope is that the module shows off your stars —
your high profit, high popularity items — and not so many plowhorses — low profit, high
popularity items.
If getting more stars featured in this module means promoting your stars across social media to
get more people ordering, or revamping your menu descriptions to make them more attention-
grabbing, do it. You want to do whatever you can to make your stars shine even brighter than
they already do.
3. Provide Lots of Detail
Your guests ordering from your restaurant online won’t have the pleasure of interacting with
your servers or staff, so they won’t have the chance to ask any questions about your menu items.
This just means that you have to spend extra time to really provide thorough descriptions for
every menu item.

Think about every question that’s ever been asked about a particular food or dish you make —
yes, even the questions that seem unnecessary — and provide answers to them in the description.
When someone’s dining in-house, they can send back a dish that didn’t meet their expectations,
and your staff can make sure the issue is fixed without their experience being negatively
impacted. When the guest isn’t in your restaurant, though, it gets more complicated than that, so
you want to make sure the guest has the right expectations when ordering an item.
4. Offer the Ability to Make Modifications
Many people with dietary restrictions choose to order online because it gives them the ability to
list out any modifications and know the modifications are being communicated to the kitchen
exactly as they’re written out.

According to DoorDash, "A whopping 96% of people are customizing their DoorDash orders —
That means it is important to provide your customers with selection and add-ons to choose
from."
On each third-party ordering platform, make sure to allow all available modifications for each of
your menu items. It might sound tedious, but it’s important to your guests. For better or worse,
the modern guest loves customization, and it's a great way for you to increase check size.
5. Ensure Your Branding is Consistent
Even though you’re building your menu on a third-party website that might not allow a ton of
branding modifications, there are still things you can do to make your business's aesthetic shine
through.

The first one’s pretty easy: Upload your logo to be your restaurant’s profile photo, and if you
have the ability to customize the page’s colors, make sure they match your brand colors.

Another easy way to keep your branding consistent on third-party delivery sites is to use the
same tone and voice that you do on your in-person menu, in your restaurant, and across social
media, when describing your menu items.

If you’re using photos, make sure you’re using the same high-quality ones you’re proud to share
on social media and other channels. And speaking of photography…
6. Invest in Great Photography
Remember that no photos are better than bad photos. Photos taken under poor lighting can make
food look seriously unappetizing and could significantly affect your ability to sell your items to
hungry guests.

However, according to DoorDash, “Good photos will set the menu apart: Including a photo of an
item on a menu can increase its sales by up to 30%."
7. Make Sure Traveling Food Stays Fresh
Some foods are made for delivery. There’s a reason pizza’s the classic example of a delivered
meal — it tastes good fresh out of the oven, it tastes good warm, and it still tastes pretty great
cold.

With the surging popularity of online ordering, restaurants everywhere are scrambling to deliver
every item on their menu to the customers who want to eat at home. But before sending out an
order of, say, eggs florentine, consider what might happen to it in transit as it steams and then
cools in the back of a delivery driver’s car (or bike).

If you have a dish that could easily be brought back to life by being toasted, microwaved, or
heated in the oven, include reheating instructions on a little piece of paper, or even in the
customer’s email receipt. This will show your guests that you want their food to be in the best
shape it can be, as if they were dining right in your restaurant.

One important tip from Doordash is to keep your sauces on the side no matter what. “Offering
sauces on the side will ensure that your food doesn’t get soggy in transit. Keep this in mind for
salads especially.”

They also suggest offering canned drinks instead of fountain drinks. “Offer canned beverages:
Canned refreshments are easier for delivery partners to grab and carry than fountain drinks.”
Finally, the most important thing DoorDash said you should do for delivery is to do test
runs. “If a restaurant owner is unsure about offering a certain item, the best thing to do is test it:
wrap the food in foil, let it sit for 30 minutes, then taste in order to get an idea of what the
customer will be getting in the end.”
Chapter 2: Your Menu on Your
Website
When building your restaurant website, think about why a guest would visit your site. They want
to know when you’re open, how to get there, and what they’re going to eat once they’re there.
That’s why the top three most important elements are your critical info (your address, phone
number, and hours of operation), a link to your online ordering site, and your menu.
When you post your menu on your website, always include prices. Upscale restaurants have
sometimes taken to posting their menu without prices online, which isn't at all recommended. It's
extremely off-putting to most of your website-browsing potential guests — only those wealthy
enough to truly not care if an entree is $15 or $65 will feel comfortable coming to your
restaurant. It even pushes away guests who don't usually spend a lot on dinner, but are looking to
splurge for a special occasion, because no one likes going into an experience without knowing
how much it'll cost.
On your website itself, you can either have your menu written out in HTML text on a Menu page
on your website — that is, built right into your website — or have a link to a PDF file of your
printed menu, or both. We recommend having both, for two important reasons:
 1
Accessibility. It’s important to consider your guests with different needs, and PDF files
are harder for screenreader programs to read aloud to potential guests with vision
impairments.
 2
Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Here's online menu SEO 101: When you have a
webpage with text on it, search engine crawlers read the content on the page and make
sure that it pops up when a person searches a relevant search term — and crawlers can't
always read the content in PDF files.

For example, if you're a Mexican restaurant in Louisville, people who search "mexican
restaurant louisville" in Google will be served your restaurant as a search result.
However, if your menu includes tacos, you also want the search term of "tacos louisville"
to make your restaurant's website pop up.

If you have a text-based page on your website where tacos are listed on the menu,
the crawlers will find the tacos on the menu and serve up your restaurant's website
to the searcher. However, if you only have PDF of your menu on your website, your
restaurant won't come up in that "tacos louisville" search.

Make Your Website Stand Out

If you work with a web designer, you put together an beautiful, stylized online menu experience,
like they have at Eat Your Fish in Philadelphia, PA. It aligns perfectly with the rest of their
brand, every menu item is photographed and featured throughout the page. Every section of the
menu is broken up with a clickable carousel of photos of all the items featured in the above
section. They also offer a PDF of the menu at the bottom of the page.
Check out a video walkthrough of Eat Your Fish's menu page below.
Play Video

Lucha Libre Taco Shop in San Diego, CA has an awesome menu page, too: the color scheme and
icons match their brand and make it feel like you’re looking at the menu in the restaurant, but
from the comfort of your couch. They also have a prominent, hot-pink Order Online button in the
top-right corner.
Check out a video walkthrough of Lucha Libre's menu page below.
Play Video

But even if you don’t have the budget to work with a graphic designer, that’s ok — sites
like Squarespace offer amazing, professional-looking restaurant website templates to work off of
and customize.
Remember to only use photos if you have excellent, professional-quality photos, and keep in
mind that simplicity is best.
Assignment: Bring Your Online
Presence into 2020
We know it's really hard to keep your online presence current while you're busy running a whole
entire restaurant. But take this assignment as an opportunity to spend half an hour updating
your online presence.

Start by opening an incognito or private window in your browser, Googling your restaurant, and
seeing what comes up when a brand-new guest Googles you for the first time.

Then, update your website and its menu page, update your social media pages, and most
importantly, update your Google My Business page.
 1
Do you have an old photo of a dish that you no longer offer? Remove it.
 2
Have your opening hours changed? Update them.
 3
Does your Facebook cover photo feature a color scheme that clashes with your new
branding? Change it.
 4
Is your menu up to date everywhere it's posted? Remove the old menus and upload new
ones, wherever your menu is hosted. That means making sure your menu on Facebook,
Google My Business, your website, and all online ordering sites are the exact same.
Menu aggregators like SinglePlatform can help with this.
A Quick Intro to Your Menu
When You're Growing
One of the most exciting milestones in a restaurant's existence is once you realize that
your first restaurant is doing so well that you want expand and serve more guests in a
new location.

There's so much that goes into that decision: you need to be sure your first restaurant is
profitable enough to shoulder the cost of expanding, you need to be sure you have enough
great staff members to fill the ranks in your new location, you need to be sure your
suppliers also service the area of the new location — and countless other factors.

But one thing's for sure: your food needs to be just as wonderful in your second location
as it is in your first — and that remains true when you expand to two locations, then to
four locations, then to ten, and if you ever decide to franchise.

Your menu will need to be refreshed and modified every time you expand. In Part 4 of
this course, we'll be showing you how.
Chapter 1: Going from One Menu
to Two
When you’re opening a new location for the first time, it’s important to do some serious research
into your new location, even before you sign a lease.
Do a Deep Dive Into Your New Neighborhood
What are the demographics of your new clientele? What other competing restaurants are in the
neighborhood? How will these two questions impact your menu?

To help you predict how your menu will perform in your new location, do as much research as
you can into the demographics of your new neighborhood, and use your findings to create a new
target guest avatar that represents the majority of the new clientele you hope to attract.

Then, once you know all about them and what they like, check in with your menu and see if
there's anything that'll need to change. For example, if your new clientele is much younger than
the clientele in your first restaurant, you may need to adjust for more vegetarian-friendly items.
Plan For a Change of Scenery

You’ll also want to take into account the differences of the physical space. If your new location
is significantly bigger or smaller than your first location, you’ll want to consider the impact
that’ll have on your back-of-house operations.

If your kitchen is half the size, your menu should be pared down significantly — but you should
prioritize your high-contribution margin items: your Stars and your Puzzles.
How Will Your Menu Grow With You?

There are two schools of thought when it comes to expansion and your menu.

You can prioritize brand consistency and keep your menu exactly as it is to try to build the
same experience in your new restaurant, or you can make minor tweaks to reflect the different
desires and needs of your new clientele.
You always go with the best of both worlds: open with the same menu to start, ask for feedback
from your new community, and then adjust it according to their feedback.
Analyze Your New Menu
However you choose to proceed, doing a menu engineering analysis is a crucial step in
expanding your restaurant to a second location.

Once your second location is up and running, and you feel that things have leveled out after the
madness of opening, it’s time to do some more menu engineering. That’s right — your menu
engineering spreadsheet could look very different from one location to the next, because you’re
dealing with two completely different clienteles.
An item that’s a puzzle in one location might become a star in your second location, and a dog
might become a plowhorse. This means that you should take your findings and adjust your
menu as you see fit.
Chapter 2: Your Menu when
Franchising
If you’ve decided to go down the path of franchising your business, you’re about to get very
familiar with the process of standardization.
You’ll need to create iron-clad documentation about absolutely every moving part in your
restaurant — from how you manage your staff, how you want your customer experience to go, to
how you organize your fridge, to how each recipe is made, down to the ½ teaspoon. This is
where having a solid bible of standard operating procedures is key: not only should every cook at
every location know exactly how you want the guacamole to be made, but they should also know
which size container to make it in, and how long a batch can sit in the fridge before it's not fresh
anymore.
Because of this, you'll want to be selective about how you pick your franchisees. Start slow and
only work with people who you know will uphold the high standards — for everything, from
menu to management — that got you to where you are today.
Decide Who's in Charge of What
When you’re a business owner who has franchises, any menu decisions you make will have a
large-scale impact, which is why it’s so important to back up any changes with solid menu
engineering analysis.

You'll have to decide whether the menu item pricing will be your responsibility, or that of your
franchisees — and along with that, who'll have to do menu engineering analysis every quarter (or
even more often).

As a franchisor, you won’t be around or responsible for most of the everyday operations in a
restaurant, so you won’t have as much context to understand local trends in popularity and
profitability. Instead of making decisions based only on numbers and enforcing them from on
high, make sure you communicate often with your franchisees and try to gather context from
them, or assign a lot of the pricing work to the franchisees themselves.

For example, if you want to incorporate a rotating roster of local beers at all your locations, you
might want your franchisees have the autonomy to price those as they see fit.
Menu Engineering Results Will Vary Across Locations
You’ll want your brand to stay completely consistent across all your locations, but that doesn’t
mean franchisees can’t reorder or emphasize different menu items to reflect regional or local
menu engineering analysis. Why is this flexibility important? Because the prices of ingredients
will vary from location to location, so some of your Stars may be less profitable and could turn
into Plowhorses instead.
If your most profitable item in Boston is more expensive to make in Omaha, your franchisees
can use a visual callout to promote a more profitable item on your Omaha menu, or create ads on
social media to promote their location's Stars and Puzzles. Speaking of social media...
Consider Social Media Menu Promotion
You'll have to decide how consistent your social media presence will be across locations. Will
each location have a different social media accounts where they can share about different menu
items and promotions as they see fit, like at Capriotti's? Or will there be one big social media
strategy for the whole empire, like at In-N-Out?
There's pros and cons to each, but the biggest point in favor of letting each franchisee run a
social media account for their store is that they can leverage the power of social media when
trying to push a menu item that's been lagging in sales lately, or to show off a new special that
they're only running at certain locations.
One More Piece of Advice
If you're dipping your toes into the wild world of franchising, find yourself a mentor who has
gone from restaurant ownership, to expansion, to franchising. Talk to someone who's done it
before, and find out what they wish they'd known before they started.
Go Forth and Make the Most of
Your Menu
14 lessons and 4 assignments later, you made it to the end of the menu engineering
course!

You know about what it takes to do menu engineering, how to create a gorgeous menu,
how to optimize your menu online, and how to adjust your menu when you're growing.

You know your Stars, Puzzles, Plowhorses, and Dogs like the back of your hand, and
you've got a plan in place to make aesthetic improvements and adjustments for greater
profit. You're ready to approach changes in diner behavior when it comes to off-premise
eating, and to think about your restaurant's future.

Now that you've got the tools to make the most of your menu, find out how you can
optimize every aspect of your restaurant's business with Toast POS, because the
best restaurant tech makes menu engineering easy. Click here to request a
demo today.