Building an attractive menu is essential if you want a successful restaurant. It's your business's storefront, and every detail should be designed with a single focus: selling more. And there are plenty of details!
To create a restaurant menu, you need to think not only about the dishes and drinks you'll offer, but also about pricing, sales strategies and design. All of it influences your results.
Whether you're creating your first menu or thinking about making changes to improve the one you have, check out the tips below and learn how to make your menu more profitable!
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What impact does the menu have on a restaurant's profitability?
Before you start building your restaurant's menu, it's important to keep in mind that it isn't just a list of the dishes you offer. It is one of the most powerful tools for guiding and influencing your customers' choices.
What's more, the way it's designed can also affect production costs, inventory management, purchasing and other aspects that directly impact your business's profitability.
From the way item prices are displayed to the colors used, including ingredient selection and cost management — every detail of the menu matters and has the potential to increase sales and improve results.
With all that in mind, check out our tips below for creating a strategic menu for your restaurant!
Leia também: Prix fixe meals: how to build the perfect menu
7 Tips to Create a More Profitable Restaurant Menu
As we've seen, various aspects of the menu can impact profitability. By applying the tips below, you can achieve the benefits we mentioned earlier. Keep reading to learn more!
1. Faça engenharia de cardápio
If you already have a menu and have been operating for a while, the first thing to do before implementing changes is an objective analysis of what works best.
Identify which items are most popular and profitable will help you structure a more efficient menu, highlighting the most relevant dishes and removing what doesn't provide returns.
A engenharia de cardápio is the technique used for that.
2. Include Strategic Pricing
In addition to pricing proper pricing of each menu item, ensuring they are truly profitable for the business and attractive to customers, you can also use strategies in price presentation to influence customer decisions.
The first tip is do not use dollar signs ($) in front of values. Isso porque os consumidores tendem a gastar mais quando o cardápio não tem esse símbolo. Pode parecer algo bobo, mas ele representa custos, gastos, e pode gerar sentimentos negativos que fazem o cliente parar para pensar e acabar decidindo não comprar.
In addition, the way prices are presented can affect customers' perception of values. Por exemplo: pratos com os preços ligeiramente mais altos podem fazer com que os pratos adjacentes pareçam mais acessíveis, influenciando assim a decisão.
Check out Step by step: How to Price a Product
3. Highlight the Most Profitable Items
Creating a menu that simply lists all dishes one below the other without any differentiation is wasting the opportunity to direct customer choices toward what is most advantageous for your business.
So, identify which dishes bring better returns and give them the highlight they deserve! Areas like the top right corner and footer usually work well. You can use good images and colors to grab attention.
Furthermore, another tip is to create promotions and offers for these items to encourage customer choice. This way you sell more of what is most profitable.
4. Use Upselling and Cross Selling
These are two well-known and effective strategies to increase your average ticket. Why not incorporate them into your menu? If you present the options to your customers, they will certainly end up consuming more.
O upselling is the practice of offering more expensive or additional options. A classic example: a large portion of fries for a slightly higher price than a small portion. The customer ends up choosing the larger one because it's better value.
As for cross selling is the strategy of recommending complementary items, like traditional hamburger, soft drink, and fries combos. Because the price is more advantageous, customers choose this option, even if they didn't initially intend to order a soft drink, for example.
An important point is: don't forget to consider the costs of each item when planning these options. After all, the idea is to increase profitability, and if you include items with high production costs, it could backfire.
The secret to success is combining the most profitable items with the most popular ones.
5. Offer a Tasting Menu
This is another way to increase your average ticket and, at the same time, offer a differentiated experience for your customers.
O tasting menu includes appetizers, main courses, desserts, and beverages to pair. The idea is to present the restaurant's main dishes in smaller portions so customers can try them.
Although it started in fine dining restaurants, the concept is now being applied in all types of establishments, such as burger joints, snack bars and more casual restaurants.
Also check out: Fine Dining Menu: How to Stand Out?
6. Do Proper Cost Management
A well-planned menu takes into account all costs involved in producing dishes and drinks. Proper cost management in the restaurant is fundamental to achieving high profitability.
Ingredient availability, inventory control, and food waste are points that should be observed, as they can contribute to cost reduction and profit increase.
Therefore, create a menu that makes the most of ingredients and facilitates supply management.
If you include an item on the menu that requires a specific ingredient, for example, you'll have to negotiate with a new supplier. This supply will be used in only one dish, which not only raises production costs but also requires more work for logistics, inventory control, technical specifications, etc.
7. Pay Attention to Menu Presentation
Finally, it's very important to think about menu presentation: creative names, objective and clear descriptions, layout, images, colors, and item arrangement. All of this has a major impact on customer decisions.
The best way to create a menu is to hire a specialized professional. But if you can't invest in that now, there are various models and tools available that make creation easier, like Canva, for example.
Leia também: Types of menus: discover 13 models and make the ideal choice
Discover the Benefits of Digital Menu
As we've seen, a well-planned restaurant menu has the potential to increase sales, average ticket, and your business's profitability. And these results can be enhanced with technology.
O digital menu is a trend being used in establishments of all types and has advantages such as:
- It's more attractive and interactive
- Improves customer experience
- Makes service much faster
- It's simpler and easier to make changes
- Highlights promotions and provides suggestions
- Collects customer profile and consumption behavior data
In addition to all these benefits, restaurants using a solution like EPOC GO, achieve the following results:
- 31% reduction in operational costs
- 15-minute reduction in table occupancy time
- 12% increase in tips via tablet payments
That's because, in addition to being a cardápio digital por QR Code, EPOC GO also allows customers to place orders and make payments directly from their own phone.
In other words: it's a complete self-service solution. And it's also integrated with PDV, Back office e KDS, providing much more efficiency for your business.
If you want to better understand how it works and how EPOC solutions can contribute to your restaurant's success, schedule a free demo and talk to our specialists.
