Airport Experience® News - Food & Beverage Issue 2023

SEAN WILLARD Menu engineer at Menu Engineers

right tends to be a sweet spot so we tend to put our highest, most profitable entree items there,”Willard says. “Withmost diners, their eyes will go there first. Some people read a menu like a book, so they’ll start in the top left and go down and bounce over but that’s a minority of people. But that top right is a known sweet spot so we try to make sure that our key items are placed there.” Highlighting certain menu items – with borders, photos or other methods – can also influence customers to choose it, so it

The order in which a restaurant lists menu items, and their placement on the menu, can significantly inf luence purchasing patterns, says Sean Willard of Menu Engineers . “When you are building the menu itself, one of the key points is primacy and recency,” he says. “So what people read first and what they read last, they will remember those” and be more likely to purchase those items. Willard says a “backbone” strategy is to list menu items sequentially in profitability, starting with the most expensive item. “Then what we’ll do is maybe pull the second or the third most profitable item and pop that down to the bottom of the list,” he says. “We’re really playing on that primacy and recency principle.” That strategy is applicable for a linear menu, but on a multi-panel menu the customer’s eye tracks differently. “The top

Above: Tom Cook, a principal at restaurant and food service consulting firm King-Casey.

in addition to what you can do visually with the menu. But, that said, it’s a balancing act because you don’t want to give too much. Supply chain issues can also be a factor, he adds, because restaurants might not be able to consistently source certain products. For example, heralding the use of tomatoes from a local farm can be precarious if supplies aren’t more or less guaranteed. A Basic Framework Cook says there are four or five principles and absolutes of good menu optimization. “The first key one is identifying and leveraging ‘hot spots’ on menus,” he says. “It’s where customers look first. A handheld menu has certain hotspots, a menu board, a digital menu all have certain hotspots, and they vary. Whatever your menu communication medium is, you need to know where those hotspots are because that’s where you want to put your key products. “Another strategy is allocating real estate according to the numbers,” Cook says. On a menu board, for example, categories that outperform in volume and profit should be given more space than underperformers. “It’s not democratic,” he says. “Too many times we see menus giving an inordinate amount of space to categories that really represent very little of the business. Cook advocates listing the categories and products in order of sales and profitability, “because that’s the way consumers tend to read.” He also pushes for a strong upselling component within the menu. “There’s promoting meals and pairing and combos and customization – moving to a premium ingredient,” he says. “Those should be incorporated into any menu in order to optimize the business performance.

Left: Sean Willard, a menu engineer at Menu Engineers.

Source: Menu Engineers.

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