What is menu engineering and why do our restaurant consultants advocate for it? Menu engineering is a careful analysis of your menu—its offerings, its design, but also, what’s selling. Taking pricing and popularity into account, our restaurant consultants organize your menu based on buyer psychology, considering where your guests will look first, what they might have had recommended to them, and how add-ons and pricing will affect their decision-making and most importantly steer your guests to your most profitable and popular items.
Menu engineering impacts more than just your bottom line, although it is the smartest way to ensure you meet your financial goals. Menu engineering helps restaurant owners navigate supply chain issues, market trends, and food safety concerns, and it is deeply connected to marketing efforts and the customer experience.
While our restaurant consultants have years of expertise in optimizing menus, the chief data source is always the customer. As Nation’s Restaurant News (NRN) shares in this recent piece, “qualitative and quantitative research [of your menu] can be leveraged to identify opportunities for improvement, streamline menu offerings without jeopardizing sales or customer satisfaction, fine-tune pricing, and objectively validate the most effective optimization strategy for your menu communications.”
The suggestion is a means of conducting real-time research on how customers are using your menu, to aid in the most effective menu engineering. “This in-depth research is an effective way to understand how consumers are using your current menuboard communications; to recognize consumers’ attitudes toward their usage of menu communications on an absolute basis and as compared to the menuboards they encounter at competitive brands; and to ascertain attribute/benefit criteria that impact their attitudes, with an emphasis on identifying aspects that might be leveraged to drive higher ticket sales, promote the trial of new/different menu items, improve brand perceptions, and increase the speed of service,” writes Howland Blackiston for NRN.
Blackiston’s method includes tactics for both quantitative and qualitative research, without impeding too much on the customer’s experience. He suggests combining the collected data with other menu analyses, all of which our restaurant consultants make a regular part of our consulting services. The data can be used beyond menu engineering also, helping owner operators to craft better marketing, better operations, and better customer services overall.
Working with a consultant at National Restaurant Consultants is the simplest way to streamline these methods into a professional, effective system with a proven track record. “Menu engineering often results in reduced costs, increased sales, and most importantly, improved profits and cash flow,” writes Richard Weil, principal and owner of National Restaurant Consultants.