9 Menu Engineering Design Tips & Secrets That Will Boost Your Sales

What is the first thing you look for when you visit a restaurant’s website or location? The menu, of course. Just by looking at your menu, clients decide if they want to dine at your place and how much they are going to spend.

But did you know that with a few simple menu psychology tips and tricks, you can both increase customer satisfaction and persuade clients to order more?

We’ll teach you all about it in this in-depth article containing menu engineering design tips:

What is menu engineering?

Menu engineering is the process of optimizing your menu to highlight the most popular and profitable items. It requires two main steps:

• Analyzing all menu items and calculating food costs for each to determine which ones have the higher profit margin and which ones clients usually order;
• Implementing menu engineering design tips to persuade customers to order more of your high-profit menu items and increase the average order value.

What is the purpose of menu engineering?

One of the main objectives of menu engineering is to maximize your profit. You can engineer anytime you notice your sales are stagnant, but ideally, you should do it before you even open the restaurant to achieve success from the start.

Here are the main benefits of menu engineering:

• Cost management: food costs are the main reason restaurants go out of business. If you engineer your menu, you get a chance to adjust prices or adapt recipes to make every menu item profitable;
• Better customer experience: if you implement menu engineering design tips, you make the ordering experience intuitive and pleasant. Clients can easily find what they want, without the choice paralysis provoked by too many options;
• Standing out from the competition: customers will usually browse the online menus of a few restaurants before choosing one to dine at. If your menu is both easy to access and engineered for clients’ preferences, you increase your chances of being the chosen one;
• Less food waste: knowing what menu items sell best, you can plan your ingredients accordingly and won’t have to throw away spoiled ingredients.

9 Restaurant menu engineering design tips

If you want to create a persuasive menu that clients won’t be able to resist, follow these easy-to-implement menu engineering design tips:

1. Add vivid imagery to illustrate your menu items

Did you know that having some great-looking images accompanying the food items on your menu has the potential to increase restaurant sales by 30%?

The phrase “we eat with our eyes first” is particularly true for online menus, where people want to know how their food will look like before they order.

Therefore, invest in a professional photographer or learn more about restaurant photography so you can add mouth-watering images to your menu items. Hungry clients won’t be able to resist a delicious-looking photograph.

2. Add the visual content on the left side of your menu

The right hemisphere is in charge of our more creative side. And that means that it is our right side hemisphere that helps us process images. Or any type of graphic content for that matter.

However, what few people know is that the right side of the brain is responsible for controlling the left side of the body. Due to this in-built neuroanatomical structure, the right hemisphere can best process images when they’re located on the left side of the menu:

So when you show your client a menu that their tired mind can process extremely fast, then this produces an enjoyable sensation in their brain. And they attributes it to the menu that’s currently sitting in front of them.

When you place images and graphics on the left side of your ad, you increase processing fluency. This refers to the ease and speed with which our brains process information.

But why is this important?

Well, by placing most of your menu images on the left side, your customers will be able to process your promotional materials quickly.

You might also like: How to Build a Restaurant Menu That Will Skyrocket Your Online Sales

3. Position the products to help customers visualize eating the food

Menu item placement matters. Ok, so what does that mean? Well, in layman’s terms, this tactic encourages mental interaction with the product that you’re selling.

And helps your customers visualize eating the food they’re seeing in the picture.

Take a look at the two mouth-watering images below. Although they’re the same, the one on the right will seem more appealing to your right-hand customers.

Because it will help your customers see themselves grabbing a slice of that hot pizza with dripping mozzarella.

This is like a mental incentive that pushes them towards placing an online order with you.

4. Keep the menu short

The customer shouldn’t spend more than 10 minutes deciding on what to eat because they will grow frustrated, and it will also slow your table turnover. To avoid this, stick to a short one-page menu that will:

• Increase customer satisfaction: if you eliminate the choice paradox where clients can’t decide on what to have, you create a better experience for your clients;
• Decrease food costs and food waste: with a limited number of menu items, you have to buy fewer ingredients that you can use before they go bad.

Read more: Why Restaurants with Small Menus Are More Successful [+ Template]

Download our free small menu template here.

5. Use descriptive language in the menu item descriptions

Menu items with well-written descriptions can increase sales by up to 27%. If you want to convince customers to order, don’t just list the ingredients, but try to describe how they taste.

Keep the menu descriptions short and follow these tips:

• Use adjectives to describe taste and texture such as “velvety chocolate pudding with freshly baked cinnamon rolls”;
• Humanize the dishes: tell people what makes the menu item special, be it ingredients, recipe, or type of preparation. For example “porchetta roasted on an open fire, after a traditional Italian recipe”;
• Bring some humor: if you branded your restaurant as a fun persona, make it visible in your descriptions, like “easy-peasy lemon-squeezy pea hummus with a hint of citrus”;

Read more: 3 Secret Menu Writing Tips: The BEST Food Descriptions that Make You Hungry

6. Display menu pricing with no currency signs or decimals

One of the simplest menu engineering design tips is to change the way you display menu pricing, following tips from researchers at Cornell University:

• Remove currency signs and decimals such as .99 you often see in stores: clients are less likely to be price-sensitive if they don’t see them and will often order more;
• Make prices the same size, font, and color as the menu item title: this way, the price blends in with the rest of the information, and people choose exactly what they want to eat, even if it is more expensive than they originally intended.

Read more: Restaurant Menu Pricing Strategies to Help Your Business Thrive

7. Highlight the most profitable menu items

When people scan a single-page menu item, their eyes tend to focus on the items located at the beginning and at the end. To take advantage of this knowledge, implement the following menu engineering design tips:

• Split your menu into categories: such as mains, appetizers, sides, and desserts, and place the items you want to sell the most at the top and bottom of each category;
• Place expensive items near less-expensive, yet high-profit margin items: this will determine people to choose the less expensive option that will bring you a higher profit;
• Use signs to highlight dishes: for example, you can mark items as Hot, Vegan, Halal, Nut-free, Dairy-free, etc.

Read more: 7 Most Profitable Menu Items to Include in Your Restaurant Menu

8. Provide clients with menu choices and add-ons

Since the purpose is to get your clients to order more food – and spend big time – providing them with additional and related products will certainly do the trick.

All crafty marketers use this technique to sell you something, whether it’s McDonald’s fries or that extended warranty for your fancy new phone or TV.

And they’re successful because they make you feel that you need that extra additional product. And sometimes our needs intertwine with our wants.

So that’s exactly what you should do – give your clients the chance to add…

• extra snacks, like french fries
• extra pizza toppings
• or/and provide them with some of your most delicious dessert options

Read more: How to Improve Your Restaurant Menu with Choices and Add-ons
<h3id=”display”>9. Display promotions at the top of the menu

The great thing about online restaurant menus is that you can display irresistible promotions right at the top. You can also make them available for dine-in clients if you use a QR code restaurant menu.

For them to be efficient, they must be at the top of the menu, so they are the first thing a client notices. With targeted restaurant promotions, you can:

• Attract more customers: offer first-time clients a discount or a freebie to encourage them to place an order;
• Get more loyal clients: create loyalty promotions where clients get a free dessert or a considerable discount after they place six orders;
• Increase the average order value: by conditioning the promotion with a certain order value, such as free delivery over $60.

To learn how to set up your first promotion in minutes, check out this video tutorial:

Enjoy the benefits of menu engineering without the work

Implementing these nine menu engineering design tips can help you considerably increase restaurant sales and client satisfaction.

Of course, doing all this is easier said than done. So we took it one step further and we created an online menu builder that helps you automate this entire process. And enables you to make the most of all these psychological hacks. Here’s how:

So use our ordering system to engineer your menu and increase your revenue. Oh, and here’s an added benefit – you can also leave your competitors in a cloud of dust. It’s that simple.

The ball is in your court now.