Hey, everybody. It’s Ryan Gromfin here - author, speaker, chef, restaurateur,
and the founder of TheRestaurantBoss.com,
as well as RestaurantCoachingClub.com
If you're a restaurant owner, operator, manager,
highly motivated employee
and just anyone in the restaurant or bar business,
you've absolutely landed in the right place because today
I'm going to share with you the top seven profit exploding
menu engineering tips
that you could put into play pretty much immediately
into your menu to increase profits.
I'm going to show you exactly how to do it right here.
So what exactly is menu engineering?
We hear this term thrown around a lot.
Well, it's the art and science of maximizing profits
through design and item placement on a menu.
And what does all that mean?
Well, it's basically our way of influencing customers
to purchase what you want them to purchase.
There's no Jedi ninja mind tricks here or anything unethical,
or that's not aboveboard, but
we basically want to influence your diners to order the items
that you want them to order. Whether it be the easiest to prepare the highest profit,
whatever works best for you. We're going to go over all that here in a second.
So, I want to share with you an example - the power of menu engineering.
Here's a case study.
I had a client who came to me the end of the year a few months ago and he said,
I want to take my wife on vacation but I can't afford one.
Well, to give you an idea folks, this is not a high grossing restaurant,
as you'll see when we go through these examples.
All this client wanted was a little extra money
at the end of the year to take his wife on a well-deserved vacation.
Let me show you how we not only created enough income to do that,
but we blew it out of the water here. Let me show you something.
So on this person's old menu,
they were doing on average 5,718 dollars
and 87 cents per week for an average of 709 covers,
which is an 8 dollar and six cents per person or check average.
A month later, after we implemented the changes that I'm going to share with you
here today,
the sales went up to 6794 dollars and
52 cents in a week for 745 covers,
which was the average, so that created a 9 dollars and 12 cents per person
or check average. That's all we're really interested here and I'm going to show you why.
That's a 1 dollar and 6 cent increase in check average.
Now with that 1 dollar and 6 cents increase,
this goes straight to the bottom line. Don't forget,
there's no extra labor here. He didn't have to buy any extra food
there was no added expenses other than maybe the forty or fifty dollars
it cost to reprint his menus,
but he added a dollar and six cents per customer who walked into his restaurant.
Let's look at what this will look like over the course of the year here.
On an average of 709 covers, again I'm using the lower of the two averages here.
On an average of 709 covers,
that's seven hundred and fifty-one dollars and fifty-four cents in increased sales
per week,
which is thirty-nine thousand eighty dollars and eight cents over
the period of 52 weeks or one year.
I think it's safe to say that this restaurant owner can take his wife on a very,
very nice vacation at the end of the year
and still have a lot of money left over and as you saw going through those examples,
this restaurant was only doing six to seven thousand dollars in sales a week.
This is not a high-volume restaurant,
huge grossing restaurant.
Imagine these same statistics in your restaurant.
How many covers do you do in your restaurant?
How much can a little change make? So, let's get right into this.
Let me share this with you.
So my first tip. Tips one through five.
These are tips that I say any restaurant owner anywhere can do because
you don't need to know the cost of your menu items.
Most restaurant owners don't know the cost of their menu items.
I highly suggest that you do, but if you don't, that's okay.
We were still able to have a dramatic impact.
Actually, this restaurant owner didn't know the cost of his menu items
and so let me share with you.
Tip number one is, don't put dollar signs anywhere on
your menu at all.
Tip number two is to hide the price in the text.
I'm going to show you a visual example of this in a second.
Number three - don't bold the prices.
We don't want to draw attention to the prices, we don't want to hide them but we don't want
people to make their first decision based on the price.
Step number four is to use a smaller font for numbers.
Numbers have a way of looking larger than letters do.
So you want to bump your font down one or two points to make them look
more even, more the same.
And tip number five - don't use even dollars on your menu
I mean the 16 or 17 dollars.
unless you're ultra-fine-dining. If you're high-end fine dining and you're in that
22-24-28 dollar,
30-40-50-dollar range,
then the even numbers I think work better, but I'm going to explain to you why we
don't want to do that here in a second.
So, let's take a look. I know this is a little small for you to see, but here's an example
of a menu that draws attention right to the price.
See all these dashed and dotted lines,
there drawing your attention right to the price.
So, the first thing you're going to do is make a decision.
Your finger is going to just scroll down this menu here and see something that you can afford,
or that you want to spend. You go, oh! 9.95, it's the cheapest thing
I've seen so far, I will have those,
rather than reading the description first ad making your decision that way.
Let me show you a better example of this. When you look over here at this menu,
even though we're using even prices which I don't recommend and I'll explain to you
why in a second, this actually happened to be a perfect mistake.
The person who is formatting this menu
did bold prices in one section and non-bold
prices in the other section, and when I saw it, I thought, wow, what a great example.
You actually see it on the same page, but if you notice how
this first section with the bold prices, even though they're buried in the text,
your eye still goes directly to those prices, and then you
come over here to see what it is.
Whereas down here, where the price is buried,
I find that my eye naturally doesn't find the price right away
and I start reading the description.
So, I might decide wow, Duck Mole in a sour red-orange sauce, that sounds great.
And then I'll see the price, but I've already decided I want that duck
rather than scanning down and seeing 24 dollars and then seeing eighteen dollars
and going, you know what? I will have that.
So tip number six - this is a little more advanced and this is if you
know how much your items cost, position is everything.
You want to find the sweet spot. So let's go over this really quickly here.
On a 1 panel menu, the sweet spot is usually
a little bit to the right and a little bit higher than center and then your eye goes up over
and down.
On a 2 panel menu, same thing. You kind of find yourself over in the right,
maybe upper right of the menu and then it follows this kind of pattern
of kind of zigzagging back and forth, and this was done
in studies in the 70s and 80s where they actually
had some kind of camera behind a menu and they could track
and they would track where people's eyes went on the menu,
then on a three-panel menu, this is your prime position or your sweet
spot and it kind of follows the same pattern as the two-panel menu.
So, I just wanted to give you guys a quick one on kind of positioning here.
And then tip number seven – again, this would require you to know how much your items cost.
Use boxes, borders, bold text colors, or photos to draw
a guess attention to high-profit items.
So again, here's an example of a menu
where not only this is a single panel menu,
it's hard to tell because it's a white menu and it’s a white background but it's a single panel menu
and if you notice, not only did they box the sweet spot right here
which is where your eye goes, or I'm sorry…
but they also boxed it in which is really drawing your attention.
This quite obviously are the items that this restaurant wants to sell more of.
These are most likely their highest profit items on the menu.
So, I know we went through this kind of quickly here.
If you need any more answers to questions
that you may have or if you have any questions,
please go ahead wherever you're watching this,
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You can come over and check that out.
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so you can get more updates like this every week.
I hope you guys enjoyed what you saw here. I know this was a really brief overview
of menu engineering. Again, please reach out to me somehow someway
if you have more questions or if you want to share your menu with me.
I'm more than happy to give you a free consultation.
Take a look at your menu if we can get you results
like we did for the gentleman that I showed in that
case study earlier today.
An extra forty thousand dollars
might help your life or your restaurant a little bit.
So again, my name is Ryan Gromfin I'm with TheRestaurantBoss.com
as well as RestaurantCoachingClub.com
Please reach out to me, please subscribe. Forward this on to Facebook or Twitter
or wherever you would love to share this information.
I really appreciate you spending the time with me here
and I hope you guys have an absolutely wonderful day.
Thank you. Bye-bye.