Menu Psychology

The menu is the heart of the restaurant. It embodies the restaurant’s demographics, concept, physical factors, and personality.

Menu engineers are tapping into a growing body of research into the science of menu pricing and writing; hoping the way to a diner’s heart is not only through the stomach, but through the unconscious

“The average person makes more than 200 decisions about food every day, many of them unconsciously, including choices made from reading menus.”

-Brian Wansick, director of Food and Brand lab at Cornell University

1.The Upper Right Hand Corner

2.The Price Anchor

3.Bonus Boxes

4.Columns

5.Menu Siberia

6.The Small/Large Plate Conundrum

 1.Upper- Right Hand Corner

This is the prime spot where diners’ eyes automatically go first. This restaurant isn’t taking any chances, with a picture drawing the eye to the most expensive dishes. Photographs are among the most powerful motivators but, extensively used in low-end chain restaurants. This restaurant’s tasteful drawing is about as far as a restaurant of this calibre can go.

2..Decoy Pricing (The Anchor)

The restaurants high profit dishes tend to cluster near the anchor, making their prices seem more reasonable.

Menu consultants use this prime space for high-profit items (stars), and price “anchors”. This restaurant’s anchor is the seafood plate for $115. By putting high-profit items next to the extremely expensive anchor, they seem cheap by comparison. So, the triple-figure price here is probably to induce customers to go for the $70 Le Grand plate to the left of it, or the more modest seafood orders below it.

3.Bonus Boxes

A box around a menu item draws the diner’s attention. Is $16 such an indulgence for a shrimp cocktail, they might think? Not next to a $115 extravaganza! A really fancy box is better yet.

4.Columns

The most common menu mistake is listing prices in a column, as here, because it encourages diners to choose from the cheapest items, instead of choosing what they want and then deciding if it’s worth it. But at least the restaurant menu doesn’t use leader dots, which draw the diners’ gaze away from the dishes to the prices.

5.Menu Siberia

This is where low-margin dishes that the regulars like end up. Or, this can be where unprofitable dishes (plowhorses and dogs), like a plate that requires expensive ingredients and lots of work is banished to a corner that’s less noticeable or in a multi-page menu stashed on page 5.

6.The Small/Large Plate Conundrum

A restaurant often offers the same dish in two sizes. The diner never knows the portion size and is encourages to trade up. However, the smaller size is usually perfectly adequate and not much less than the larger size. Making the price differential almost pure profit.

Big chains are already using menu engineering strategies to boost profits, and smaller industry players should be doing the same. If a restaurant is going to print menus, those menus should be the most effective sales tools possible.