patrons will not request the price for the same reason. If it is absolutely
of that item. The chef now has more control of increasing sales of the
necessary to use this term on the menu, instruct your servers to
more profitable and perishable items, and reducing the sales of the loss
indicate the market price when distributing the menus, rather than
leaders—those items that are not as profitable as other items but are the
waiting to be asked. Here are some easy dos and don’ts.
favorite of a few regular guests.
Don’t…
Common practice in the industry has been to put key items in the
• Have the prices all lined up in an even column; this results in
area just above dead center, where most people will look first. It’s been thought that placement in that area will increase sales of the item.
price shopping. • Run a line of dots from the description to the price. • Try to fool the customer using $.95 cents in a price.
Most guests look at the right side of a two-page menu just above dead center and it is a great hot zone for selling your more profitable items.
• Use dollar signs. Do… • Stagger prices by placing them no more than three spaces after the
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last letter of the description, not the menu item title. • Consider a centered menu format and provide room for the price to
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have its own line. Staggered ROSEMARY-MARINATED GRILLED CHICKEN BREAST Garlic mashed potatoes and baby spring peas 13 GRILLED PORK CHOP
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Späetzle, caraway cabbage with bacon, applesauce 16 Centered: ROSEMARY-MARINATED GRILLED CHICKEN BREAST Garlic mashed potatoes and baby spring peas 13 GRILLED PORK CHOP Späetzle, caraway cabbage with bacon, applesauce 16
Menu Engineering
An article appearing in the January 2012 International Journal of Hospitality Management by S. S. Yang debunked this tried-and-true approach to item placement. Her research replicated common restaurant gaze-motion patterns and found that consumer scan paths differ from those anecdotally espoused in the industry, suggesting that traditional menu “sweet spots” may not exist. Her results reveal the pattern (below) as being closer to the way consumers actually view their menus.
Based on any given menu, a restaurant has a certain pattern of sales. If the average of sales is 13.25% swordfish to all other main courses, then whether there are 75 reservations or 220 reservations, if you
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order about 14% of the total reservations of swordfish, there will be very little, if any, waste. Point-of-sale systems can be programmed to calculate your sales mix for daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly analysis. Incorporating all of the aforementioned techniques with an analysis of sales mix will result in providing the guests with a meal they will most enjoy while making you the most profit. To be effective, the gross profit of every item on the menu must be calculated by costing every recipe. Once this has been determined, the placement of each item on the menu will positively or negatively affect the quantity of sales
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