Designing Menus That Sell: A Psychological Perspective

The importance of a food service business’s menu can never be understated. Your menu can determine if and how much your consumers spend each time they visit your business. It doesn't matter if you manage a cafe, restaurant, fast food establishment, ghost kitchen or bakery; you must dedicate adequate time and resources to your menu design process.

What is Menu Design?

Menu design or menu engineering refers to the process of creating and structuring a restaurant's menu to enhance customer experience, guide purchasing decisions, and align with the brand's identity. When you design your menu, you should consider important elements such as colours, typography, food item order, pricing, size and length. All these factors influence consumers’ decision-making and ultimately the profitability of your business. If you run an online business, you also have to consider how to optimise these factors in a digital environment. This article highlights some best practices SMMEs can implement to design menus that appeal to consumers and elevate their businesses too.

Factor One: Visual Elements

Visual elements play a significant role in the effectiveness and quality of your menu. The first step when designing the visual elements of your restaurant’s menu is considering your brand identity. Brand identity is the collection of all visual and tangible elements that represent a brand, including its logo, colours, typography, tone of voice, and overall style, which together shape how the brand is perceived by its audience. How do you want your brand to be perceived when your customers see your menu? If you are a healthy restaurant, consider using green as the dominant colour for your menu. If you want to create a fun or vibrant perception, use colours such as red. Research also suggests that red and yellow work well for restaurants as they are more likely to stimulate hunger. For instance, restaurants such as KFC, McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut all have red as their brand colours.

When it comes to typography, restaurants should use clean, easy-to-read fonts and limit the number of font styles on the menu. Instead of assigning different fonts to each section, it’s best to use one font for headings (e.g., “Starters”) and another for the dish descriptions. The tone of the menu also matters—using vivid, sensory-rich language can help evoke the taste, smell, and feel of the dishes, making them more appealing to customers.

Research shows that menus are easier to read when they include ample white space and keep text lines between 40 and 70 characters long. Additionally, avoid cluttering your menu with too many food photos. Rather than including an image for every item, choose a few standout dishes to feature visually and draw attention to them strategically.

Factor Two: Menu Choices

A menu can be visually appealing yet still fail to drive business results. That’s why it’s essential to design a menu that aligns with your target customers’ preferences and demographics. For example, a restaurant that caters to families will offer different types of cuisine, portion sizes, and pricing compared to one that serves students. It’s also important to keep up with current food trends and offer options that meet dietary needs, such as vegan, gluten-free, or low-carb dishes, to attract a broader customer base.

Your menu should be well-organized and easy to navigate. In a fine dining setting, this might mean structuring the menu according to the number of courses. In a more casual setting, categories like Burgers, Pastas, or Pizzas might be more appropriate. While it's crucial to be customer-focused and provide variety, avoid overwhelming guests with too many options. Research suggests that 7–10 items per category is ideal. Overly long menus can lead to decision fatigue, a phenomenon known as the Paradox of Choice, which can slow down ordering and reduce overall satisfaction.

Factor Three: Pricing & Profitability Optimisation

Have you noticed how some menus omit currency signs? This is because research suggests that customers don’t want to feel they are incurring financial losses each time they eat at a restaurant. Furthermore, it is also common practice to avoid including cents: i.e. instead of pricing your wrap 78.99, just price your wrap 79. When pricing your menu, ensure that your prices are benchmarked with your competitors and industry standards: consumers often compare your prices to what similar restaurants charge for similar dishes.

In addition to these tricks, the ‘Golden Triangle’ and Menu Engineering Matrix are two important menu design concepts that will help you optimise profitability.

The Golden Triangle is a menu design principle that identifies the three areas of a menu that customers' eyes naturally focus on first — the centre, top right, and top left. These are considered prime real estate for placing high-margin or signature dishes. In menu design, the Golden Triangle helps increase profitability by highlighting best-sellers or most profitable items in the most visible sections of the menu, encouraging customers to choose them over less strategic options. The Golden Triangle is relevant for physical or PDF menus online.

The Menu Engineering Matrix, developed by Michael Kasavana & Donald Smith, is a strategic tool used to evaluate and categorize menu items based on two key factors: popularity (sales volume) and profitability (contribution margin). It helps determine which items to promote, improve, reprice, or remove. The popularity is on the x-axis, while profitability is on the y-axis. The matrix divides menu items into four categories:

• Stars (high profit, high popularity): These dishes should be highlighted in your menu and feature in the Golden Triangle area of your menu. If you only have a mobile-first menu or an app-based menu, you can highlight these dishes using a ‘recommended’ or ‘best sellers’ tab.

• Plowhorses (low profit, high popularity): These dishes are essential if you want to cultivate customer loyalty. Even if they do not contribute as much to profitability, they improve customer retention. You can strategically implement small price increases or slightly reduce portions in order to increase profitability. Another tactic to use is to bundle it with other dishes in combo deals or offer relevant extras

• Puzzles (high profit, low popularity): If you have dishes like this, you can try highlighting them in your menu by using photos or more emotive language to describe them. You can also run promotions to encourage customers to order them.

• Dogs (low profit, low popularity): These dishes should not be included in your menu any longer.

These three factors must be considered extensively during your menu design process as they ultimately impact the success of your food service business. Incorporating best practices pertaining to visual appeal, menu choices, and pricing will ensure you design menus that are aligned with your branding, business objectives and customers.

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