By Andreas Breitfuss

Restaurant Menu Designs play an important part of the overall profitability of any hospitality operation, and it is your menu which is the starting point to creating great profits from your restaurant business. Your menu is the first and foremost a marketing tool to get customers to buy certain items on your menu for you to make sales and profits. If however your menu is not designed correctly to capture your customers to buy the highest contributing items on your menu you are not only letting money through the grate but also it is limiting your growth and you are missing out on the benefits of reaching to your full potential.

In order for you to design a restaurant menu to gain the highest profit possible you must avoid the 7 fatal mistakes when designing your menu.The 7th most fatal mistake of menu design

Printed menus with hand written changes, these days with the use of PC's there is no excuse to not re print you menus if you need to change something on your menu. The professional look of you menu will be compromised as too with be your reputation and in the long term your profitability and even survival. Just don't do it!

The 6th most fatal mistake of menu design

Misspelled items and copy on your menu, this is one of the most embarrassing moment you can encounter as an owner or manager of a hospitality business is someone showing you a spelling mistake on your menu. This usually show sloppiness and an unprofessional approach to your business. There is no excuse to misspell words with the automatic spell checkers on pretty much all the word processors and publishing software available today. And if it is technical food or beverage terms that are the problem invest in a copy of "Larousse Gastronomic" this book has all the food and beverage term you will ever want to know.

The 5th most fatal menu mistake

Listing items customers cant get all of the time, this has to be one of the most annoying things to happen to any one of your customers. You probably have spent lots of money in marketing and promotions to get them to your business only to disappoint them with items not available for sale.

The 4the most fatal menu design mistake

Too many (or too few) items on the menu, by giving a customer too many choices can be a downfall of your menu design as your customer is coming to your venue for a dining experience and not to be confused and bombarded with hundreds of choices, you want to make the process as easy as possible for them to make a choice. You want to create an effortless experience for your customer and long drawn out menus wont let them do that.

The 3rd most fatal menu mistake

Designing your menu to totally change on a daily basis, this can be one of the most detrimental things you can do. This will surely confuse your market and it will be hard to get repeat customers that may want to come back and have their favourite dish (which will have changed) this may be great way to get them to try something else but you fall into taking the risk that they will never come back again.

The 2nd most fatal menu design mistake

No signature items on your menu, a signature item is one or two items that you offer and that you are famous for. This is most important when building your branding for your venue. The signature is your differentiation from you and the rest of your competitors, by having signature items you are basically standing up in the market place and saying "this what we do best at and we are famous for it". By having signature items available will help your customer make a decision when deciding where to go for something to eat. Your signature items don't have to be the most expensive or the most elaborate item on your menu it just has to be different to what everyone else is doing.

And finally the no. 1 most fatal menu design mistake...is

Not engineering your menu. This is the number one mistake hospitality operators make. The average diner spends about 3.5 minutes viewing a menu before making a decision so you need to make the biggest impact by increasing the chances of your customer buying the highest contributing items on the menu. Only engineering your menu will allow you to do this, and if you don't engineer your menu you are leaving thousands and thousands of dollars on the table. You will need to know all the correct menu design secrets to increase your profitability on your menu like how to shade effectively, how to use signature items to generate more sales, how to position your menu categories for increased sales, how to use the seven psychological elements of a menu to your benefit and how to price your menu correctly.

By Andreas Breitfuss

Your restaurant menu is an integral part of your business and like most areas you are always checking up on things, you are always checking up on your staff, your accountant is always checking on the health of the financials and it is the same with your menus. You need to perform a regular health checkup of your menus to see if they are healthy or not.

To perform a health checkup you need to answer a number of questions and then brainstorm with your staff to see what you can change on your menu. What you are trying to do is find areas where perhaps you could be doing better in. You want your menu to be the best and up to date with all the industry changes and trends. You need to be asking the following questions in order to take the temperature of your menu:

You can ask yourself as many questions as you like about the health of your menu however if you don't take action then it will all be in vain. Address problem early on and you will be able to keep your menu fresh and inviting to customers over the long term.

To ensure you give your menus and your business the best possible chance of survival and to learn how to make your menus more profitable the easy way click here right now and purchase your copy of the Restaurant Management Toolkit.

In very simple terms, business or menu engineering entails finding your most profitable items and ensuring that those are sold the most. It is in effect a continuous process that improves restaurant marketing activities.

It's the art and science of developing and using interactive, customizable models for analyzing, planning, and implementing profitable marketing strategies and tactics. In restaurant terms that is using menu engineering on all of your menus to ensure that you are selling the most profitable items.

In the past, restaurants operated in a fairly predictable manner. This involved invoicing the labor assigned to a specific task to complete a deliverable. But the exploitation of non-traditional marketing opportunities will require the creation of non-traditional, organizations or operations.

Marketing-oriented restaurants or cafes often take a pro-active approach in maximizing their profits in their target market within their current customer base. The majority of companies would agree that taking care of their current customer base through new and engineered menu items --- that better serve their needs, in ways that the customers may not be aware of --- is a top priority with these companies.

J. Hicks Lanier, chairman and president of Oxford Industries, is recognized by 'Sales & Marketing Management' for his efforts to successfully turn Oxford from only a clothing manufacturer to a clothing marketer. By changing the emphasis on appeal from the lower margin retail store items to the high priced, high profit designer apparel, profits and sales have been boosted tremendously.

Engineering your marketing strategies or evaluating of your most profitable opportunity has two aspects:

--> Avoiding the truly outlandish or unwise projects

--> Gathering sufficient information to decide which products warrant more time and investment

To do this, you first have to estimate the size of your present market, analyze the customers' profiles, predict risk and profitability of each menu item and on the basis of all this data determine the viability or non-viability of carrying on with a particular menu range.

These days there are also software programs available to help you make these estimates. This software in restaurant terms is menu enginnering software.

Use Your Engineered Services/Products in Your Marketing

Domino's Pizza is another fine example of a company which has built a huge business and seized market share out of a simple promise -' Domino's will deliver your pizza in 30 minutes, or it s free'. How did it do that?

The company realized that their customer's lives are dominated by time considerations. They engineered their pizza delivery processes around that little delivery and just see the result. It's evolved into one of the strongest brands in the Quick Service category.

Most companies today work in extremely competitive environments where they have to deal with limited resources. In such a scenario in order to maximize success, they must concentrate their limited resources and efforts at those opportunities that have the best chance of high returns. Menu Engineering offers a mathematical way of calculating that best chance for your restaurant.

Menu engineering is the analysis of your menu. In this analysis we are looking at the sales price, sales history and the cost of each item of the restaurant's menu. From the collected data we are able to design the menu to highlight results of the engineering.

Engineering refers to the calculation of the profit or contribution margin of each menu item in relation to all the other items on the menu for a period of time.

Menu engineering is an integral part of hospitality management in today's robust and competitive market.

Once calculated with the engineering formulas, each of the menu items will be classed into one of four categories to highlight the importance of each menu item within the menu. Those categories are:

1. Stars (popular and profitable)

2. Plow Horses (popular but not as profitable)

3. Puzzles (not popular but highly profitable)

4. Dogs (neither popular or profitable)

With this information you are able to make an informed and calculated decision on what to do with the items on your restaurant menu.

Engineering is not a one time calculation, it is done on a regular basis usually monthly or quarterly. It will allow you to achieve maximum reduction in food and beverage costs and enhance the profitability of your menu.

Engineering does not stop there as it allows you to position items on your menu to gain the maximum exposure to your customers to gain maximum profit.

Engineering allows you to focus on the profit or contribution of each item rather that the usual practice of the individual cost percentage.

Remember dollars pays the bills not percentages.