When you print takeout menu, you are not just enhancing a customer’s overall dining experience but you are also utilizing a savvy marketing tool. Imagine a hungry diner who walked into your restaurant without having any idea about the kind of food that you’re serving. Once you hand over the menu, that serves as a marketing tool because you want the menu to sell your restaurant’s dishes. If you have a menu that’s difficult to read, is filled with too much text or have too-small images that make the page look crowded, do you think that the hunger of the customer will be appeased by simply looking at the menu? Not necessarily. This is the exactly the reason why it is important to print carry out menus and dine in menus that reflect the theme of the fare you’re serving inside your dining establishment.
Tips for Restaurant Owners when Designing a Menu
Remember that creating and designing a menu are entirely different things. Creating a menu involves choosing the theme of your restaurant, which dishes you are going to serve, and which ingredients you are going to focus on. Designing a menu is done when you are finished selecting and naming your dishes. For example, you’re a pizzeria and you named your pizzas after the days of the week, your menu would consist of seven different pizza flavors, drinks, and perhaps a few side dishes.
How are you going to effectively design your print to go menus with such a theme? Here are a few tips:
- Again, use the menu as a marketing tool. With the pizzeria example, how are you going to describe the pizza flavors in such a way that customers would know what they’re getting – but there is still a surprise element to the taste, or maybe the ingredients used? Achieve that delicate balance between having well-lit, mouth-watering images and text or dish descriptions that tease the mind and the palate.
- For your takeout menu, make sure that the dishes are profitable and quick to prepare. Otherwise, indicate the approximate number of minutes that they need to wait before you can get that dish out of the kitchen. For pizzas, add three to five minutes to the time it takes to bake the pizza so that the customers will feel happy when their waiting time is actually cut short.
- Research shows that customers read menus as they would a book, so there’s actually no ‘sweet spot’ where you can put a bestselling dish that will attract the eyes like a magnet. Feature your bestsellers on the upper left or right hand corner of the menu page to get maximum results.
Follow these tips when designing a menu and watch the profits of your food business grow!
