If your assigned task is to print pizza menus, how do you go about it? How can you make sure that you will not just finish the assignment, but succeed in letting the menu speak for your food business as well? Read on to find out.
Things to Remember when You Print Carry Out Menus
Be it pizza, Chinese, sandwiches, or other types of food, your dine-in and takeout menus are an important ingredient in running your food business. It’s the first thing that hungry diners will look at when they walk into your restaurant, so it says a lot about what you are as a food establishment. To get started, here are some key things to remember when printing out your takeout menu:
- Know what drives food sales in the first place.
For sit-down restaurants or diners, almost 80% of the sales comes from your menu – the waiting staff will sell the rest to the customers. For takeout fare, the number is definitely more than that – so you need to make sure that when you print to go menus, it has all your bestsellers and the quick-to-prepare but profitable dishes.
- Make sure that there’s a good balance of text and images.
Look at the online menus of the most popular fast food chains. There’s a good balance between text and image. If you must include food pictures, leave enough white space around each photo to still make it look interesting.
- Be aware of the ‘hot spots’ in a menu.
The upper right hand corner of the menu is one of the hotspots – although after scanning the whole page, people read menus as they would the page of a book. Keep this in mind when deciding how to layout the page.
- Skip the dollar signs and columns.
You don’t want people to feel the pinch of what they’re buying in their pockets – so skip the currency sign. Also, 9.99 looks less expensive than 10.00 even though there’s very little difference between the two amounts, so use such a strategy when pricing your food items. It also pays to use boxes and a more unique layout instead of traditional columns, with the prices arranged from the most to the least expensive.
- Know how to distribute menus to boost sales.
Finally, your takeout menu should not just be placed inside the restaurant or the takeout counter. People passing by may want to learn what your prices or pizza flavors are without having to walk into the restaurant – so keep several copies outside for them to pick out. You can also distribute a copy of your takeout menu to suppliers, in every delivery order, in public bulletin boards, and anywhere or any event where there is plenty of foot traffic.
