The Bar Business Podcast

Designing Menus That Sell: The 5 Menu Mistakes Eating Your Profits

March 13, 2024 Chris Schneider, The Bar Business Coach Season 2 Episode 52
Designing Menus That Sell: The 5 Menu Mistakes Eating Your Profits
The Bar Business Podcast
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The Bar Business Podcast
Designing Menus That Sell: The 5 Menu Mistakes Eating Your Profits
Mar 13, 2024 Season 2 Episode 52
Chris Schneider, The Bar Business Coach

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Ever wondered why your restaurant's masterpiece dishes aren't flying out of the kitchen as expected? It might all boil down to those sneaky menu design flaws that are inadvertently guiding your patrons' choices. In our latest episode, we're peeling back the layers on the five cardinal sins of menu design, laying bare the critical errors that could be siphoning off your profits. We promise you'll come away equipped with the know-how to craft a menu that not only dazzles the taste buds but also captivates customer interest and drives sales.

As the lights dim and the evening crowd trickles in, your menu's readability becomes the unsung hero of your establishment's success. We dissect the nuances of font choice, color schemes, and size, ensuring your menu's legibility doesn't falter in those intimate, low-light bar settings. Join us as we transform your menu from a mere list of offerings to a strategic masterpiece that sings your dishes' praises, all while making sure every customer, regardless of their eyesight, leaves feeling catered to and content.

And when it comes to the organization and length of your menu, we cut through the clutter to reveal the golden ratio of offerings that maximizes profitability and minimizes waste. We're sharing insider tips on how to position your star items for maximum impact without overwhelming your patrons or your kitchen staff. Get ready to reshape your bar or restaurant menu into a lean, mean, profit-generating machine that ensures each item is not just a dish, but a deliberate step towards a more successful business. Join us for this culinary crusade where we're not just changing menus – we're changing the game.

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Welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, the ultimate resource for bar owners looking to elevate their businesses to the next level. Our podcast is packed with valuable insights, expert advice, and inspiring stories from successful bar owners and industry professionals. Tune in to learn everything from how to craft the perfect cocktail menu to how to manage your staff effectively. Our mission is to help you thrive in the competitive bar industry and achieve your business goals.

Special thank you to our benchmarking data partner Starfish. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software by using AI to help you make smart data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.

For more information on how to spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar:
The Bar Business Podcast Website
Schedule a Strategy Session
Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'
Bar Business Nation Facebook Group

Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Send us a Text Message.

Ever wondered why your restaurant's masterpiece dishes aren't flying out of the kitchen as expected? It might all boil down to those sneaky menu design flaws that are inadvertently guiding your patrons' choices. In our latest episode, we're peeling back the layers on the five cardinal sins of menu design, laying bare the critical errors that could be siphoning off your profits. We promise you'll come away equipped with the know-how to craft a menu that not only dazzles the taste buds but also captivates customer interest and drives sales.

As the lights dim and the evening crowd trickles in, your menu's readability becomes the unsung hero of your establishment's success. We dissect the nuances of font choice, color schemes, and size, ensuring your menu's legibility doesn't falter in those intimate, low-light bar settings. Join us as we transform your menu from a mere list of offerings to a strategic masterpiece that sings your dishes' praises, all while making sure every customer, regardless of their eyesight, leaves feeling catered to and content.

And when it comes to the organization and length of your menu, we cut through the clutter to reveal the golden ratio of offerings that maximizes profitability and minimizes waste. We're sharing insider tips on how to position your star items for maximum impact without overwhelming your patrons or your kitchen staff. Get ready to reshape your bar or restaurant menu into a lean, mean, profit-generating machine that ensures each item is not just a dish, but a deliberate step towards a more successful business. Join us for this culinary crusade where we're not just changing menus – we're changing the game.

#####
Welcome to the Bar Business Podcast, the ultimate resource for bar owners looking to elevate their businesses to the next level. Our podcast is packed with valuable insights, expert advice, and inspiring stories from successful bar owners and industry professionals. Tune in to learn everything from how to craft the perfect cocktail menu to how to manage your staff effectively. Our mission is to help you thrive in the competitive bar industry and achieve your business goals.

Special thank you to our benchmarking data partner Starfish. Starfish works with your bookkeeping software by using AI to help you make smart data-driven decisions and maximize your profits while giving you benchmarking data to understand how you compare to the industry at large.

For more information on how to spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar:
The Bar Business Podcast Website
Schedule a Strategy Session
Chris' Book 'How to Make Top-Shelf Profits in the Bar Business'
Bar Business Nation Facebook Group

Announcer:

You're listening to the Bar Business Podcast where every week, your host, chris Schneider, brings you information, strategies and news on the bar industry, giving you the competitive edge you need to start working on your bar rather than in your bar.

Chris Schneider:

Welcome to this week's edition of the Bar Business Podcast, the ultimate resource for bar owners. I'm your host, chris Schneider. In today's episode, we're going to be delving into the five biggest mistakes that you can make on a menu, and I know we normally focus just on, or more on, bar stuff. But this is going to be equally true for bar folks, restaurant folks, really anyone that has a menu. I don't care if you're running a food truck. This is all true, and the thing is that so frequently I go out to eat, I go in public, I go to bars, I go to restaurants and I see menus that are not doing that establishment justice. And what I mean when I say not doing that establishment justice? I mean your menu is actually interfering with your ability to make money. That sounds counterintuitive. I know that because your menu is what you're reading, or what you're giving your customers to read. Rather, that is telling them what you offer and what's available to them, and it is how your customers order. It's how you get revenue. It is from your menu. But I will tell you right now that having a server go to a table and tell the table five items is more effective at sales. It's more effective at making your guests happy. It's more effective at selling high margin popular items than a lot of menus are. And so, when it comes to menus, what we always have to remember is it's not just a list of what we're selling. As I just mentioned, that menu is the tool by which your guests know what's going on, what they can order, what's available to them.

Chris Schneider:

Now, when we think about just the beverage side of the bar business, there are plenty of bars out there that don't have cocktail menus, and we've talked about before. I think every bar needs a cocktail menu, but most bar guests they're going to come in and if I'm at your bar, I'm going to order a vodka on the rocks, probably a Tito's, because that's what I drink when I go out. If you have a nice cocktail menu, though, I might order a cocktail, but your bar patrons are not necessarily going to have a worse experience or a different experience because of your menu, but anyone that eats food is, and they need that menu to determine what they want to eat. Anyone that goes to your cocktail list, they need to see that list and it needs to speak to them. And so, as we go through this list of the five biggest menu mistakes you can make.

Chris Schneider:

What I want you to do is think about your menus, every menu you have in your bar dessert menus, cocktail menus, food menus, appetizer menus, lunch menus I don't care how many menus you have. Think about every single menu you have and think about do I make any of these five mistakes? Because I promise you, if you make one of these mistakes, you're leaving money on the table. If you're like most bars or restaurants, most menus that exist in the wild, you're not making one of these mistakes. You're making two or three or four of these mistakes and you're stopping your establishment from reaching its full potential and you are not optimizing your profits. You're making less money than you should because of the things that you are doing on your menu.

Chris Schneider:

So we will go through these five mistakes in great detail, but first I just want to tell you what they are. The first one is your prices are in the wrong place. Second one is your menu is not readable. Third is that your menu is confusing. Fourth is that you're not putting your best profit items in the right space.

Chris Schneider:

And your fifth biggest mistake that most people make on menus is their menus are too long. Let's get started with the first item on that list prices in the wrong place. And this is something that I see far too often, and we'll talk a little bit beyond just the price itself being in the wrong place, but when it comes to how prices are on menus, most restaurant, most bar menus are designed so that your customer sees the price. The price is easily and readily apparent to them and then therefore, they make decisions on what they want to eat or drink based upon the price. Now, as I'm sure all of us are aware because this has happened to us in our daily lives, we go to the grocery store, we make decisions on price. Inflation is here, food prices are still going up and that has made people very, very price conscious. So that doesn't mean that you want to have a menu with no prices, but that does mean that you need a menu that is not going to focus on the prices. So here's where most folks go wrong.

Chris Schneider:

Most menus that you will see have all the prices in a column and normally the prices are by the name of the dish. So you'll have on the left side of the page, columnari. On the right side of the page will be a price that says $12 or $12.95. And then below that will be a description of the columnari. And when you put all the prices, especially when you put them on the title, it causes people's eyes to be drawn to the price. But when you put them all in a fricking column, people compare prices before they even look at what the menu item is. They're not even going to give that columnari a chance if it's the highest priced item on your menu at $12.95. Because they see everything else as $9.95, $10.95, $11.95. So they're just going to skip it. Maybe they want it, maybe they'd order it, but they're not going to because they see all the prices in a row and they're instinctively never going to pick the highest priced item. So it is absolutely essential that you don't put your prices in columns and, like I said, if you put them next to the name of the item, chances are that's going to be visible enough that they'll still make a decision based on price. So what does that mean? The price should go.

Chris Schneider:

Well, you have two basic options and it depends on how your menu is set up. To be real honest, one thing you can always do and this works really really well on a cocktail menu compared to a food menu is. You can say here is our martinis. All martinis are $13. So you just have $13, that's in the header under the like general description of the martinis available, and then you list all the martinis below. No one's thinking about price while they're reading the martini descriptions, because, hell, there's no price there. They have to look up above it to see the price. The other option you have and this is a lot more flexible in that you'll see this on both your food menus and you can do this anywhere and it doesn't require everything in the same column or in the same section, I should say, of your menu is the same price. The other place you can put the price is in the description, and this is what I'm a huge fan of have the name of the item, have a description of the item and, at the end of the description, put the price.

Chris Schneider:

Now, when you go to put that price, let's talk about a few things that also point that out, besides just where it's located on the page. If you use a dollar sign or a euro sign, if you're in Europe, people are going to see the price. It is absolutely true that we are trained from a essentially extraordinarily young age with just the way lives work and stores work, that when we see a dollar sign or a currency symbol, we know that's money. If you leave that symbol off, guess what People will pay less attention to the price. The other thing that our brains have been trained to do since we were little kids is to treat anything with two decimal points as a price, as a value of money. So don't have two decimal points.

Chris Schneider:

Frankly, with where we are now on pricing, we're past the days where 0.95 is always going to be your best option. That worked really well when we were trying to differentiate between prices at $2 and $4. But now most things in bars, even craft beers right, there aren't many people that are selling craft beer under $5 anymore. Hell, there are a lot of bars that aren't selling even domestics under $5 anymore. That means you can do everything on a dollar or maybe on 50 cents, because if you see 7.5, that doesn't necessarily ring in your head as a price like 7.50 would. So frankly, I think, with where we are money-wise, where inflation is, where the world, is right now on all of this.

Chris Schneider:

There's no reason to ever price anything at something other than a 50 cent point. It's clean, it's simple. If you can get away with it, price everything on the dollar just because it looks better, and people are not going to see that as a price as easily. This is all about the psychology of your customer and not having them make decisions based on price. So put your price not in a column, not on the top line. Put it in the description of the item, leave off the dollar sign, leave off the decimal points and just give them a number, and they won't even see the number. They'll make decisions based on what they want, not what the price is.

Chris Schneider:

So that brings us to our second biggest menu mistake that a lot of places make, and that is that the menu just isn't readable. And think about that for a second. The whole purpose of a menu is to convey to your guests what you offer, what you're serving, and if they can't read your menu, it's not going to work. And in this case I'm not referring to something that would make your menu confusing. That's our next point. What I'm referring to is just it's actually physically difficult to read. Now, largely, menus can be hard to read for people, because when we go to restaurants, when we go to bars, at bars especially, usually they're not the brightest places in the world. Usually it's not the middle of the day. Now, when you design menus, when you review menus, when you're looking at menus, usually you're doing it off your computer. It's backlit, it's bright. Sometimes maybe you're reviewing your menu in the middle of the day and you're sitting outside and you have natural sunlight and it's easy to read, but that's not the environment in which our guests are reading our menus. Our guests are reading menus when it's dark out, when your lights aren't up high in the bar, let's be honest when they've had a couple to drink, so their comprehension isn't the best. Anyway, things seem a little fuzzy to them, it's a little blurry when they look out of their eyes, and so you have to have a menu that, to put it simply, a drunk senior citizen with poor vision can read, because if they can't read your menu, they can't order your food, they can't order your drinks.

Chris Schneider:

There are three big things when it comes to the readability of your menu, and that's your font, the colors on your menu and the size of your font on the menu. Let's go through those one by one, because I think a lot of folks get really enamored by their design of their menu, by the look of their menu, and don't necessarily think through these three steps. And, like I said, there are a lot of things that look great on a computer screen when you're looking at the proof that your designer sent you that are absolute shit in a guest's hands in a dark bar trying to read it and figure out what the hell they can order. So it's super important that you make sure that you have all these three pieces right. So with font font. So what we're talking about is the actual script on the page, the font on the page. You need a font that's readable. Now I'm not saying that you have to do your whole menu and areal or Times New Roman or Calibri, but think about fonts like that, especially for the descriptions of your items. Your descriptions generally are going to be a slightly smaller size than your titles of your items, than the titles of the sections on your menu. So make sure whatever font you're picking for your small descriptions is readable If you're going to use multiple fonts on your menu, which can work from a design perspective.

Chris Schneider:

But sometimes it makes me wonder. I like to use the same font for the title of the item and the description, but if you're going to use multiple fonts, you can use something a little bit flowier, little bit flashier, a little bit riskier on the name of the menu item, but that's still not good. Stick to an easy to read font. Now, where you really can play around, though and this is where I do play around when I design menus is on the title of the section. So if you want to have starters in some sort of Gaelic font because you're an Irish pub, but when you have potato skins under it, make sure that PotatoSkins is not in a Gaelic font that no one can read. It's really simple.

Chris Schneider:

But it's not just about design, and that's the thing, because too often you get people that design menus and they make a piece of art and you look at it and you go God, this is a piece of art, this is going to be great. It's not a piece of art, it's a sales tool. And always remember that, as many fonts as you can pick, it's not productive for you if people get confused and can't read it. Another note there too, don't use 15 fonts. I was looking at a menu the other week with a client of mine. This has been about a month ago and it was for a bar he was looking at becoming involved in and taking over, and well, amazed me. What absolutely freaking amazed me Was, I swear to God, this menu had no less than 15 fonts on it and it hurt your eyes because you couldn't focus. By the time you figured out how to focus on words in one font and then all the other fonts were out of focus. It just did not work.

Chris Schneider:

So if you're going to use multiple fonts which from a design perspective is absolutely a great idea make sure that that multiple fonts that you use are set up in a way that you're only using two or three and that you're consistent in their usage. So, use the same header font, use the same item title font, use the same body font or description font, but be careful with your fonts. You need fonts that people can read. Then we get to colors, and people love to play with colors, and one thing that you'll see a lot of places do not necessarily a lot, but you see a fair amount is they'll have white text on a dark color. That works fine, but in low light environments. Light text on a dark background is actually exceedingly difficult to read. Dark text on a light background in almost every situation, is easier to read. That's why books have white pages. So make sure your colors work. And along those lines, if you're going to go into yellows or pinks or light blues or subtle greens and a bunch of earth tones, make sure that that text is actually standing out vibrant enough.

Chris Schneider:

In a lot of ways, if we're just talking about the ability of your guests to read your menu and the colors on it, as close to black text on a white piece of paper as you can get is going to be the most readable. Now, obviously, the last thing I would recommend that you do is to take a computer piece of paper that's just plain white, put black letters on it and call it a menu. But you need some color. But keep in mind that every time you add color you add difficulty, and if you don't add the right colors in the right way, it makes your menu harder for people to read. And the last piece of a menu being unreadable is the size of the font. Now, generally speaking, if I'm just going to throw a number out there, try to have nothing under 11 point font. Most people are used to reading 11, 10 point font in books, in the newspaper. A lot of newspapers are a little smaller than that, and so that's pretty legible for them. If you get into the eight, nine point font, it's a waste of your time. And again, we're talking about people reading in low light environments, and especially if we're talking about someone that has a couple drinks in them. Bigger fonts are easy to read, so don't go to a font that is too small for people to be able to easily read. A matter of fact, if you need a large print menu on a regular basis for, like people that don't aren't blind and I say blind, not literally blind, but people that don't just have really really bad eyesight and forgot their glasses then your font's too small. You shouldn't really need a large print menu if you have a well designed menu.

Chris Schneider:

Hey there, bar owners, it's Chris Schneider, the bar business coach. Are you tired of the daily grind and ready to skyrocket your profits? I've got the solution With my coaching and consulting services. We deep dive into menu management, team empowerment and business optimization Instead of slogging away in your business day in and day out, washing dishes, covering for employees and working 60 plus hours a week. Picture this A thriving business that runs like clockwork, whether you're there or not, letting you enjoy the successes that you've dreamed of. Let's make it happen. Visit barbusinesscoachcom to schedule your free 30 minute strategy session with me, or you can book a session just by clicking the link in the show notes below. Together, we will turn your business into a profit powerhouse, because at the bar business coach, our only goal is to help you spend less time working in your bar and more time working on your bar.

Chris Schneider:

Now, the third biggest mistake most bars and restaurants make on their menus is that their menus are just freaking confusing, and when I say confusing, what I mean is they are hard to figure out. Now, this can come from a few different spots. One reason menus can be confusing is that they have too much going on. There are random pictures, there are boxes, there's all this design stuff, but there's not just lists of items and columns that's easy to read. So make sure that your menu has good structured organization, and in my mind, if we're talking about what makes good structured organization on a menu, it's a few things. First of all, your menu is broken down into multiple categories that are familiar to people. That make sense.

Chris Schneider:

So if we think about most menus, let's use food menus or, yeah, let's use food menus here as an example. You're gonna have appetizers, entrees, maybe soups and salads, maybe desserts. Those are things that are very common. Now, obviously, you can play around with those names. You can call your appetizers starters, you can call your entrees mains, you can call your appetizers small plates. I really don't care on that.

Chris Schneider:

But it needs to be organized in a way that someone sitting down looking at your menu, reading your menu, understands what foods where. Like, if they want an appetizer, they can pretty quickly figure out oh, here's where the appetizers are, that's where I need to be. If they want a salad, they can pretty easily figure out oh, here's where the salads are, that's where I need to be. And along those lines, you should make sure that when someone looks at your menu and in fear, in a place that speaks English or most of Western Europe, most of the world, frankly, most languages read left to right, top to bottom. Obviously, if you're in Israel, they're gonna read right to left, top to bottom. So there are differences around the world, but that means in the US, in places where people read left to right, top to bottom. The first place they're gonna look is the top left of your menu. That should also be what corresponds with the beginning of their meal.

Chris Schneider:

People expect to see these categories not just labeled and accessible so that the items are easy to find based on what they're looking for, but also those categories should be in more or less an order, and that order would be. If someone was eating every course, how would they go through it? So, generally speaking, appetizers come before soups and salads, soups and salads come before entrees, entrees come before desserts. Now, obviously there are a lot of sections that you can add to that. There's a lot more complexity that can be built in there. But make sure that your food items are in categories and that those categories have organization to them. Makes sense Along those lines.

Chris Schneider:

Be careful when you start having all this graphical stuff on a menu and pop out blocks and overlaid sections and all of that, because that can make it more difficult for people to understand what's going on. Like I said when we were talking about making sure your menu is readable, yes, you can do a lot of cool design work, but cool design work does not sell necessarily. It can look pretty but it is not. If it's not helping your guests make a decision and find what they want, it is not helping your business. You are not in the business of having a pretty menu. You're in the business of selling food and beverage. So make sure that your menu is organized in a way that is not confusing, that people can find what they want when they want it. That brings us to the fourth menu mistake. That I see a lot when I go out and you can't necessarily see this just by looking at a menu, but you definitely can once you start being involved in a business and you understand where they're making money is that folks are not highlighting the items they make the most money on.

Chris Schneider:

Now, in a perfect world, all your chef specials, your best food that you are putting out of that kitchen that's on the menu is also your highest profit item, but in reality that's often not the case. Now you can do a number of different things to point out what items to order and a lot of people will talk about. You can put things in boxes. You can change colors. You can do all of that, of course you can, and that will help people order more people if there's a box out item on your menu with some design around it, people's eyes will gravitate there. They will tend to order that more.

Chris Schneider:

Now I will tell you. I think those boxes can get in the way of readability and things, as I'm sure you picked up as we've been having this conversation. So then the question becomes what can I do? That's not a box that's not going to separate an item or separate the design of this section on my menu, but still drive people to purchase it. Because, again, we want our profitable items in places where people are going to purchase them and it doesn't matter if it's your best item. As a matter of fact, I will say that some of these actually work for items that maybe are not the best thing out of your kitchen but that you make a shit ton of money on. Because, again, remember, we're in the business to make money. Obviously, if there's something coming out of your kitchen that's terrible, you need to scrap that menu item. If there's something coming out a cocktail from behind your bar, that's terrible, you need to scrap that cocktail. But assuming that everything's good, then you need to focus on profit as far as where you place things.

Chris Schneider:

So, as I mentioned, people read top to bottom in the West and when people read, that means that their eyes are most drawn to the top item and the bottom item. Statistically, people will order the top item and bottom item on a menu more than they will order items in the middle. So your highest margin item should generally be the top item on the list and your second highest margin item should be generally the last item on a list within a category. Now, if you have multiple columns say you have 10 appetizers and it's two columns of five your top left and your bottom right are going to be the two that are most seen, but your top right and bottom left are shortly there behind. So if you have two columns, you have four spaces that you can utilize. And if you want to know which ones, the order they come in. Just think left to right, up to down. Left, top is going to be generally the most encouraged item to order on a menu. Bottom right, if we have multiple columns, is going to be the second, top right would be the third and bottom left would be the fourth.

Chris Schneider:

Now, obviously, design and different things can influence that, but that's, generally speaking, going to be true. So you need to make sure that these items that you make the best money on are the ones that people are going to order. And, for the record, something you just put in the middle if it doesn't sell well, it could just be menu placement, because menu placement matters, but always make sure your profitable items have the best placement. Now, this is not part of the five mistakes people make, but while we're talking about placement of items and boxing items and things like that, let's also point out that it is a really good idea, especially if you live in a community that does a lot of vegetarian food, vegan food, gluten-free, keto. Anytime you have food that fits a weird diet, have a symbol on your menu that shows people that it fits that weird diet. I shouldn't say weird, but if you cater to multiple eating or drinking preferences, point that out on your menu. That way, if you have a guest in and they're vegetarian and they see, hey, everything with its V next to it is vegetarian, they can look and scan real quickly through your menu and find it.

Chris Schneider:

I want to take a moment to highlight a powerful resource that could be a game changer for your bar my book how to Make Top Shelf Profits in the Bar Business. It's not just a book. It's a comprehensive guide with 75 lessons covering crucial aspects like bar design, menu creation, team culture, marketing strategies and much more. Instead of having this wealth of wisdom at your fingertips, whether you're a seasoned bar owner refining your craft or someone dreaming of stepping into the bar business, this book is your ultimate companion. You can grab a copy on Amazon and print eBook and audiobook formats. The link is in the show notes below. Join the league of successful bar owners who found their blueprint to working less in their bar and more on their bar.

Chris Schneider:

And now the final menu mistake that I see way too often when I go out to eat or drink is menus that are just too fricking long. There is a lot of people in the industry that think that longer is better. We want to cater to every taste. A you're never going to cater to every taste. It's a stupid thing to try to do. It's just not achievable. And B the more you do, the harder it is to do anything really well. I focus my consulting on bars. I focus my consulting even more specifically on business processes within bars, on driving the metrics on a P&L, on understanding KPIs and managing KPIs.

Chris Schneider:

I don't design menus. I can talk about menus designed like we are now, but I don't design menus. I would have a graphic designer design it and then critique it. I'm really good at critiquing them. I'm not that great at Photoshop. That's not my business.

Chris Schneider:

Likewise, if you have a bunch of different types of cuisine on your menu, if you have a cocktail list, that seems schizophrenic in the fact that you have some things that make me feel like it's a beach bar and some things that make me feel like I'm in some hole in the wall in Chicago in 1920 trying to hide from Al Capone while I drink my old fashioned, I'm gonna be confused and most of the time when you see that, it's because the lists are far, far, far too long. And especially with cocktails, there is this thing with mixology and some bars where they wanna say, hey, we have 50 cocktails, we have 100 cocktails. That's great, that's wonderful, and if you can pull that off and that's your shtick, by all means do it. But for most bars having a list more than 15 items on a cocktail list you're never gonna pull them all off right, because for every item you have, whether it's a food item or a beverage item, your staff has to be trained on it. They have to make sure that everyone on your staff makes that drink, makes that food item the same way every time, regardless of time of day, regardless of what shift it is. And when you're talking about 12 cocktails, that's not that hard. When you're talking about six cocktails, that's kinda easy. When you're talking about 60 cocktails, it's fricking impossible. Not impossible, but it's really really difficult.

Chris Schneider:

So long menus are difficult to pull off properly. They're also difficult for your guests to decide what they wanna eat. And, for that matter, when I say long menus, I don't just mean, say, a food menu with 70 items on it. Personally, I think most food menus should be 25 items or less, especially when we're talking about bars. We are not necessarily in the food business. I mean, a lot of us are by proxy, but we're not in the food business necessarily as our primary goal. We don't need that many food items, especially if we have a menu that changes on a regular basis. There is no reason to have generally more than 25 items on a food menu.

Chris Schneider:

But it's not just about the number of items when I say too long. Too long can also be the way your menu's laid out, and this is not to cast shade on any corporate restaurants that sell a lot of desserts, but if I go and sit at your restaurant and you hand me a fricking book and the burgers are on one page and the salads are on another page, but then there's some other salads on this other page and then some appetizers are on this page, if they have this, but either the appetizers that have this other thing or on this other page, I can't see what my options are. I'm flipping back and forth from pages, I'm going into my briefcase, I'm grabbing out post-it notes, I'm dog tagging, I'm labeling. Point is no one will be able to figure out what they actually want to eat and they're just going to spend all this time with this menu. That's way too long. So don't do that.

Chris Schneider:

Keep your menu short, both in the number of items on it, because that is going to be how your team can pull that off the ability of your team to actually execute the menu that you're putting in front of them, but also in the actual number of pages of your menu. In a perfect world, if I was dictator of all bars and restaurants that existed on the planet, I would tell them you get one sheet of paper front and back. That is your food menu, cocktail menu you get one sheet of paper front. Now, obviously there are different situations and that's not always true, but nine times out of 10, if you cannot fit your cocktail menu on one page and you cannot fit your food menu on one page, front and back, your menu is too long, you have too much going on and you are opening yourself up to waste, problems and training, issues with execution and all sorts of things because you have too many items on your menu.

Chris Schneider:

So those are the five biggest menu mistakes that I see on a regular basis Prices too obvious and in the wrong spot. The menu itself is unreadable because the font, the colors or the size just make it hard to read. The menu is confusing because it's not laid out well. The menu is not pointing out the items that generate the most profit for the establishment and therefore revenue is not optimized by the use of the menu as a sales tool. And the fifth one, the menu, whether it's the items on the menu or the physical menu itself is just too long. So I want you to think about those five things and this is what I would encourage every single person to do, as I said at the beginning, look at your menu, figure out, am I doing one of these things, two of these things, three of these things, four of these things, and then make a new menu. Stop doing it. And if you stop doing it, chances of your profit going up, chances of your sales going up, are actually pretty big. You would be amazed how many bars and restaurants can get another five, 10, not more than 10, but another five or 10% sales when they structure their menu in a way that actually works for you and not against you.

Chris Schneider:

So if you have not had a chance to join Bar Business Nation, our Facebook group, check it out. It's down in the show notes. Go there, join, upload your menu and myself and everyone else in the group obviously, once you remember the group, you're more than welcome to critique other folks' menus as well. But if you want join, post your menu. Let's take a look at it and let's talk about. Hey, here where you have some opportunities, because, as I mentioned, almost every menu I see makes one of these five giant mistakes and therefore the bar is leaving money on the table because they are not addressing it.

Chris Schneider:

So with that note, guys, I am gonna let you go for the day Wonderful to talk to you. If you enjoyed our conversation today, make sure to like, subscribe or leave a review, as I just mentioned. Go on Bar Business Nation, post your menu. Let us tear it apart and help you out. Also, if you want to dive deeper on your menu, on what needs to happen with your physical menu or anything else in your bar, and you want some guided, structured help with that, make sure you go to the show notes below, click schedule a strategy session down there. It'll take you to a link you can book a call with me. It's a half hour, absolutely free, no obligation call. Where we talk, we get to know each other a little bit and we can see if I am able to help you increase your profits, because that's what we're all about, right Increasing profits. On that note, I hope you guys have a fantastic day and we'll talk again later.

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Intro
#1 Prices in the Wrong Places
#2 Design That Makes the Menu Unreadable
#3 A Confusing Layout
#4 Improper Placement of Profitable Items
#5 Menu too Long
Final Thoughts