Smart & Profitable Menu Design for Restaurants, Cafes & Foodservice

A menu's main role is to sell, so how do we use all traditional and digital channels to boost sales, improve customer service and maximise profits? Which of the old menu design rules still work, and what are the new possibilities with apps and websites?

In this important webinar, you will discover:

• How to Change Menu Design and Layout to maximise profits
• Menu Words & Descriptions - how to create a menu that ‘sells itself’
• Menu Pricing Tricks - increase revenue by up to 5% with better price shaping
• Apps, Screens and Kiosk Ordering - how to use new channels to maximise sales, and discover profitable design rules that work in these channels.
• Takeaway Menus - how to improve customer spend
• Dessert Menus - adding sweet profits to the bottom line 
• Healthy Menus - finding the profit opportunities
• How to Improve Staff Selling from the menu

 

Summary of Key Points from the Webinar

A menu is much more than just a list of food and beverages - people engage with your menu online, through online apps, on social media, on a plate and through their takeaway orders. A well-designed menu persuades customers to spend more money, and return for the food and drinks they enjoy.

Basic design tips for menus

• As you design a menu, make profit calculations so you can be realistic about the sale price of each item. Keep your gross profit margin in mind because it's the money you make on items that determines success.
• Sections and where you locate items on the menu influence your sales. Typically items that are going to be the most profitable should be in the ‘prime real estate’ and will sell more.
• Use a standard A4 page for a printed menu - the most common shape, and the most cost-effective for printing.
• Use columns because they are easier to read and easier to scan
• Keep an eye out for currency symbols and price endings. To improve sales and add 5% to your revenue, avoid ‘flat pricing’, such as pricing an item at only 9 without a dollar sign. Instead, adjust the price to $9.80.
• Highlight your specials by putting stars or any symbol that will attract the customer's attention
• Change your menu from black and white into colour
• Use nested pricing, which means tucking the prices at the end of each line so that people can focus on the description rather than the prices.
• Use words that use sight, taste, and smell descriptions because this is what sells the meal eg crunchy chips, golden fried chicken.
• Avoid using too many words because this makes your menu hard to read

New Marketing Rules for Digital Menus

• Make the menu smaller and tighter - shrinking the menu and wine list makes it easier and more economical to produce.
• Using QR codes as well as paper - a digital menu gives customers access with their phone, and the opportunity to order whenever they’re ready eg when it’s time for dessert, or when a place is short of wait staff.
• Include More Add-ons and ‘Modifiers’ - the new terminology for digital menus, driven by UberEats and delivery apps. People ordering online have no one to help them or offer suggestions. Smart design now offers a greater assortment of items and add-ons, so consumers can customise to their liking. The extra revenue per order translates into more profit. One experienced restaurateur who studies this, has seen you a 12% increase in average sales, just by offering more upsell options.
• Measure the basket size, not just the per-head spend. Data is the key to profit improvement. Basket size is an ideal way to measure the return on customer experience because rather than looking at how much money is spent per head, it gives you an idea of how many items and how much money a customer spends every time they order. When you know the basket size of your online orders, you can develop strategies to increase it and grow your business. The formula for this is: Total revenue ÷ number of orders = basket size. It has been proven that going from taking an order traditionally and then moving into a digital form you will increase your basket sizes and increase frequencies
• Use Great Pictures - wonderful, delicious and enticing photos. Whether you hire a professional or do it yourself, pictures sell your food 100% of the time, whether they're jpeg images, short videos or animated gifs. Good photos should convince customers to order something even before they read the description or see the price.
• Add Instagram Business Features - remember that Instagram is also a menu, so you need to update your account to include business features if you want customers to browse the menus and place orders online. There are many great options to explore.
• Coach your staff about the food on the menu. The more you drill and train them on the menu, the more they will remember, and increased sales will follow. Your staff must be able to tell customers...
• What is their personal favourite
• What all the other staff enjoy
• What is the best seller in a category
• Whether It’s spicy, not hot, and other common flavour requests
• If it's vegan or suitable for other dietary preferences

Transcript of the Webinar: Smart & Profitable Menu Design for Restaurants, Cafes & Foodservice

Ken Burgin: Welcome everyone. This is an important topic today, smart and profitable menu design. You don't have to redesign your menu, but I want to show you lots of ways that you can do that, and to get customers spending a little bit more, to emphasise the high profit margin items, and generally make this a really powerful sales document. Of course, it's no longer a piece of paper or a piece of cardboard. It's now on a screen, it's on a kiosk, it's on a phone, and we're going to be looking at some examples of how that works.  

A quick intro to our guests: I'm Ken Burgin, been working with Silver Chef for about four years now. Used to have my own business consulting, and a few years before that a café and restaurant in Sydney. Love the industry and always looking for ways to help people make a bit more money and do it a little bit easier. Really a great privilege to have Emma Nguyen here from I Love Pho. Very successful restaurant on the north side of Sydney and Emma has kindly agreed to share some analysis of her menu and how she makes it work so well, so we got to look at some of her menu pages, and she's got some figures to show us. Well, let's say the last four or five months, people have really dived into online menus and apps and takeout ordering in a much more enthusiastic way, but she was, I'd say, one of the pioneers of this and just got a lot of good stuff to tell us.

            Jose Solinap and Tyrone Ho are good colleagues of ours. Both offering menu systems, ordering systems through kiosk or phone or website,  and they're able to give us a helicopter view of what smart operators are doing that they work with, too, because that's what we want to hear. What are the clever people doing? We see enough people making mistakes, we want to hear about the clever ones. Anyway, just an offer for you, as well. Like I said before, if you see any interesting menus or if you've seen any, if you want to drop those links into the chat would be great. But also, if you want menu feedback after the webinar, because I'm going to bombard you with a fair bit of information, also ask for that in the chat and I'll track your contact details down from your webinar registration, get in touch, and usually I do a five minute recording. I'll just look at your menu and give you feedback and it's all part of today, no charge with that. I'd be very happy to help you with it.

            Okay, what I'm going to do first up is dive into some menu design basics. This applies to whether it's on a phone, whether it's on a kiosk, or traditionally on a paper, and some of the things we need to think about there. One of them is, actually, the P word, profit. What do we actually mean by that? And even that people get a bit confused. So I've got two items here for sale. Now, I haven't included GST and I'm just not taking that into account to keep the calculations simple, but of course, looking at that coffee, we don't actually get $4, we get about $3.60. So don't forget, when you're doing your profit calculations to be honest about what the sale price is. But you can see two items here. One selling for $18, one selling for $4. And we could say, well our profit margin on the left is 10%. Sorry, our cost at 10% and our profit margin's 90%, which is pretty attractive. On the right, our profit margins are only 67%.

            And many of time I've said to people, "Which one's more profitable?" And they'll say, "The hot pot, of course." No, sorry. They'll say, "The coffee, of course," because the cost percentage is much lower. Well, that's cool, except which one is going to pay more of the rent? Which one's going to pay more of the wages? I'm not trying to teach you simple stuff here, folks, but it's amazing how many people forget about the gross profit margin. It's the dollars you make on items that are going to make you successful or not, so just a little reminder. And look, with all of this kind of stuff, please teach the chef, teach the staff, because they work hard, probably didn't like maths much at school, and they need to know some of this stuff, as well.

            I want to now go through some design principles, as well. And don't forget, if you got any questions and answers, if you would just like to drop those in our Q&A as we're going along, as well. Actually, before I dive into that next part on design, I might just have a look at the poll and we'll close that off and see what the results are from that. Okay, so finishing the poll, and let's have a look at the results here. Question is, how often are we seeing menus being offered on apps or phones? Occasionally, so not too often. Do you see menus being sanitised or removed from use for COVID safety reasons? Hardly ever. That's my experience, as well. It's like a lot of places. What COVID crisis? They know business is down, but they haven't changed their behaviour very much.

            Here, interesting question, for people ordering takeaway. Slightly more people using other apps rather than Uber Eats delivery or others. And looks like the experience, it's pretty mixed there. Easy to use, but not a lot of add-on sales being done with it. Okay, so we can just think about those survey results as we're going through our content today. Okay, now I've got my 10 top design tips for menus, which I want to go through with you. If you got any feedback, drop it into the chat, that'd be interesting to hear, but we're going to use that when we talk to Emma about her menu and how she designs menus and looks at profit margins.

            A few things just on menu layout. A typical A4 page, the most common menu design, and certainly the cheapest to produce if you're printing. And you're thinking, "Well, which part do we put where?" Well, the items that are going to be the most profitable should be getting the prime real estate. And while it's important to think about it is this is usually how the eye travels. Obviously, the no meat, no gluten is probably an important part of your menu, but it's probably a small part. Chicken and beef are usually the biggest sellers, so let's give it prime real estate. Seafood, certainly profitable, maybe not as high a seller. But just remember that sections and where you put things, everything like that is influential. And if you've got a menu that you can move things around, just test and see how it influences your sales.

            Columns are important, so here's a rather hard to read layout on a page, and we've all seen plenty of these. And you're reading and reading, you're thinking... again, you're not consciously reacting to it, but it's just hard work, a menu like that, whereas if it was rewritten with two columns, like this, notice straight away, easier to read, easier to scan. And there's an important difference. And the men can decide whether this is true or not, but it's been said that men scan a menu and women read a menu. Do you think it's true or not? Helena says, "Absolutely, yes. Hell yes." Good. But we got lots of people, so we've got to have menus that are easy to scan, menu headings, and if someone wants to read all about how it's made, there's something good for them, as well.

            Currency signs and price endings: $9 or $9.80, what are we going to sell things for? I see so many places that have, what I call, flat pricing. It's just a 9, there's not dollar sign or anything like that. It's just a 9. But if you sold 100 of those for $9.80, instead of $9, hey I need that 80 dollars, that's paying someone’s wages for the whole night. Sometimes people say, "It's a design thing." Well, let's put design second and put profitability first – it’s an easy win in the next few days, if you wanted to have a bit of reprint or redo what's on your screen.

            Here's an example of that, and I actually did some calculations around that, and I saw a full 5% improvement just in sales, just by changing price endings. Does the consumer think that $9.80 is the same as $9? Well, certainly there's lot of retailers who work off that approach, as well. I think that's a very easy win, probably one of the easiest wins you could make with menu changes. Another simple one is just highlighting specials. I put a couple of stars on this one, but you could put them in a box or you might put a little symbol beside it or something like that. Just by drawing attention to something, you will sell more of them. Which ones will I draw attention to? Maybe it's some kind of special that you're enthusiastic about, but I'd love to think that the ones you draw attention to are the ones that are the most profitable, the ones that have the best gross profit margin.

            And that's why something even like a seafood platter, which if you do it on your menu, if can be a very expensive item. If might be $85, it might be $125. And if you did the percentage of that with a half lobster and all sorts of expensive seafood you might think, "Well, that's too high percentage-wise," but the dollar profit margin on that is considerable. That's the reason why we do some highlighting, and, there are ways to do that with new digital menus. It's easy to do on print menus, and we've got some examples to look at. Here's another interesting trick, I don't know if you've tried this, a decoy price. Notice we've got a price range there that's pretty even, the entrees are in the $8 to $12, the main courses between $18 and $22. Now, notice as soon as we drop that $29 price at the bottom, what does it do to all the main course prices? It makes them look a bit more reasonable.

            Maybe you won’t sell a lot of that $29 one, but you will sell some, but the point is to play with people's heads and they reconsider the pricing and the value of other items on the menu. Nested pricing is also something that can work well. Notice how, on the right hand side, we've got the prices down the right, kind of like a hardware catalogue, and on the left, we've just tucked them at the end of each line. We're not hiding prices, but we're not making them the number one most important thing. We want people looking at the left-hand side of the menu, where the description is, not getting stuck on what's on the right-hand side.

            This is a fun one to do, and look at your menu and see if you can just change it from black and white into colour. What are some simple, tasty words that you could add to description? Not just fried fish and chips, but golden fried fish and chips or crispy golden fried fish and chips. Don't go crazy and don't hype it up, well you can if you want to, but it's really easy to add some simple words. And actually, when we look at Emma's menu shortly, you'll see how she's very nicely incorporated that. We want people going, "Yum," not just, "Oh, I'm hungry. I better have something to eat." This is the way people will spend a little more on something that sounds a little more interesting. This is an easy win - I often see menus that are still a bit like black and white TV rather than colour.

            Here's another example. Flathead's a beautiful fried fish, but if you have tourists, people won't know what a flathead is. It sounds like a deformity, so make sure, if you do have a flathead, you can tell them that it's fish, but you can see the different between what's on the left and what's on the right.

The last of our design tips here is: in a section, the item that's first in a section or last, especially the first, will sell more just because of its position. So don't go putting things just in price order from cheapest to most expensive. Think about the garlic mussels, and if we make the most dollar profit, put it first. And maybe the chilli prawns, even though it's $12.95, but the cost of putting them on the plate and the gross profit on them might be less, so moving those things around makes a difference.

            I've got another poll for you, because I'd like to ask you as consumers, what kind of menu weaknesses you notice. We've looked at menu strength, but that's highlighting a lot of menu weakness that we see around.

             Let's have a look at the results. Okay, so it's pretty much across the board, all the weaknesses. The flat dollar pricing, maybe not as much of a problem, in most situations. Too many words and hard to read seems to be the top one. Interesting. You can take that on board. Now, don't forget. I've given you a lot of information here in these 10 principles. When I send out the replay, on Monday, of the webinar. I'll also include a PDF of all the slides, as well. So you can go through those in your own time, also.

            Now just one picture, in a typical food court, and this is where we seen menu design principles applied. To me, most of what's important here, I mean the same things around easy to read and headings and descriptions. Oftentimes, they'll use pictures, as well. But people scan very quickly and words have to grab the attention very quickly, as well. You can see the screen, that one, create your own, on the right. To me, that looks way too busy for anyone to pay attention. Usually, they're looking down at the person or what's on the counter, rather than up. I don't know about you. I think this one's a little bit busy, but hopefully they can change it around. And, of course, you've got flexibility with this sort of design work that you can keep changing any time you want to.

            Okay, so real life experience before we dive into talking to Emma about her menu is I went to dinner last night at an Indian restaurant that I really like, and have been there quite a lot. The picture looks a bit crude, but it's very comfortable and the food's great, and the service is always very friendly. Hadn't been sitting down there since back in about February, before covid lockdowns. And they had no menus, just a QR code in the middle of the table there. I pulled my phone out, and boom, straight up came the menu, and you can do the same, actually, on this screen, if you want to. You can see what comes up. But I've ordered take away from this place, and the menu looked pretty much the same on my phone when it came up, basically they've just swapped over to having all menus on phones only.

            When it came to dessert time, at the end, they did bring a small laminated card around, but most of the heavy lifting with the menus is being done with the QR code. So QR codes now have to be part of our kit and part of the way we set things up. So let's now talk to our guest, Emma Nguyen, from I Love Pho in Sydney on Sydney's north shore. Wonderful restaurant. A wonderful operator, and it's a real pleasure to have you here today, Emma, and thanks for joining us and sharing about your restaurant. Just tell us a bit about the restaurant, the style of menu. What's your thinking behind it?

Emma Nguyen:

Hi everyone. A bit about myself, I have a Vietnamese restaurant in Crows Nest for almost nine years. This has been a good change for me from corporate world to being a restaurateur, because I' really enjoy it. And I also have the Chao's Catering which serves the corporate client for all the restaurant food. Today, I would like to share with all of us here of how the takeaway menu have been changed from the past couple year until today, and how it changed from being a very small extra income, to becoming a main part of our sales. .

Ken Burgin:

I just took some screenshots from your website, where we've got some of them are the takeaway menu and some of them are the sit-down. So I think this one's from the takeaway. Is that right? Or is this the sit-down?

Emma Nguyen:

This is the dine-in menu

Ken Burgin:

Now that you're all keyed up on menu design principles, you will notice what are some of the words or the descriptions or the things around pricing? Anyone want to drop stuff in chat about what are you noticing there? Jose, you can kick off for us. What do you notice in some of the design principles that are being followed there?

Jose Solinap:

Most definitely, descriptive words. I'm nearly salivating reading them.

Ken Burgin:

Crispy chicken wing. Caramelised fish sauce. Now, I love this one, light, crispy batter. This is telling me that even though it's fried, it's okay. Is that right?

Emma Nguyen:

The idea is that the menu is very appetising you when you look at the picture, rather than reading the description and the price. "Oh, I want that." And then, once you decided, your mind already said, "This is what I want," so it doesn't matter what you write and how much it is-

But you only have enough information, so when they read it, they're just confirming, "Yes, definitely this is what I want. Yes, I want to eat it," rather than boring ingredients.

Ken Burgin:

You also have a signature dish. And notice at the top, entrees to share. So what's this saying? This is not small entrees, this is entrees to share. Emma, is the thinking here to get people to order, basically, the large size or something?

Emma Nguyen:

The idea here is to make the person feel not too guilty to order.  So then the cost, $24, suddenly becomes $12 each.

Tyrone Ho:

The other one is the images there, Ken, are great.

Ken Burgin:

What's the story with photos, Emma? Do you get a professional for them? Once a year to do your photo or do you do them yourself or how does it work?

Emma Nguyen:

My menu is an investment, in terms of design, photos, and layout. With all the images flat laying with multiple dish, when people look at them, they forget about the menu, they're looking at the dinner on the table. And then, "Oh, this is what I want. This is what I want." And, at the same time, the person sitting next to them can share and, "Look, how about that?" So you take them away from the focus of, "Okay, what are we going to have? How much we have to spend?" But rather than, "Oh, I want this, I want that. How about we share that?" So the image has to be real size, the real ingredients, and also its plating it complement to each other. "Okay, should I have shaking beef or I have a crispy pork belly?" Even with the salt and pepper before, “I don't want prawn, I can have squid," or "I'm vegetarian, I can have tofu and eggplant," rather than go and look in the description.

Ken Burgin:

I love this title for vegetarian, Love Green Veggies, not vegetarian menu. I often think vegetarian menu sound like it's a bit of sentence, isn't it? This is like a flavour celebration. Bronwyn is asking, "Is this just the online menu or does it look this is in the restaurant? And how large is the document?"

Emma Nguyen:

This is the A4 size dine-in menu in the restaurant. But when I do the online menu for takeaway, it's the same image. Online and dine-in is very consistent, but because with the online, depending on the platform that we use, we have to follow, so we just use individual dish, but the same description and same concept.

Ken Burgin:

Okay, so when you pull this up on your phone, it'll just be individual dishes rather than the-

Emma Nguyen:

They will just be individual.

Tyrone Ho:

Ken, there's another question. How does sharing work with COVID issues?

Emma Nguyen:

Yes. , so this menu was a while ago and it's still ongoing, but with the COVID, when you sit on the table, you're already considered as the family or same group. But then people are more cautious about it, then you can always order separate dish, single entrée, because there's another section on my menu, it's just individual entrée dish.

With a sit-down menu following with the concept you mentioned, it’s easy for people to navigate. You have entrée and then you want to sell your main which is where you have most profit margin and the biggest sales, so it's on the second part. And then, any other options of meat choice, vegetable choice, is following after that. Even though my signature dish is pho, which is the Vietnamese noodles, I wouldn't put it on the front page of the menu. It will be right after all the entrée, the main, and then I have-

 

Why? Because if someone come and know exactly what they want, they will just go straight to the section that they want to order. But majority of people coming in with their family or friend, they like to browse through. And it's the impression of the first thing that you want them to see.

Jose Solinap:

I think that's also a good strategy, too, because, Emma's a bit of an institution in North Sydney, people know her for her pho, so if you're going to have pho, you know where to go and get it. But I think what we want to do is, "Look, we're more than pho. Why don't you look at the other stuff that we can provide, and then, at the end of the day, if you want pho, of course, we're going to do pho for you, but here's an opportunity to see what else we can do."

Tyrone Ho:

Lots of highlighting vegetarian or gluten free options and things like that, which is good. It’s becoming more and more prevalent these days. And just the little options to upsell, like the salt and pepper. Oh, so the calamari. Oh, you want prawns? It's only an extra two bucks. All those little additions, similar to what you were saying earlier, Ken, about the hot pot versus the coffee, all the little incremental gains you can make helps pay the rent right.

Emma Nguyen:

I'll follow that point. For example, salt and pepper items. We have the main at $23, but then for someone they just want it for themselves, there's an option for entrée. And also, when you look at, "Okay, it's only $15.90," but then you look at the option and you say, "Actually I love prawns." So extra two dollar normally it's just nothing. But when you put $17.90, it's another step to think of, but two dollar extra, that's fine. Everyone can just do it. So it’s helping them to making a better, smoother decision making.

Tyrone Ho:

Is the menu on individual pages or is it some form of book and what would you recommend?

Emma Nguyen:

With the menu I have, because there are many dish, and I have a vegan menu as a separate section, but it is an A4 book, and it's designed on the open page of two A4s. It's actually A3 landscape, so when you see one side will be all image with the number reference, so then you want people to shop by a picture. Look at the dish. I'm talking about dine-in now. And then, after that, they can reference to the right and see description, options, and price. So even on the first two page will be entrée to share and entrée by itself. But at the same time, they both see all the options.

            And then, the next page will be two pages of main, and then the next page is noodles and one page is salads. So it's continuous and easy to compare, rather than suddenly you cut half of the menu and then move to the next one. You will have to turn left and right to keep looking on that picture, in reference with this. So you want everything just in one view and you can just see it.

Tyrone Ho:

Do you print them yourself? Do you have a good printer at the restaurant or?

Emma Nguyen:

This menu is laminated, so we can actually sanitise and wipe it and it doesn't wear out. It can be easily printed by a printing shop, not by myself. But it's easy to change and update, because we have the soft copy, if we need to update, we just reprint and the menu is covered by the book, so you can just insert it in.

Ken Burgin:

Let’s look at some numbers.

Emma Nguyen:

So I thought it's easier to break it down to the chart. With takeaway, before COVID, it's about 40 to 45% of my total revenues. And when COVID-19 happened, we got shut down in terms of no customer and the only way you can deliver is to go delivery and online. Luckily, at the time, we already had all our online available in all different platform. But then, it's just the time to think, it's like, "Okay, I don't have a chance to interact with my customer," the only way the customer can find me and order and communicate with me is the online order. The focus is shifting to, how can I make this takeaway menu better? I mean, this has always been purposely designed for easy to look and easy to order, but then now that the whole business income stream is shut, the only way is the takeaway, so I look at that to improve. And after the three weeks on the COVID, on the third week, our takeaway sale became 54% of the total revenue. And during this lockdown, when I say dinner and lunch there, I mean people walk past the shop the order, by walk past, by telephone directly, but not online. So 54% is online orders through all different platforms.

If you go back to the first slide, It was 54% of the takeaway, and now that we reopened to 10 customer and 20 customer, the takeaway is still maintaining at that value, but it's come down to 45%. It's meant that, in a way, right now, what I'm doing is better than before COVID.

Here is to breakdown of how we boosted our takeaway sale, because now it's the main part of the income? If takeaway by itself is already 54%, how can we upsell? How can increase the frequency? How can we increase the order sale amount? Same logic as when we serve the dine-in customer, we want the extra drink, add on extra complement dish that will complement with the dish that they order or should we create a combo suggestion? How I look at it is, how can I train my online menu? What is the perfect virtual stuff?

First, I think of myself as a customer. If I want to order and I look at the online menu, I have no help and support. I don't know who to ask and how big it is, what is a good way, should I order something else? Because once the food is ordered and delivered to home, you're kind of too late to make any change, you're not sitting in the restaurant. On the menu online, I'm talking about Uber, Deliveroo, and buy direct online, I will ask, okay if you want, say, crispy chicken, "Would you like steamed rice? Would you like to have some vegetable?" This doesn't have to be an add-on, but it's a suggestion of complement dish. And then, people might as well just make the addition right there, rather than scrolling down to the next page and looking, "Oh , I need to have a main, a vegetable." And then, right after that will be, "Would you like an extra piece or chicken or would you like an extra vegetable on your dish?" So they have an option available and the flexibility of design their own meals for their family.

Ken Burgin:

Right, okay. So they can turn an entrée into a main by just adding extra things to it even.

Emma Nguyen:

And at the end they know whether they want a drink or not, and it’s still convenient to have it right there. And then, people can just add it on. Even though we're starting with entrée of $9, but they probably already end at $40.

Emma Nguyen:

So if we look at the numbers again, this is how it works. For me, the food takeaway was 54%, but with drink add-on and combo, I managed to increase 5%. We all think 5% is nothing, but when, just for example, the turnover is $30,000 a week, your 54% of takeaway is $16,000. And with the 5% extra at the bottom there, it's showing $1,500 weekly. That is just an add-on. $1,500 for add-on extra over a year is about $65,000. And $65,000 this is a large amount of money that you can easily do it to offset your other costs.

Ken Burgin:

Just by tweaking the design.

Emma Nguyen:

Giving them an option, so this could help you to reduce your commission of 30%, reduce your rental. And this is cheaper stuff, at the end of the day. How can you do everything that you can, get the customer, get the perfect choice of menu selections and make a good delivery, and they come back. Over time, they know, "Okay, I can add on this, add on this," and believe it or not, the next time they actually get more add-on, and more add-on.

Ken Burgin:

Oh, okay. So you're noticing a customer history like that. This is so interesting. And when you can see a complete customer transaction and then compare one and see how they change.

Emma Nguyen:

This is an example with UberEats ordering. So say that is the spring roll, I have choice, which is no extra cost. And then, I have an option, "Would you like an extra?" Because one serve is only three or four. If you have one person extra at home and you want extra then you can add on extra unit. And moving down, I have add-on with extra piece, and then I have extra side, whether you steamed rice, or want a vermicelli noodle or you want sauce to come with it, because some people want more sauce. Some people want just to eat the entrée with the rice.

This is only the last three months. I wanted to show how we were doing in COVID time. So same example here, say this is the very basic item that sometimes it's the restaurateur or operator, we don't think that people need it. We just put the complete dish. But things that we have available so much in the restaurant, pasta, noodle, vermicelli, sauce, anything that you can just put it on as an extra,  give them a lot of flexibility to build up for their own preference. For me, for example, if you look at extra vegetable, this is five per day, over a month it's 126. And then, look down in the price, the vegetable is $5 each. So over a year, $7,000 of the vegetable extra, if you didn't offer, you don't have the extra $7,000.

Ken Burgin:

You've got an Asian style menu here. We get asked, "Do you want to have rice?," or "Do you want to have," in an Indian restaurant, "a naan bread?," or something like that. I'm thinking for our café or for our Western style menu, this is the challenge, isn't it?

Emma Nguyen:

No, they still have a lot of options. I've been in the café where they have extra egg, extra sauce, extra butter, extra jams, extra upgrade of the bread to sourdoughs, different bread. I think they have a lot more to add on. .

Ken Burgin:

I think that's a good challenge for those restaurants, the Western one or the café, where you think, "Oh no, we don't do it like that." Well, why not? Because the figures you share, $7,000 a year, $7,500 dollars for extra vegetables. Hey, let's make an effort. Let's find a way we can actually sell more things.

Tyrone Ho:

The other thing I think everyone should remember is, don't forget the principles you mentioned earlier for the extras. Don't just say, "extra egg." Say, "extra poached free-range egg." Or say chilli sauce, house-made.

Emma Nguyen:

Sometimes with the extras and the add-ons, if you can modify that to a different way of saying, and it sounds as good. For example, in Uber, they let you change how you want to ask the extra. The way I ask is like, "Would you like an extra egg? Would you like an extra spring roll?" Some platform are fixed, so then you just have to use the word add-on or extra. With extra and add-on we feel like it’s a bit greedy.

Ken Burgin:

It’s the subtlety of the wording. And Bronwyn's made a good comment, "Works great on breakfasts and add-ons." Bronwyn, maybe you'd like to let us know what are some of the bestselling add-ons you do on your breakfast. I'm guessing you've got a café there.

This has just been awesome Emma, the feedback you've given and the information you've shared with us. I'm sure lots of people will be diving onto your website. And hopefully, if they're in Sydney, coming to visit, as well.

            But what are some of the new rules for menus? Certainly, just from talking to lots of people, everyone's shrinking their menu a bit and making them a bit smaller, not as many wines, plus QR codes. I've given you a couple of examples here, I'm about to give you a couple more. But this is super simple and easy to do. Emma, have you got QR codes or are you planning that?

Emma Nguyen:

I'm in the process of setting up that menu to show in a QR code. I mean, QR code is easy to have, but you want customer to see a good menu and order.

Ken Burgin:

When we click on the QR code, it has to take us somewhere that's really juicy and appetising. Lots of add-ons and what is called, in digital terms, modifiers.

Another term that retailers always use the basket size. How many actual items do people order. Now, in traditional café restaurant, we think of per head spend. Table of four, they spent $80, that's $20 per head, but it's important to look at another number, this basket size, as well. I think that's worth thinking about and, of course, take great photos. Emma, do you use a professional or do you do some of the photos yourself?

Emma Nguyen:

I'm flexible. I mean, if the menu is to print, then with professional person. But I have special menu on social media it will be just myself or staff can do it.

Ken Burgin:

Phones are amazing what they can do now. Now, I'm just going to drop a photography service in the chat there. It's called Snappr, and it's like Uber for photographers. When I've run a few events in the last 12 months, when events were a thing, I needed an event photographer and I'd book someone for two hours at a very inexpensive price. I wanted an event photographer, but I know they've got food photographers, as well. If you do want someone to come along and do it, it's worth exploring.

Tyrone Ho:

Ken, I was just going to say, I think now's probably also the time to experiment, too, because it's almost like customers seem a wee bit more forgiving or understanding. So whether the experimentation is shrinking your menu or just focusing on more vegetarian or seafood or something like that. You mentioned basket size, which is definitely a traditional retail term, but even if you think fundamentally, how many years have we been waiting at Coles and Woollies and they have all the chewing gum and the chocolate and stuff like that at the cashier.

Tyrone Ho:

At the counter. That's essentially what your add-ons and modifiers are. It's just that little bit extra, it's actually the same concept, but you're just trying to do it in a digital manner.

Ken Burgin:

George at Moody Chef in Sydney says his front counter is what he calls ‘waterfront real estate’, it's prime selling territory where you get that last sale for chocolate or a muffin or some little impulse buy.

Tyrone Ho:

He's almost duplicated the retailing, because he also sells some mints and chewing gum and stuff like that, as well.

Ken Burgin:

Tyrone, you've got a helicopter view of what you're seeing with your product TabSquare. You've given us a couple of examples here, very nice photography. But just tell us, what are some of the things that you're seeing the smart operators doing with taking a digital menu and making it work much harder than a piece of paper?

Tyrone Ho:

Well, I'll steal one of your favourite terms, Ken - take good photos. Pictures do sell, 100%. And even gif images, so an animated gif from the data we have these...  you might see photos with the burger being built.

Ken Burgin:

Or the sauce being poured onto the steak or something.

Tyrone Ho:

Four to five times more sales of that one item.

I guess, one of the things that we do is we have a little bit of an AI engine in the background that may sound like a movie name, but essentially it just learns the preferences of the customer. As you were saying, location is everything, and it's the same digitally, whether it's on paper or not, it's the same. Even more so on the phone, because if you've got 100 items, people aren't going to scroll down to look at every burger. So if I'm vegetarian, I'll keep focused, I want to see the vegetarian burgers first, right? Then even with the upsells, right? I'm vegetarian, don't try and upsell me bacon on my vegetarian burger. Upsell me on the marinated mushroom and things like that.

            And wacky things exactly like this, similar to what Emma was saying is, if someone forgets to order a drink, we should try and sell them a drink, right? And you could do it the other way around. If they forgot to order spring rolls we should go, "Hey, you only ordered pho. Why don't you get some spring rolls? It sounds great, right?" So it's that same kind of thing, I think on the right there it's specifically for pizza, but it's the same thing.

Ken Burgin:

Everyone grab your phone and scan the QR code to open up Tyrone's demo. You can pretend you're ordering and see how this system works.

Tyrone Ho:

We've definitely seen some really good increases in whatever terminology we use. I've said here average transaction value or you could say basket size. On average, you see about a 12% increase by just being able to upsell what that person actually wants.

Ken Burgin:

And I think we've got to recognise that most of the waitstaff we've got in Australia, they don't sell. Aussies weren't born with the selling gene. We just give you the menu. "Are you ready to order? What do you want?" And we try and coach them and all the rest. And it's a joy when you do have someone who actually spends the time, but most times it's not going to happen. The menu has to do that work, the menu or the app. And then, you'll get that result that you dream of, and you're always frustrated that it doesn't seem to happen. The add-on, the extra.

            Jose, let's flip to your insights, you represent OrderUp. And Emma, I understand that for your online ordering you use OrderUp, as well. Jose, you've given us some step throughs of a typical setup at the Little Italy restaurant. It all looks pretty simple and straightforward, and interestingly, you've also got that last thing you might also like, dessert. What are some of the observations you'd like to make after the different things we've been looking at so far?

Jose Solinap:

Well, I'll reiterate Tyrone's slide on the stats. From traditional ordering versus putting a menu in a digital form, we've seen an increase of up to about 30%, so we've got about 1,500 restaurants all around Australia, and the data we've seen, it's proven that going from traditional ordering and moving into a digital form, you're going to increase your basket sizes and you're going to increase your frequencies. What we've seen further to that, we have a lot of customers who still don't have images on their menus. We have a lot of customers who still don't have modifiers. What we do as a business is also coaching through this process, because what we've seen, and this is a real live case study, we had a café four weeks ago who had our solution, the OrderUp solution, so it was a digital menu, but it didn't have modifiers, it didn't have images. In four weeks, he grew his basket size by 10%, just by adding images and the opportunity to get the customer to modify their own dish.

            It's not about forcing anything onto people, it's just about giving them options. And myself, when I go out to eat at restaurants, I love to add extra things on, because I like to eat, that's the way I grew up. I find it disappointing when you go to a restaurant and you don't even get the option to do that. You know what I mean? So that concept, I think, now moving into the digital age, is lot easier to do now. And again, with a digital menu, you can change the descriptions, you can change the pricing, you can change the menu as often as you want. Outside of your design brief around descriptive words, the next level up is imagery. I know also, when I got to a restaurant, I look at everyone's plate till I sit down.

Ken Burgin:

In my café days I made very good money from desserts. I have a bit of a sweet tooth. The more we made, the more we sold, and I just think it can be a massive opportunity, and here’s the formula: sugar plus air plus water. Now, add a bit of chocolate, maybe add a few strawberries or something like that, but this is a great way to make money and build that basket size. And sometimes, we do see people have got their dessert menu, but it's not the range. We want the desserts where people can share, something that can be sharable and maybe you don't feel guilty. So that word light or, I don't know about low fat, but some of those things. Something fruity certainly is going to be a bit less guilty. Almost healthy. Is that the word?

            Anyway, and using your own descriptions. My place was called Café Troppo and we'd have Troppo trifle and Troppo this and Troppo burgers and all the rest. Another comparison that's important, I think, and that's strike rate, a term that's worth looking. We had 100 customers last night, and 18 of them ordered desserts. Our strike rate is 18%. What do you reckon? Good? Bad? I reckon that's pretty bad, so how could you improve? Because once we know the numbers, then we work on doing better.

Tyrone Ho:

Ken, also on desserts, especially for online orders, I think drinks almost all come into that same dessert category.

Where drinks always seem to be the forgotten thing. In a venue, we want to sell drinks with a great margin.

Ken Burgin:

Now my last point. I'll come back to our friendly staff and, yes, they're coachable. Yes, they can do better. It's just about drilling it over and over and reminding them, they need to talk about what their favourite is, what our bestseller is, and what everyone loves, and reassure people the curry is not too hot, and all those kind of things. But don't give up on training, there are definitely things to do.

Instagram is a menu as well, isn't it? One item and just a reminder, I hope you've updated your Instagram account to have business features, because you can have people clicking through the menus and clicking through to be ordering and all those kind of things, as well. Anyway, we've come to the end of our webinar today. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you to my three awesome guests Emma, Jose and Tyrone for contributing.