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Psychological Menu Tricks

9:00 am in Daily Bulletin

In the latest edition to our ongoing series on restaurant menu secrets, Jessica Hullinger wrote about some of the psychological tricks that restaurants use to boost sales:

  • Customers get uncomfortable if they’re presented with too many choices. The golden number of options per category of food (appetizers, entrées etc.) seems to be about seven.
  • Pictures boost sales of menu items by as much as 70%.
  • However pictures also lower the perceived quality of the food – which is why high end restaurants rarely have photos on their menus.
  • The price “$12.00” on a menu is far less appealing than simply “12”.
  • Menus may often open with an expensive item – say a $100 lobster – to make a $70 item later on in the menu seem affordable.
  • The most profitable items are strategically placed in the top right corner of the menu, since that’s where people look first.
  • Profitable items might also be put in a box on their own to draw attention to it.
  • Longer descriptions of food boost sales, in part because patrons think they’re getting more for their money.

Read about the colour schemes that menus use, the power of nostalgia, and more over here.

Source: Mental Floss

Tags: Foodonomics
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The Secrets That Menus Keep

9:00 am in Daily Bulletin

The Economist reviewed The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu and outlined some fascinating statistics from the book:

  • Mid-level restaurants constantly describe their food as ‘fresh’ – indicating anxiety about how people perceive their food.
  • The cheapest restaurants like to assure diners that their food is ‘real’
  • Expensive ones avoid such terms – suggesting that their food is fresh or real would allow patrons to consider the possibility that the food could be anything else.
  •  More expensive dishes have longer names. Each extra letter in a dish’s name roughly adds $0.18 to the cost.
  • Filler words such as “tasty” bring down the price by 9%, since it’s clear the restaurant has nothing useful to say about the food.
  • Expensive food is sexy. High end restaurants may describe their food as “seductive” or “orgasmic”.

Read some other fascinating insights, find out why people like to describe their guilty pleasures as ‘addictive’, get some insights about reviewers, and more over at the full article here. We can only imagine how good the book is which you can find here.

Source: The Economist

Tags: Foodonomics
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Restaurant Menus

9:00 am in Daily Bulletin

Megan Garber looked at the design of restaurant menus:

  • A restaurant’s menu, says the head of menu design at IHOP, is “the single most important representation of the brand in the restaurant, other than the building itself”.
  • The first menu appeared in France during the 1700s.
  • Before then restaurants would serve whatever food they wanted to serve and people would play a flat price to eat at communal tables.
  • In recent times there has been criticism of menus that are too long. Simple chains that focus on a few items such as Chipotle’s have been successful.
  • Menu designers have to consider things such as lighting in the restaurant and how things might get darker towards the evening.
  • Colours also change by season. Applebee’s menu has brighter colours in spring.
  • Menus are living documents. They’re usually updated every few months with some experimental dishes. If those dishes are successful they make it onto the permanent menu.

Read about how menu design is like web design, the menu’s Chinese origins, and how IHOP’s menu redesign helped boost sales over here.

Source: The Atlantic

Tags: Foodonomics
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Against Menus

9:00 am in Daily Bulletin

We’ve previously outlined a critique of the children’s menu. Turns out that adult ones aren’t that great either, at least according to Geoffrey Gray:

  • Menus don’t provide enough of the information that we need. Most just list the ingredients – not how they’re cooked – which isn’t really enough information for patrons to know what they’re about to get. Instead they usually have to clarify with their server.
  • They also provide a lot of information that we don’t need. Advertizements for the Chef’s new cookbook; information about the locally sourced farms from which the ingredients come from, and other tidbits that don’t help customers make their dining selection.
  • Customers read the menu to find out what they would like to order. Restaurants, however, design it to sell the items with the greatest markup.
  • The menu kills conversations. As soon as one shows up on the table people stop focusing on one another and on the menu instead.

In the full article Gray talks about the history of the menu and provides a five step framework to create a useful menu. Read it here.

Source: New York Magazine

Tags: Foodonomics
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The History Of The Children’s Menu

12:00 pm in Daily Bulletin

Michele Humes presented “a brief history of the children’s menu”:

  • Before 1919 children didn’t really eat at restaurants. These were meant for adults who could engage in “boozy grown-up fun” in a child free environment.
  • Then prohibition happened and restaurants desperate to find a source of revenue that could replace alcohol started offering children’s menu to cater to a new class of customers.
  • At the time a book by a pediatrician called “The Care and Feeding of Children”, was the seminal text about raising children. It stated that they should not be given “fresh fruits, nuts, or raisins in their rice pudding” and that items such as pastries, ham, bacon, tomato soup, or even lemonade were forbidden.
  • These rules against…good food seemed to have been laid down because the pediatrician behind the book “believed there was moral danger in sensual pleasure, and damnation in indulgence”.
  • The popularity of the book meant that restaurants soon began to advertise their meals as being “approved” by pediatricians.
  • Since then our views about raising children have become more enlightened but parents have become attached to the low prices on the children’s menus, while kids appreciate having the booklets that can also be used as clown masks or have cut out paper airplanes.
  • Times may have changed but the bland and unhealthy food on children’s menus hasn’t.

Read more about the hotels that pioneered the children’s menu, how it has evolved over the years, and more over here.

Source: Slate

Tags: Foodonomics
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The Doggie Menu

12:00 pm in Daily Bulletin, Signature

We’ve all heard of places which have dogs on the menu. Alina Dizik reported on the rise of restaurants that have menus designed specifically for dogs:

  • Dogs dine along with their owners and get a special menu for themselves. Some of the items include:
    • Bowser beer (nonalcoholic)
    • Frozen raw bone sprinkled with dill
    • Freshly baked dog biscuits made by the pastry chef
    • Lamb stir fry
  • One place offers all of its human-menu items in doggie version. While the food is the same the price is lower for dogs because they require less preparation and don’t include side dishes.
  • Chefs must be careful when designing the doggie entrees. There are foods such as onions, chocolate and dairy products that are unsafe for dogs.
  • Some restaurant owners even consult with vets to ensure their menu will appeal to dogs.
  • There are economic benefits to doing this. Not only does the dog-menu introduce a new revenue source, customers with dogs generally stay longer and order more food and drinks. There is also greater brand loyalty from these patrons.
  • Dog-owners are regulated to the patio – a typically underutilized space. Those who dislike dogs can avoid them by eating inside.
  • One restaurant had to build a separate entrance for dogs because regulations prevented dogs from walking through the human entrance.

The entire article is fascinating and sprinkled with wonderful insights. If you click on the link here you’ll find out how the restaurants deal with dogs that have to use the bathroom, how much these items may cost, what percentage of revenue doggie items make, some other dog-only menu items, how many dogs typically visit such establishments, why owners are concerned that their pets are getting old food, why certain pet owners hate the idea of a dog-only menu, and what restaurant owners and customers have to say.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Via: Marginal Revolution

Tags: Pet Perks
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“Market Price” In Restaurants Is Mostly A Sham

9:00 am in Daily Bulletin

Ever seen “MP” listed on a menu instead of the actual price? It’s probably a trick, wrote Kate Krader:

  • Shielding diners from prices on menus began with freshly caught seafood. Supply is erratic and prices can swing between extremes, making it difficult to print a set price on a menu.
  • But chefs liked the air of exclusivity it added to menus and so began to use the label on their proudest creations.
  • Hiding prices also helps prevent sticker shock and artificially lowers the average menu price, making it more popular on sites like Yelp.
  • This is just one strategy that restaurants have pursued to improve margins. Overall restaurant food prices rose 2.6% last year, while the cost of ingredients fell 1.3%.

Read more on Bloomberg.

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Ghost Busting Is Alive And Well In France

9:00 am in Daily Bulletin

Who you gonna call? You have a menu of options if you’re in France wrote The Economist:

  • The Catholic Church has 100 licensed exorcist priests in France but most are inactive.
  • Independent contractors have sprung up to fill the supply gap. One general exorcist charges $180 an hour to rid properties of demons.
  • Others are specialists. One that focuses on exorcising farms charges about $600 per exorcism.
  • The business can be lucrative. One practitioner reports working 15 hours a day and earning $14,000 a month.
  • Demand tends to rise after terrorist attacks.
  • American TV shows such as Fox’s The Exorcist also drive inquiries.

Read more on The Economist.

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The Economics Of Fake Food

9:00 am in Daily Bulletin

No, the title does not refer to fast food. Food unfit for human consumption. Again, no, not fast food. The Economist wrote:

  • Fake – or replica – food is used by restaurants to market their wares.
  • These used to be made of wax, but it too easily lost its shape.
  • Now, in most instances, a special plastic polymer is poured into molds and then painted.
  • For something like ramen, individual threads are created to give a true sense of the dish.
  • Raw food like fish, and clear liquids are the most difficult to convincingly depict.
  • Things start with a consultation where an expert makes a detailed sketch and takes note of the dish’s colour, consistency, and texture.
  • Fake dishes are particularly popular in Japan. They became so once western food started to spread in the 1930s and restaurants needed a way to show diners what they would be getting.
  • The “chefs” take pride in their work – they boast that it takes a decade to truly learn how to make replicas of sushi – just as long as it takes to master real sushi.
  • One Japanese company claims to serve more than 80% of the market, with annual revenues of $46 million.
  • The price of a replica can be up to twenty times the cost of the menu item.
  • Still, business is slowing. People now go to food blogs to see photos of the real life food.
  • The trade is also a victim of its own success – the replicas last so long restaurants don’t really need to become repeat customers.
  • The dominant company in Japan is trying to change that. It now offers annual subscriptions where it touches up the replica every three months.
  • It is also looking to expand into other markets. Some hospitals are clients and use the replicas to educate patients about the types of food they should eat after a procedure.

Read more on The Economist.

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Why Do So Many High End Restaurants Serve Burgers?

9:00 am in Daily Bulletin

Restaurants that serve a wide variety of cuisines, and are on the pricier end on the market, are all starting to offer burgers. Ryan Sutton looked into why this was:

  • Restaurants that introduce a burger usually price it to be much cheaper than the rest of the options on the menu.
  • And since burgers normally come with fries, it usually means patrons are too full to consider appetizers or deserts.
  • Therefore, the economics of burgers are confusing – they seem like they would drag down restaurant margins.
  • But restaurants reason that they attract a broader base of customers who might eventually order more expensive things on the menu.
  • It’s the dinner period that is usually the most lucrative for high-end restaurants anyway, so several will limit the burger option to the lunch menu.
  • Though classy restaurants also have to deal with grumpy chefs who didn’t get into the gourmet food preparation business to flip burgers. To placate them, some restaurants will limit the number of burgers they sell to as little as five per day.

Read more here.

Source: Eater

Via: Marginal Revolution

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