Moose Country Whiskey & Food, Minneapolis

Good design is good business. That's as true a statement as there is in marketing. The trouble is, what's good for me may not be good for someone else. There just isn't any accounting for taste.

I point this out only because I try to showcase menus in these articles that I think represent some pretty good design. However, I also know from more than 25 years of selling art and design, that a client, however well-intentioned, can wrangle even the best designers into creating some real crap.

Besides that, what I try to introduce in these articles is not as much about design as it is about engineering. There are a lot of people who can give a menu a double-dip in the glitz bucket, but it takes real skill to create a menu that will entice customers into making better choices for a restaurant.

A few months ago Terry Peters, Hal Langevin and Dan Salem of U.S. Foodservice, Plymouth, Minnesota, introduced me to Shawn Murray, the general manager of Moose Country Whiskey & Food. Murray was very helpful in getting the basic information we need to do a menu makeover. He provided theoretic food cost for each item, a complete set of menus, and a PMIX (product mix analysis) from his POS (point-of-sale system).

Current Menu

The previous menu had a nice layout. Not much to fault there. The right things were mostly in the right places, and the original graphics were professionally executed. Overall, I've seen a lot worse. What I wanted to improve was the prices. They were not strategic, they were in bold type, which puts a lot of pressure on bargain hunting, and some key items were placed incorrectly.

Also, there were a lot of pieces to the menu, which could be confusing. Besides that, nothing was highlighted, so the customers were left to make up their own minds about what to eat. That may not seem like a bad thing, this being a free country and all. The problem is, most customers will purchase items that have far less value than we restaurant operators would prefer. So having a menu offer some items as choices over others is a good idea.

According to the menu matrix, this operator was selling a lot of Stars, despite the food list-approach to the menu. For example, the hottest-selling sandwich, the Walleye, outsold the next-fastest-selling sandwich by almost two to one. Furthermore, it was bringing in nearly 50 cents over the average Plow Horse. In fact, 41 percent of total sales in the sandwich section was coming from Star performers, which is very healthy for any restaurant.

The entrée section at the time showed more potential than actual sales. Eight out of nine items were Puzzles, and the Fettuccini Alfredo was a Dog. In fact, the Smothered Chicken had not sold at all in this report.

There were a couple of factors contributing to low sales. First, the most difficult items to sell in any restaurant are the most expensive items. Consumers typically shy away from high-cost food. And now with the economy in the tank, it's getting even harder for restaurant operators to sell center-of-the-plate items.

Multiple Choices

We started by doing a basic layout, new copy and several design trials to get Murray's idea for the next incarnation of his menu. Of the five layouts we created, the client chose a very rustic, woodsy look with a stylized moose on the cover.

While all of the layout choices incorporated some of the old look, our designers gravitated toward the stylized moose illustration. We reduced the menu size a bit so the entire offering could fit into an 8.5-by-14-inch double (four-page) menu. In this way, we were able to offer a more manageable menu. We also were able to take advantage of better positioning, highlighting, mental anchoring and strategic pricing.

New Entrées

In the restaurant business, it's essential to offer items difficult for consumers to duplicate at home. That's why fried fish, appetizers and other stinky items are so popular at restaurants. Nobody wants to cook that way and have to live with the consequences.

To help entice customers to trade up to center-of-the-plate entrées, we recommended developing a few new entrées. And we embellished the names of some of the existing entrées to make them sound more appealing.

According to the original report we were given, Moose Country had sold only 186 of their best-selling entrées. Compared with the best-selling sandwich at 642 items sold, or the leading appetizer at 1,005, the entrées were not moving well at all. Even the salads sold better.

We addressed this problem by eliminating some of the items that seemed off-brand. The Fettuccini Alfredo didn't sell well, so we dropped it. We also tucked the prices into the paragraphs to make it harder for consumers to shop on price.

The High Roller Plate is the mental anchor point of $56.99. At that price, we're not expecting to sell any. What we are interested in is selling more Walleye Dinners, New York Strip Steaks, and Moose Country Meat Loaf.

Another strategy was to showcase items that had potential and were showing some signs of life on the old menu.

We also introduced "Chef Todd" to the menu to call attention to the restaurant's local connection. Chef Todd was responsible for adding his touch to many of the selections, so we made him a part of the menu.

The overall objective was to redefine the entrées in a way that would present them with real points of difference; i.e., menu engineering with an ability to draw consumers into trading up rather than down.

The New Menu

With the new design, we placed the appetizers, wings, pizza, soup and salads on the back because they had so much power, the customer will find them anywhere. It's sort of like placing the milk and eggs in the back of a grocery store so the customer has to walk past all of the really great other options on their way there.

We incorporated a creamy background color so we could use white highlights. By putting ragged boxes around some of these items, and by adding violators, we were able to give the entrées and other important profit items a boost in sales.

Murray said that even though the economy is really tightening, many of the entrée items are starting to sell, as well as many of the higher-margin items in each category. He also said the items that are harder to make and that offer less attractive profit levels are actually slowing down.

Best of all, Murray has gotten a lot of customer compliments on the design of the new menu. And even though we took his prices up an average of 10 percent, he has not had any comments on the price increase.

The Menu Matrix

The first step to any menu project is to develop a menu matrix, which plots out the value of your menu items based on popularity and contribution to the restaurant's income. This is essential in knowing what to keep on the menu, where you can take a price increase, and where to cut items from the menu. Any good matrix will break the menu down into these four categories:

Stars: These are your best-performing items. Stars bring you your best plate contribution, and they are popular, so they offer excellent brand power.

Puzzles: Puzzles are above average in profitability for your restaurant, but they are not popular enough. They may be priced too high or off brand.

Plow horses: These items will bring in the most sales. Your brand will be anchored in these items, so be careful not to upset customers by removing them or taking the price up too abruptly.

Dogs: Dogs don't sell well in comparison with other items, and they underperform from a gross profit standpoint, too. If you have to delete items, this is where to look. But be careful; these items are tricky in that they can offer some value to the operation both in profit and brand power.