How to optimize your restaurant menu for online orders

Your dining-room menu is not your online menu

It is the sentence kitchens least want to hear and the one that pays best. A room menu is read sitting down, with time to ask for advice. An online menu is scanned standing up, on a 6-inch screen, in 40 seconds.

What the data shows

Across the menus we see, dishes below position 12 take under 5 per cent of orders. It is not a quality question, it is a position question. A 40-dish online menu is a 12-dish menu and 28 decorations.

Three corrections you can see within a week

1. Lead with what the kitchen does best, not with what earns most. A customer disappointed on their first order does not come back, and the margin on zero orders is zero.
2. Remove what travels badly. A dish that arrives lukewarm and soggy costs more than it earns, in cancellations and in reputation.
3. Photograph every dish you intend to sell. A dish with no photograph sells 3 to 4 times less than the same dish with a decent one, taken on a phone, in daylight.

Cancellations tell the truth

Look at cancellations per dish, not revenue per dish. A dish often cancelled before cooking has a description or a price problem. A dish often cancelled after cooking has a timing problem: the kitchen quotes it too fast and the customer waits too long.

The simplest rule

If you are hesitating about removing a dish from the online menu, remove it for 2 weeks and watch. Kitchens that run this exercise rarely put the dish back.