The Menu Mix is a regular podcast that takes a look at looking at leading restaurant groups to reveal the techniques and considerations behind the way they design their menus and run their businesses. Subscribe on YouTube to follow.
In this episode George Wetz (CEO) and Matt Holy (Director of Strategic Projects) discuss how Hopdoddy has delivered growth through smart menu design.
Episode highlights:
Overall impressions of the menu
"One of the things I love about this menu is its personality. And they've done this through using a very smart application of different typographies and iconography. So I'll give you some examples here. You're going to be able to see each of the different burgers, has got a different typeface to their title, and that really helps to give a different personality to each of those."
"It's quite daring really, to use so many different fonts in one menu, but they've managed to do this in a way that's really eye catching and engaging."
The psychology of the menu design
"So the different fonts breaks the menu up really nicely and draws the eye in in different ways, so you don't feel like you're reading a novel. What's really nice as well, is if you actually look at the categories, they're all labeled in green to break that up as well. So it gives you a really easy way to filter down like, ‘okay, what do I want to look at?’"
Rule of seven
"To the eye, it doesn't feel like a big long list. It gives each dish their own place in space and you don't get overwhelmed. I think it's a really smart piece of menu design. The psychology behind that is what's called the rule of seven. Within any menu category, you want to have no more than seven dishes, ideally five or six, because that's when you start to get fatigue from reading all the different options and potentially buyer's remorse because there's too many options for your guests to choose from."
Combinations and pricing
"One of the things on here we wanted to call out was the pricing generally and in particular the kind of the breadth of pricing from the basic to the premium in each of these categories. The way that they price their menu is really interesting. There's some burger where you get your burger and your fries are included. It's all one combo at price."
"What they've done is they've actually broken it out. And when you order your burger and you think 'I want some fries', you immediately go to the Friends of Burgers section and you'll you'll notice that the shareable large format bowls are right at the top. And then if you just wanted a vegetable side, that's at the bottom, but you can't get the individual side for all of them."
Cocktails and margaritas
"One other element we wanted to talk about on the composition was the cocktails and margaritas, which, compared to the beer, they get an awful lot of space, quite rightly so, they're higher margin products, so they're trying to draw your eye to those as much as possible."
"They've actually got nine cocktails, four of them being Margarita's. We've got a margarita menu just to give a bit more space to the eye, to really draw attention and give each one their own kind of personality."
Execution of the menu
"Burgers are a really interesting category in this space because sometimes it's very high customization, which can increase the complexity of the menu. But they do some really smart things around ingredient cross utilization. There's bacon on a lot of the the burgers and menu items. There's caramelized onions on a lot of those as well. So you could use that same ingredient that you've prepped in multiple places with other ingredients to create unique flavor combinations."
"There's just the right amount of variety and there's some of these burgers and sandwiches have their own flavor profiles completely that actually draws in a guest who's looking for that distinct flavor profile. the science behind this is from a turf analysis."
Salads and the use of color
"If you look closely at the salads here, they've mimicked the burgers. So they're using very similar ingredients to bring that complexity level down again. The chose to call out making the burger into a bowl with this green call out on the menu instead of just circling it like you might see in some other parts of the menu."
"One of the reasons behind this is because green evokes health. It evokes natural ingredients. And anyone who's looking for a healthier option on the menu, if they see some green, their eyes are going to automatically go there. This is one quirk about this menu, actually, because to that point, when I come over here to the Parmesan truffle fries coming in at 1560 calories, that's that's not the item on the menu I associate with being the most healthy, absolutely delicious, but not healthy."
Thanks for watching.
