Menu engineering. It’s a thing. | E-Neighborhood Advisor

It’s time for lunch and you and your crew head to the local fast casual restaurant. You take a quick look at the menu and choose your meal. You may not realize it, but the menu itself may have been engineered to influence your decision. “Menu engineering” is an industry dedicated to designing menus to convey certain messages to customers, encouraging them to spend more and making them want to come back. BBC Future talked to menu engineers and learned how fonts, the order of items and their descriptions, and even the weight of the menu itself are all carefully calculated to influence diners. Some major chains will test a menu for up to 18 months to get it just right. Why? Because the stakes (no pun intended) are high: a large chain may have a million people coming into their restaurants every day. Drawing consumers to the items that are the most profitable for the restaurant can yield enormous profit. Words have tremendous power over our food choice. Giving dishes descriptive names can increase sales by up to 27 percent in some cases. This becomes particularly effective if the description attaches some provenance to the ingredients – “Grandma’s home-baked zucchini cookies” sound much more appealing than plain zucchini cookies. But the words on the menu are not the only thing sending you signals. The colors it uses could also be having an impact. Green is often used to imply the food is healthy and fresh, while orange is thought to stimulate the appetite. Red suggests a sense of urgency and perhaps draws attention to dishes the chef most wants you to buy – probably because they have the biggest profit margin. Reordering the dishes on the menu can also have dramatic impacts. By placing the most expensive item at the top of the menu, it makes those that come after it seem far more reasonably priced. What’s next for restaurants? Perhaps tracking individual preferences and then suggesting menu items the next time you dine. Your Flooring Consultant, Matt Capell Email: sales@capellinteriors.com Phone (208) 288-0151 Fax (208) 917-6160 P.S. Here's a joke for you! I've opened up a restaurant called "Karma" There is no menu, you get what you deserve.