FOOD & BEVERAGE
MARGINS IN PLAIN SIGHT
Edit your menu listings and layout to protect your margins and drive sales.
This is Part 1 of a three-part series on the most over- looked profit lever in food and beverage: the menu. Part 1 focuses on using menu design to improve profit margin. Part 2 will dive into how to build a menu that tells a story guests want to buy into. Part 3 will look at how choice architecture and guest behavior impact menu design.
By Travis Talbot, Resort Hospitality Strategist, Hospitality Arts Group
Example: Turkey Club
Menus are food and beverage’s secret sauce. They shape behavior, set pace, and move more dollars on the P&L than any other system in the building. But most are only pulling a portion of the load they could be. Too often, they are treated like seasonal paperwork. Reviewed, updated, de- bated, printed, laminated, and left to age. Maybe there’s a seasonal facelift. Maybe a price bump. Then they sit. Not lifting. Not steering. Just existing. Meanwhile, 3 to 7 points of margin are hiding in plain sight, which adds up. A good menu communicates brand, supports service exe- cution, and sets the tone for the entire guest experience. It informs, educates, persuades, and entertains. Sometimes it even covers for what is not working elsewhere. It is also the first line of defense in protecting margin and your best ally in driving sales. It is a powerful and multifunc- tional tool. The trick is to learn how to utilize every tool within the tool.
Applied Strategy
Food Cost
Menu Price
Gross Margin
Sold Per Day
Daily Margin
Mid-page, no formatting
$4.25
$14.00
$9.75
8
$78.00
Top-left, bolded, boxed “House Favorite,” staff prompt
$4.25
$14.00
$9.75
12
$117.00
$4.25
$14.00
$9.75
17
$165.75
Nothing changed in the kitchen. The lift came from the menu layout and framing, and a nudge from the service team. This is where most menus fall short. The food is dialed in, but the strategy for how it’s presented gets left behind. Stop treating the menu like an art project. It is a business tool that belongs in the same conversations as labor strategy and pricing decisions, not buried under branding and print specs.
LEAK VS. LIFT
WHERE THE EYE LANDS
Menus are never neutral. They are either working for you or working against you. The leaks usually start quiet. A high-mar- gin item gets skipped because it is hard to find. An add-on never sells because it is boxed into a blind spot. A prep-heavy favorite ties up the line but barely moves the needle. Modifiers confuse more than they convert. None of it triggers alarms. Most of it never shows up in the reports. But the drag is real, and it hits every shift. That’s why each menu listing needs to be viewed and managed as a lever to improve traction or slammed down to avoid slack and lost profitability. Margins often come from how a product is positioned on the menu, not necessarily the product itself. Consider the fol- lowing table. Same food cost. Same price. Same prep. Three very different outcomes.
Guests don’t read menus. They visually graze them. Ten, maybe 15 seconds is all the attention most menus get before a decision starts to form. If the layout doesn’t guide that scan, guests default to what feels easy—whatever jumps out first, sounds familiar, or avoids asking a server for clarification or translation. For example, at one mid-sized ski resort in their all-day café, a $15 grilled chicken sandwich was outselling a $26 signature burger 2-to-1. The burger had stronger guest feedback and a bet- ter margin, but it was buried in the midsection of the menu with no formatting. The chicken sandwich led the list, boxed in, and flagged as a “guest favorite.” After swapping positions and giving the burger a proper visual anchor, sales shifted fast. These same layout principles apply even in cafeteria and scramble-style setups. Whether it’s a printed sheet, chalkboard, or digital screen, it’s still a guest-facing menu that drives behav-
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