4. Types of Menus
Chose Healthier
Options
Chose Random
Entrees
No Calorie Listed ✓
Calories Listed ✓ ✓
Calories listed high to
low
✓
Calories listed high to
low & color coated
✓
5. Discussion:
When guests see lower
calories, they tend to
chose those items. The
exact numbers between
with or without listed
calories weren’t much
different.
Hinweis der Redaktion
Hello and welcome to the annual restaurant management seminar. My name is Mechaela Croskey and I will be sharing with you the benefits and the downfalls of displaying calories on your menus.
We will begin with an introduction to a study that was done at Arizona State University this past year (2014), that tries to figure out if guests would chose different items based on their total calories if listed. We will then see what the results were of the study, which came to be surprising but not at the same time. Last of all we will discuss the outcomes more in depth as if they could be beneficial or not to your business.
How many of you have either the calories on the menu or on a sheet that could be given to the customer? Now raise your hand if take note of what items sell best on your menu, are they the healthier options? Based on the amount of managers that rose their hands we can see that this trend has not taken off yet.
The main hypothesis or question was to figure out if specific layouts of menus with or without calories listed would have an effect on what guests would order. I know personally if I were to visually see the calories listed on the menu of a place I was eating at, I probably would pick a healthier option only because then I would realize that maybe my favorite dish is not that great for you.
Sadly as you could imagine this could effect the amount of product that would be used for the night or how much profits would be made based on peoples decisions. If the healthier options takes more fresh ingredients, ordering more of those may cut into your budget or if those entrées aren't priced high, then your business would run into loss of money, see the concerns?
As you can see this study used four different types of menus to have their participants order from. (1) Without calories listed, (2) with calorie labels, (3) calorie labels from low to high, (4) calorie labels from low to high that also had also had red or green circles indicating low or high calorie choices.
Now you may be confused about the double check marked section but there is an explanation. Based on the results the “calorie listed” menu really made not difference in how the guests ordered their food.
Since it wasn’t a huge difference like the color coated, it wasn’t a big deal. Based on the calories listed the feedback we got from our participants was:
if the calories were listed it would determine if the restaurant was healthy or not.
If you have potential customers that care about what they are eating this may also be a negative because they possibility might not come back due to you not being a healthy choice.
This may not seem to important to you but based this pie chart, we can see that yes people do eat at home, but the next biggest places people eat are at fast food restaurants and at restaurants. For the united states to become healthy we must make changes in these places.
Thank you for listening and coming to my seminar.
