The future of data mining is bright and the food industry is jumping on board. 

We spoke to Nick Freeman, managing director of Menulytics about how this new software is helping restaurants extract dish-level-data to reimagine menus and increase their profitability. 

How long have you lived in Singapore and before then, what is your history?

I’m originally from the UK and worked with a few QSR chains in London before I moved to Singapore with PizzaExpress in June 2017, having joined the company in 2015. When the incumbent GM was promoted to a position in Shanghai, it made sense for someone familiar with the business to take over. I went on to open 7 outlets in my 3 years with PESG. Prior to joining PizzaExpress, I worked with Compass Group in Abu Dhabi. I was in charge of creating brands and menus for eight new restaurants/retail outlets at the brand new NYU campus on Saadiyat Island. It was brilliant fun and a little stressful.

How did you become interested in food analytics? 

I’ve been fascinated by the impact of menu layout on consumer behavior since I first started manually analyzing sales mix data around 10 years ago. It’s an area of the F&B business that has always fascinated me, because so many operators are leaving money on the table by presenting a menu that hasn’t been properly thought through. 

Menulytics makes “some cool menu optimization tech”. Can you unpack what that means for us?

Some of the bigger restaurant groups dive heavily into menu analysis, whilst a lot of smaller restaurants don’t really have the people or the tools to do this. Menulytics is a simple, affordable platform designed to help chefs understand the performance of different dishes on their menu and make informed changes that improve profitability. 

What is ‘dish-level data’ and how does it work?

We essentially extract the number of units of each item sold and the selling price from the POS system, then collect food cost data so we can analyze the profitability of each dish. We look at dine-in, pickup and delivery and have built a Virtual Consultant to translate the graphs and tables into text, so it’s easy to understand the changes the platform feels should be made.

Where does the “more profitable” side come from? 

Increased profit comes from positioning your high margin, popular items in prime positions on your menu and using photography or highlights to draw the customers attention to them. Very few people take the time to read the whole menu in a restaurant, so you want to make sure they discover the dishes that earn you the most profit as quickly as possible. Alongside the analysis, we also have designers that can create a new menu layout for you based on the data we uncover.

So is it the customer side that begins to make the menu and not the chef? Where does that leave the chef? 

To an extent, the menu has to be dictated by the customer, but I think chefs understand this. The idea of Menulytics is certainly not to replace the chef. Our goal is to empower chefs to back their menu decisions with data, so they have the confidence that any changes they make are going to be improvements.

Does it help identify trends that are off the menu?

Something we’re looking into is menu balance analysis, to identify areas where a restaurant may have too many spicy or red meat dishes for example. I think it’s very difficult to capitalize on trends for a restaurant. Oftentimes with short-term trends, by the time it’s clear that something is popular it’s already beginning to fade away. Additionally, “ingredient trends” are often pushed by suppliers without much by way of data. We’re not really looking at trends as a priority. 

What psychology goes into this and do you see different cultures reacting differently?

I think the guidance will be different for different cuisine types, so I suppose different cultures could react differently. A menu with dishes designed for sharing or a menu with very customizable dishes would need to be optimized completely differently to an a la carte menu in a hotel for example. Overall I think we all read menus in a fairly similar way though. There are some fantastic articles around the psychology of menu design online. Misaligning prices, adding photos, highlighting dishes and the exact location of a dish on the page can all make a huge difference to its success.

What type of restaurant is this best aimed at?

Really any restaurant that is not currently starting with data when designing a new menu. I would say this is probably most relevant to individual restaurant owners or small chains, but in reality even some of the big players neglect to check sales mix regularly.