Menu Mistakes Food Truck Vendors Need To Avoid

Your menu is one of the most powerful selling tools for your food truck business and making menu mistakes is the last thing new or existing vendors want to do. Not only does your menu provide an opportunity to introduce consumers to your menu options, but also reinforces your concept, highlights specials or high margin items, and can even be used as an up-selling tool. In order to get the most out of your menu, food truck vendors have to make sure that it’s organized properly with key menu engineering techniques in mind.

There are many little mistakes that food truck owners and their cooking staff overlook when developing their menu. Today we’ll discuss five menu mistakes that food truck owners need to avoid.

5 Menu Mistakes You Need To Avoid

Too Many Menu Items

While you may be tempted to offer your community everything you can cook, it is easy to make your food truck menu too long. At a certain point, adding menu items stop improving your customer’s experience and start hurting your sales. When a food truck menu is too long, customers tend to take longer to decide what they want. There are simply too many options to choose from. When it takes longer for customers to place their orders, it slows down the queue and the time it takes to get to get through the line. The result is that you end up serving fewer people every shift. Keep your menu simple. If there are items that aren’t popular, pull them off.

Driven By Price

When writing your menu, you need to avoid listing menu items with completely different price points together. This will end up with your customers to select lower priced items, which will hurt your revenue. The menu should also not make price the focal point. The prices should be the same size and font as the rest of the menu text. Prices should also be aligned with the rest of the text so the prices are not the first thing someone sees when they walk up to your truck.

Poorly Organized

The items on your food truck menu should be listed in groups. Appetizers should be in one section of the menu, all of the entrees listed together, etc. If you offer desserts, they should not should not appear before the appetizers. Menu groups should be listed in order of course. This way guests are drawn to the appetizers before the entrees. If a customer finds your entrees first, they may ignore your appetizers entirely.

No Use Of Menu Psychology

The final of our menu mistakes we see all too often is when vendors don’t use ordering psychology. By missing out on these common tactics, you lose the advantage of opportunities to highlight high margin dishes on your menu. The use of photos to promote dishes is a great menu engineering tactic. Just make sure photos and other menu design elements don’t get overused. If you feature to many items with photos or called out through other design tactics, the dishes you really want to call attention to won’t stand out.

Ignores Up-selling Tactics

While your window service staff are likely trained to up-sell certain items, your menu can also do this. All item add-ons should be listed on your menu. If you have burgers on the menu, make sure to note the option for bacon, mushrooms, and other items with the price tied to each. If it’s on the menu, you won’t have to depend solely on your service window staff or risk missing out on easy up-sell opportunities.

RELATED: Mobile Food Truck Upselling

The Bottom Line

A well-designed food truck menu has the potential to make a real impact on the consumer experience and your food truck’s overall profits, so make sure you aren’t making these common food truck menu mistakes

What other things menu mistakes have you made? Share your thoughts in the comment section below or on social media Facebook | Twitter