Yesterday I spent some time “trying” to gather a collection of printed takeout menus…One of my clients is hosting an event and family members not directly involved might eat some meals in their rooms or go out…I tried to gather some printed menus to put in the packages…I was surprised that many did not have printed takeout menus and some of the ones I did collect were very poor quality ink jet or photo copy version…IMO they are leaving something on the table…
PS…And many did not even have a pdf version on their website or FaceBook page…
I do try to keep printed menu’s around. Even if they are just old school double sided menu’s that i can print at the store. But it is more a cultural thing, as the majority of consumers grew up in the digital age. They prefer everything to be found online and easily accessible via their smart phones.
A lot of the younger generations do not care for printed material at all, I have always been this way personally. I believe printed material will always have a place, but the vast majority of consumers have now shifted away from it and want digital access.
We do and I go through quite a few of them. Most every place around here I can think of has a printed menu as well, to varying degrees of quality. I try to push our website and Facebook with each one I give out, but people still refer mostly to the printed menu. I would like people to use the website as I can make changes there more easily. But even our younger crowd seems hesitant to switch away from a paper menu. I’ve attached our menu. It’s just a Word doc that I converted to pdf for our Facebook. This made me think though that I need to have a downloadable menu on our website.
I’ve always stapled a menu to every order. Dont get me wrong. I’m only 33 years old and love the internet, but some times its a pain to scroll on a tablet or a phone. I’ll walk into my kitchen and open a drawer to get a menu most of the time.
I see more internet menu users when they’re not at home.
I am pretty much the same way. I have a folder in the filing cabinet at the shop that has lots of local restaurant menus in it. It’s how I prefer to browse a menu and I am 32.
We still stuff a menu in the pizza box of every order that goes out the door. Full color, tri fold. That’s pretty much the only print marketing we’ve been doing for the last few years unless you count the keeper stadium cups we serve our drinks in.
Our menu is a tabloid size newspaper style done on real newsprint with an offset press. We print around 7000 at a time which allows us to use the same menu for dine in, or carry out. If we’re doing an offsite catering event we can take a stack there as well. This works well for us and the old fashioned newspaper style fits with our brand and is complimentary to our 103 year old building.
Kinko’s &/or in-house is not feasable for newsprint…We’ve been in the print/graphic biz before, but we farm out the press duties & keep design inhouse…most of our stuff is less than a dime to produce, overall…
Being in a resort market we have brochure racks all over town in all the lodging properties. We pay the brochure rack company about $800 per year be in them and they go through about 5000 menus per year. Of course we also have them at the store but we give out less than 1000 of them there.
The menu is approx 9X16 full color and is a 4-fold so it fits nicely in the brochure rack.
I use Mspark for my menus. I pay $354.50 a month and they mail out 5,000 menus a month and I get 1,000 for in-house use. I get a digital copy to load to my website, facebook, yelp, ect. With this package I can make changes to my menu every 3 months. I attached a link to my menu below.
Something is very wrong with that math. That comes to 6 cents each total. You can’t get them printed for that (assuming 4 color two sided) and you certainly could not mail them for that even if the menu was free! Postage alone would be double that.
I believe mine is the shared but I can tell you within the hour that people are opening the mail and seeing our menus. My sales almost double just that one
That makes more sense. A solo 5000 piece mailing of a printed piece that costs even 25 cents to print (ours costs 40 cents) would have to run $2,000+ all in to deliver to the door. At 6 cents each these have to be printed on something like newspaper flier stock.