A menu design & communication guide to calorie labelling.
Let’s make this look good
This will change things…
At this point, you should know if you’re going to need to label your food and drink with the required calorie information, and if you don’t… start with the government guidelines, then pop back,
Understanding the legislation.
If you’re struggling to make heads or tails of the government guidelines and let’s face it, who doesn’t? Fourth have a comprehensive white paper, which lays out the facts and the need-to-know info in a nicely digestible format.
Customer might not see this coming...
be transparent.
You may have been preparing for calorie labelling for a while, but this legislation was published back in May 2021, so anyone who was paying attention to it (probably not many, bearing in mind there were lots of other BIG things going on in the world at this point), by now they have likely forgotten. Also, for customers there will be a certain level of confusion due to the fact that not every venue they visit will need to participate.
For these reasons, it will be important to communicate to you guests that there has been a change, and they will be seeing the calorie content for each dish on the menu from now on. Communicate this in whichever way suits your customers best, this could be on social media, upon booking, via email, through the host or with in-restaurant POS.
Educate your team.
Make sure, before introducing the new menu, your guest-facing and social media team have all the right information. They will probably face some difficult questions if they are not armed with the correct answers. Also bear in mind, your team may well be questioned by some nutritional whizz-kids who have a strong opinions on calorie counting and its value when it comes to nutritional balanced diets. Make sure your team are prepared for this scenario too, they will thank you for it!
Be prepared for a period of adjustment for your team and your guests.
Provide menus without the calories.
The Government Guidelines do advise providing a menu without the calorie content for any guests who specifically asks for it. I would strongly recommend taking this advice! This advice was added to the rules to protect anyone who has experienced or is experiencing food and diet mental health issues. There are estimated to be in the region of 1.25 million people in the UK with an eating disorder, it’s highly likely you will need a calorie free menu at some point in the future.
For more information regarding the impact calories may have on restaurant menus…
Practicalities... where are the calories going to live?
When it comes to price positioning, I usually recommend making the font weight, size and colour the same or lighter than the header, and position it so it’s easy to find but doesn’t stand out too much. The same advice can be applied to the calorie information but now there a two details we need to subtly place on our menu, so this makes things a little more complicated.
It’s important to find the best position for the calorie information, so customers can easily find them in relation to that dish, but they are also not the standout detail. We still want the most significant piece of information to be the dish name and profile.
Different design styles of menus will require different positioning.
If you would like some advice on calorie positioning, get in touch…