Your delivery menu is not your dining-room menu with a different cover. It is a different product, eaten in a different place, twenty-five minutes later, by someone who chose it from a photo on a phone. Treating the two as the same menu is the most common and most expensive setup mistake.
🍽️ Which dishes survive the trip
Before pricing anything, decide what belongs on the list at all. Run every candidate dish through three questions:
- Does it hold? Twenty-five minutes in a closed container is a steam chamber. Anything crisp arrives soft unless the packaging vents. Fried items, anything with a sauce on top of something crunchy, and delicate fish are the usual casualties.
- Does it travel? Plated height, sauces that pool, garnishes that slide. If it needs to look composed to make sense, it will not.
- Does it carry the commission? A dish with a thin dining-room margin has no room for another 25% deduction.
A dish that fails any one of these does not belong on delivery. Leaving it off is not lost revenue — it is avoided refunds and avoided one-star reviews.
💲 Pricing for a channel that takes a cut
If the platform takes 25% and your dining-room price already assumed 0%, you have three options and only three:
| Option | What it means | The catch |
| Absorb it | Same price, you eat the commission | Only works on high-margin items, and only if delivery is a small share of volume |
| Price up for the channel | Delivery prices set higher than dining room | Check your contract for a price parity clause first. Customers do notice, so keep it modest and consistent |
| Change the product | Delivery-specific portions, bundles or formats | More kitchen complexity, but it is the only option that adds value instead of moving cost |
Most restaurants land on a mix: absorb on the items that carry it, price up modestly across the board, and build two or three delivery-only bundles that are genuinely better value for the customer and genuinely better margin for you.
📷 Photos and descriptions do the selling
In the dining room a server can explain a dish. On an app, the photo and two lines of text are the entire sales pitch, competing against eleven other thumbnails.
- Photograph the dish in its container, not on a plate. That is how it will arrive, and matching expectation to reality is what prevents disappointed reviews.
- Shoot in daylight, from above, against something plain. A phone in a window beats a bad studio setup.
- Photograph everything or nothing in a section. One item with a photo among five without makes the five look unavailable.
- Write the description for someone who cannot ask. What is in it, how big it is, how hot it is. Answer the question the customer would have asked a server.
- Put allergens where they can be seen, not buried. Someone deciding at 8pm on a phone has nobody to ask.
🗂️ Structure so it can be found
App menus are scrolled, not read. Structure accordingly: few categories with clear names, the things you most want to sell near the top of their section, and modifiers that are genuinely optional. Every extra required choice is a place where someone abandons the order.
Keep the item names the same as your kitchen calls them. When a ticket prints, the cook should recognise it without translating.