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Transforming Restaurant Menus with Behavioural Design

  • Behavioural design,
  • Eye-tracking research,
  • In-restaurant experimentation,
  • Menu optimisation

Cowry Consulting
May 8, 2026 - 2 min read

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How behavioural science helped optimise menu choice architecture for Mitchells & Butlers

The Challenge

Mitchells & Butlers operates some of the UK’s most recognisable restaurant brands, including:

  1. Browns
  2. All Bar One
  3. Harvester

Menus play a critical role in influencing what customers notice, how they evaluate options and ultimately what they order.

However, poorly designed menus can create cognitive overload, making it harder for diners to process information and decide what to order. This slows down decision making and can reduce both customer satisfaction and restaurant profitability.

Mitchells & Butlers partnered with Cowry to redesign their menus using behavioural science to improve both customer experience and commercial performance.

Customers don’t read menus line by line. They scan them rapidly, relying on visual cues and mental shortcuts. Poorly structured menus create cognitive overload, slowing decision making and reducing the likelihood of ordering multiple courses.

Our approach

Cowry delivered a comprehensive behavioural design programme combining research, experimentation and real-world testing.

The programme included:

  1. systematic literature review on menu psychology
  2. behavioural audit of the existing menu
  3. eye-tracking experiments to analyse how customers scan menus
  4. development of new menu design concepts
  5. further eye-tracking validation
  6. controlled trials in live restaurants.
  7. Infrared eye-tracking technology was used to identify fixation points, revealing exactly where diners looked when reading the menu.

Behavioural Insights

The behavioural audit and eye-tracking analysis revealed several key friction points.

These included:

Size Congruency Bias

The mains section of the menu was significantly larger than the other sections.

Behavioural science shows that larger elements are perceived as more important. As a result, customers focused heavily on mains and were less likely to explore starters or desserts.

Cognitive Overload

Dishes were not organised into clear logical groupings. Diners had to scan large sections of text to find options they might like.

This created cognitive overload, slowing decision making and reducing confidence in choices.

Attention Capture by Edge Imagery

Images positioned around the edges of the menu were pulling attention away from the dishes.

Because images capture attention faster than text, diners’ eyes were repeatedly drawn to the edges of the page rather than following a natural reading flow.

Fixation Point Overload

Eye-tracking revealed that customers were making too many fixation points when scanning the menu.

When fixation points are too numerous or too large, customers either fail to absorb the information or become stuck analysing options.

The Solution

Cowry redesigned the menu using behavioural design principles to guide attention and simplify decision making.

 

Balanced Menu Hierarchy

The menu was redesigned into three equal sections:

  1. Starters
  2. Mains
  3. Desserts

Giving each section equal visual weight signalled that all courses were equally important, encouraging diners to explore the full menu.

Clear Category Groupings

Dishes were organised into intuitive categories such as:

  1. Meat
  2. Fish
  3. Vegetarian

This reduced cognitive load and made the menu easier to navigate.

Guiding Attention Through Imagery

Images were repositioned from the edges of the menu to the centre of key sections, anchoring the start of each category and guiding diners through the menu.

Cocktail Visualisation

Cocktails were redesigned to show the glassware used for each drink, allowing customers to visualise the drink and reducing uncertainty when ordering.

The redesigned menus were tested using infrared eye-tracking experiments. The new design created a clear spiral scanning pattern, with diners naturally moving through the menu:

  1. Cocktails and starters
  2. Main courses
  3. Desserts

The redesign also reduced the number of fixation points, helping diners process information more efficiently.

Impact

 

Following the eye-tracking validation, the menus were tested in live restaurant environments.

The results were statistically significant:

+ 0 p
increase

in spend per head

+ 0 p
increase

in gross profit per head

“The early results of the menu changes look very encouraging – just wanted to say thank you for all your hard work on the project.”

David Gallacher
Divisional Director, Mitchells & Butlers plc

Why it worked

Menus are powerful behavioural environments.

By redesigning the menu around how diners actually scan information and make decisions, Cowry helped Mitchells & Butlers transform their menus into behaviourally optimised choice environments.

The new design reduced cognitive overload, guided customer attention and created a clearer decision journey, ultimately increasing both spend per head and overall restaurant profitability.

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