menukarma blog

To feed the growing consumer hunger for nutritional information, restaurant operators continue to enlist new technologies.

For Ontario-based pita sandwich chain Extreme Pita, the answer may be something called the Nutricate Receipt System…

The Nutricate Receipt System, which automatically prints nutritional information on the customer receipt, is the brainchild of Jay Ferro, CEO of Nutricate Inc. Ferro is also part owner of Santa Barbara-based Silvergreen’s, and says he was inspired to develop the Nutricate Receipt System by the number of customer requests for the nutritional breakdown of menu items they get at the Silvergreen’s restaurants.

The system, which provides information for the foods a customer has actually ordered, is a great improvement over pre-printed nutritional “brochures”, according to Ferro. “The Nutricate System knows exactly what you are going to eat”, he said. “We enlisted a team of nutrition professionals to analyze the Silvergreens’ menu and calculate the nutritional information for each of more than 400 ingredients. Our sales rose by 25 percent in the year following the release of the dietary information and installation of the reporting technology”, Ferro said.

The results were so good at Silvergreen’s, Ferro decided to launch Nutricate Inc and offer his receipt-based nutrition information system to other restaurant chains.

(more…)

Government-imposed food labeling requirements have had a profound influence on the packaged food industry. They have also trained the consumer to expect nutritional information to be available whenever they make a food purchase. It will probably be a long time before restaurants are required to disclose nutritional information, but it’s not a bad time to think about doing it voluntarily — like on your web site.

I can confirm that search engine queries containing the terms “nutrition” and “calories” are definitely on the rise. People are coming to menukarma searching for nutritional information about specific prepared foods (especially ethnic foods), and they are also looking for nutritional information about the food from specific restaurants and chains.

I can tell you that the most nutritionally scrutinized menu on menukarma is the IHOP menu. What I cannot tell from my referrer logs is whether people are looking up the calories and fat of a Grilled Turkey Super Stacker with hopefulness before they indulge, or afterwards, with guilt and regret.

I’ll leave that for the good folks at IHOP to worry about.

I tried to stir up some discussion about restaurant web sites recently on a popular food service industry forum, but the topic sparked little interest. It seems word of mouth is still king in the marketing mix, to which I responded: “I guess the question is not so much whether word of mouth is still more important than having a web site. Of course the answer to that is ‘Yes!’ The question is whether the potential benefits of having some sort of an online strategy are still so negligible that the average overwrought restaurateur should continue to ignore them?”

I vowed I’d never let this become another damned “restaurant review blog”. My personal impressions with specific restaurants are outside the intended scope of this blog. But it does seem inescapable that I should visit at least some of the 4,000+ San Francisco restaurants listed on menukarma.com, and occasionally feel compelled to write about some number of those. I have decided, however, not to suppress the impulse to write, but rather to try to use it to observe something about the restaurant from the online marketing perspective.

Tonight was the second time I visited Eden’s Turkish Food. Both times I had the Lamb Kebab Platter, and thought it a good value for under $10. I recommend it as an excellent take-out choice for anyone living in the Nob Hill/Tenderloin area. It shares the same block on Jones Street with Dottie’s True Blue Cafe and Chutney Indian Restaurant.

The first thing I did to begin my online situation analysis was I Googled “Eden’s Turkish Food”. And I was not at all surprised to find that a Yelp review was present and in the top position. This part of town is apparently very well trawled by avid Yelpers, as is the rest of San Francisco, for that matter. Yelp’s impressive penetration of San Francisco restaurants owes in no small part, I think, to the fact that Yelp is headquartered right here in SOMA.

There’s some pretty enlightening stuff for the proprietors of Eden’s to read among the Yelp reviews, not the least of which was: “I would have paid another $0.50 to be able to picture the chicken I ate having lived a happier life than it probably did, but it still all came together in a nice, comfort-food way“, LOL

What did surprise me among the page-one Google results, however, was to find that Eden’s Turkish Food has its own web site, and a pretty damned good one, too. It’s not flashy or anything.  But it is simple and effective. It has the two items of content a recent Coyle Group Restaurant Survey revealed are the most important to prospective diners online — the menu and pictures of the dining area and food. The site even has some very respectable SEO, as evidenced by the thoughtful meta tagging:

meta name=”title” content=”Eden’s Turkish Food” />

meta name=”description” content=”Inexpensive yet tasty Mediterranean food” />

meta name=”keywords” content=”restaurant, Mediterranean restaurant, Greek food, Turkish food, fast food, Union Square, Tenderloin, Nob Hill, vegetarian” />

That’s really pretty good.  Kudos, Eden’s.