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.

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.

According to a survey conducted earlier this year by the Coyle Hospitality Group, your menu is the single most influential piece of online information you can provide about your restaurant, when it comes to turning online lookers into diners. Well, I could have you told you that, lol.

Here are some of the highlight findings, based on the opinions of 2,437 restaurant-goers:

• 92% of them eat out at a restaurant they have never visited before at least once per month.
• Word of mouth was still deemed the most influential external factor.
• 78% have never booked a reservation online.
• 62% never relied on review web sites to influence their decision.
• 67% of those polled said that the quality of a restaurant’s website is an indicator of the level of service they can expect to receive when dining there.
• Menus were deemed the most important information they would like to see online, followed by pictures of the dining area.

It stands to reason: they want to know what you’ve got, they want to know how much it costs, and they want to have a look at your place. And, somewhat surprisingly, what a bunch of strangers on a reviews web site might have to say about your restaurant is almost meaningless.

“Pierna de Puerco Horneada” (Roasted Leg of Pig) was sought on Ask.com today, and found at El Nuevo Frutilandia right here in San Francisco.

“Challah French Toast 10010” was sought on Google today and found at the Lyric Diner, in New York.

The significance of a restaurant’s name is greatly amplified on the web. Your name is how your customers and constituents will come looking for you on the search engines. The words and letters in your restaurant’s name determine how easy or difficult it will be for you to corner your own search traffic. I took a look at the names of two restaurants recently opened in the Village in New York City, and assessed each one for “Search Engine Friendliness”

“BarFry” = Good.

Frank Bruni of the New York Times wrote an intelligent piece last month about restaurant names, titled The Art of Nomenclature. Most of the article is devoted to celebrating the name BarFry, a recently opened tempura joint in New York City. We are agreed, BarFry is indeed a great restaurant name. Why? Because (to quote Jarvis Dennison): “The name is brilliant. Short, memorable and absolutely unconfusable with anything else.”

But, beyond the name’s appeal to humans, I am also struck what a good choice it is for the search engines. On this point, Frank had a doubt:

“I wonder, though, how strategically prudent that name is. People looking for restaurant addresses and restaurant phone numbers on Google and other search engines are better served by a name like Sripraphai than by a name like Hearth or the House,..”

The problem with “hearth” and “the house” is not just that they are comprised of common words. Their problem is that the entire name of the restaurant, as a pattern of letters, is to be found on millions of web pages. In other words, they are common strings. But, “barfry”, although “bar” and “fry” are ultra-common, is really quite unique. And unlike “Sripraphai“, I think that most people who only hear the name “BarFry” will correctly guess how to spell it. And given that, when they come to look for you on the web, they’ll find you here, and (hopefully) here.

“The Smith” = Bad.

The Smith, a more recent entry to the NYC Village restaurant scene, is an example of what not to name your restaurant. Talk about a horrible choice! Not only is “the smith” an extraordinarily common string in the English language, it is also (to judge from the page 1 results on Google), the name of an important Opera House in Upstate New York, a rather aspirational looking high-rise apartment building in Brooklyn, and of course is eight ninths of The Smiths!

I want to stop short of suggesting anything like a formula for search-engine-smart restaurant names. I’d hate to limit anyone’s imagination. But if what you want is to drive people looking for your restaurant to a web site you control, here’s some thoughtful advice…

If you have a clean slate, strongly consider just making up a word, if you feel up to it. This is the best way to be assured of having a unique string of letters. For a total coup, pick up the domain name as well! This is your best chance to capture all your own web traffic.

If you have a restaurant with a sort of common name, and you want to try to capture as much traffic as you deserve, you can do a lot with the right domain name. When looking for a domain name variant, because for example the name of your place is “The Rose”, and therose.com is of course taken, don’t automatically reach for theroserestaurant.com or therosenyc.com. While those names are closer to the search queries people will type when they try to find you, they are not very unusual. By that I mean, there are probably lots of “rose restaurants” in the world, and probably lots of “roses” in New York. So, it would probably still take some work to bring you up into the upper listings. My suggestion is to look for additional descriptive terms you can tack on to your restaurant’s name that might form a unique string or a unique but memorable sequence of words. For example, if your restaurant, The Rose, were located on 99th street, you might leap at rose99.com or therose99.com. What may happen there is you will observe that people will begin to refer to the establishment by its domain name (rather than by the name on the door), but there’s nothing wrong with that. You have given your constituents the means to find you on the web. And that is something that even the largest brands in the world are bending, stretching and disguising themselves to achieve.

A “pittsburgh hoagie 18 inch” was sought on Google today and found at Pizza Pronto in Pittsburgh, PA.

Postres nicas were sought on Altavista today and found at Oye, Managua. This one is a bit of a head-scratcher. The query translates to roughly “Nicaraguan Desserts”. Since “nicas” is the insider term for Nicaraguan, or from Nicaragua, I got to wondering where the searcher was located, geographically. As it turns out (according to their IP address), this person is a Comcast subscriber somewhere in Dade County, Florida. Interesting. Not much hope this person will be able to gratify his or her impulse for Nicaraguan sweets tonight, at least not from the Oye Managua restaurant, located 3,100 miles away in San Francisco. Hmmmm. I’ll bet there’s a whole universe of ethnic food keywords just sitting there, waiting for the right offer of gratification to monetize their traffic.