UBC Founder Keith Bradshaw Featured in the Irish Independent on Menu Engineering
Urban Brand Creative founder Keith Bradshaw was recently featured in the Irish Independent, contributing expert commentary to an article exploring menu engineering, restaurant pricing and the psychology behind how customers make purchasing decisions.
It is familiar territory for Keith. Before founding Urban Brand Creative, he worked across the hospitality and service industry in five different countries, giving him first-hand experience of restaurant operations, customer behaviour and the commercial realities behind food and hospitality businesses.
Today, menu engineering is one of Urban Brand Creative’s specialist hospitality services, combining commercial thinking, brand, design and customer experience to help restaurants make one of their most important sales tools work harder.
Here are the top three takeaways from the Irish Independent article..
1. Your menu is a sales tool
One of the central ideas discussed in the article is deceptively simple: a restaurant menu does much more than tell customers what they can order.
Its structure, wording, hierarchy, pricing and presentation can all influence what customers notice, how they assess value and ultimately what they choose to buy.
That is the basis of menu engineering: treating the menu as part of the commercial customer journey rather than simply as a piece of graphic design.
2. Good menu design can influence customer choice
Restaurants use a range of techniques to guide attention towards particular dishes, categories or price points.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Good menu design should make decisions easier, help customers navigate the offer and allow a restaurant to communicate value more effectively.
For consumers, however, understanding that those choices are being influenced can help them make more deliberate decisions, particularly when eating out on a budget.
3. A little planning can reduce impulse spending
The article also looked at the consumer side of menu engineering.
With most restaurant menus now available online, customers can check prices before arriving, get a sense of likely spend and decide roughly what fits their budget.
The simplest advice is also probably the best: choose what you genuinely want, rather than allowing the structure of the menu to make the decision for you.
That distinction sits at the centre of good customer experience. The best commercial design helps people make confident choices; it should not make the experience unnecessarily difficult or confusing.
Experience from both sides of the table
Keith’s perspective on menu engineering combines direct hospitality experience with more than a decade working across brand strategy, customer experience, digital growth and commercial design through Urban Brand Creative.
That combination matters because an effective restaurant menu has to work on several levels at once. It has to feel right for the brand, make sense to the customer and support the commercial realities of running a hospitality business.
The Irish Independent feature offered a useful opportunity to bring some of that thinking into a wider conversation about restaurant menus, consumer psychology and spending behaviour.
Read the Irish Independent feature
Read the full Irish Independent article on menu engineering and restaurant spending →
Menu Engineering by Urban Brand Creative
Urban Brand Creative works with restaurants and hospitality businesses on menu engineering, menu design and wider brand and customer-experience strategy.
Learn more about Urban Brand Creative’s Menu Engineering service →
Book a Clarity Call with Keith Bradshaw →
About Urban Brand Creative
Urban Brand Creative is a Dublin-based, founder-led strategic growth partner. Over the last decade, the agency has increasingly focused on more ambitious digital work for enterprise-level clients, national institutions, not-for-profits, and high-impact organisations where trust, complexity, and execution all matter.
