Help customers choose faster from your menu
Most café menus aren’t structured around how people actually decide what to order.
The Taste & Type Co. audits menus using behavioural thinking, design expertise and AI-assisted analysis to show you what customers notice, skip, and choose, and why.
The result: a menu that's easier to read, faster to decide from, and better aligned to what you actually want to sell.
Why café menu structure matters
Most menus make ordering harder than it needs to be. Customers rarely read menus from top to bottom. They scan, compare and decide quickly. When menu structure isn’t clear, good items can be overlooked and customers hesitate.
A well-structured menu helps customers understand their options faster and choose with confidence.
About The Taste & Type Co.
The Taste & Type Co. is run by Ash McCallum, Creative Director, and started with two long-standing interests: design and cafés.
After years working in design — and spending plenty of time in cafés — one thing became impossible to ignore: some menus are dramatically easier to order from than others.
In some places you glance at the menu and know what you want immediately. In others you read it three times and still feel unsure.
By combining design expertise with AI-supported behavioural analysis, The Taste & Type Co. helps cafés understand how their menus function as decision environments — and how small improvements can make them clearer and easier to choose from.
The Clear Choice Method
Every audit follows the same structured process: a design read-through, a test against real customer journeys, a visual hierarchy review, a heat map / eye-flow read, and a menu psychology check - before findings become a prioritised action plan.
The Clear Choice audit includes: a Menu Performance Scorecard, an Annotated Menu Review, and a full Audit Report.
Menu audit and redesign services
The Taste & Type Co. offers menu analysis, redesign and café branding services to help cafés and restaurants present their menus more clearly and confidently.
Clear Choice Menu Audit
Understand how your menu actually performs. We test it against real customer journeys, review its structure and hierarchy, and map where attention lands and drops away - then hand you a scorecard, an annotated review, and a prioritised action plan.
Menu Redesign
For cafés ready to implement the recommendations, we can redesign your menu layout and structure. The result is a menu that is clearer, easier to navigate and aligned with your café’s brand.
Café Branding & Collateral
Some cafés choose to go further and refresh their broader visual identity. We can design café branding, signage, takeaway packaging and supporting collateral to create a consistent and confident brand presence.
About our creative director
Ash brings a background in design and shopper marketing to the café and small hospitality space. Years spent both behind the design table and as a regular café customer left him with the same observation from both sides: some menus let people decide in seconds, while others leave them re-reading the same page, still unsure.
He built the Clear Choice Method to bring that broader design and shopper marketing experience — usually applied at a much bigger commercial scale — down to where it matters just as much: the small hospitality venues that make up most cafés.
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Menu Audit FAQs
Answers to common questions about menu audits, the Clear Choice Method and how cafés use the insights.
It's a structured menu audit framework that treats your menu as a decision environment, not just a design piece. We combine design review, customer journey thinking, menu psychology, and commercial judgement to assess how easily real customers can understand, choose, and order from it.
A Menu Performance Scorecard, an Annotated Menu Review marking up specific issues on your actual menu, and a full Audit Report — covering your main customer journeys, a heat map of where attention lands and drops away, and a prioritised action plan split into quick wins, structural fixes, and redesign-led opportunities.
No. It's a behavioural read based on design and menu psychology principles, not a biometric study. We use hierarchy, contrast, layout, and established attention patterns to estimate where customer focus clusters and drops away.
No. The audit is diagnostic and useful on its own. Menu Redesign is a separate, optional next step if you want help acting on the findings.
Your menu (PDF or photos, all pages), your café name and location, your service model, your customer mix, and any commercial priorities - hero items, high-margin products, or slow movers you want addressed.
Start the conversation
Tell us a little about your café and what you’re looking for. Select whether you’d like a menu audit or have a general enquiry, and we’ll respond with next steps.