Why Restaurants Have A Kid’s Menu

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This post will cover why it is that restaurants even have a kid’s menu in the first place. The reason is derived around customer satisfaction mostly, but there are other underlining reasons why restaraunts have them too, which we will cover.

There are people that will only go to restaurants that have a kid’s menu. There are also people that will deliberately ask the restaurant when ordering food, if the restaurant has a kid’s menu or not. This makes a restaurant go out of their way and make kid’s menus. It has become a seen requirement by certain restaurants, as many restaurants are expected to have them.

If a restaurant doesn’t have a kid’s menu, then they may be seen by certain individuals as a place that they don’t want to eat. They may choose to eat somewhere else. The kid’s menu is more appealing to individuals that are trying to eat at a restaurant with their whole family, especially if the children are preteens (under the age of 13).

People love convenience, and believe it or not, some of them don’t know what they should feed their children when they go out to eat at certain restaurants. Rather than having to go through the hassle of going to a restaurant that they have never been to and trying to put together food items to feed their kids, they would rather trust the restaurant’s experience by letting the restaurant decide for them via their kid’s menu.

Many people ordering foods for their kids don’t really know the proportion of food (based off of what the restaurant is offering) that their child should have to be considered a satisfying meal. This is especially true for young adults that have had their first batch of kids. This is not to say that people don’t know their children, but they may be unfamiliar with how their kids will react to the type of foods that the restaurant is offering.

For this reason, restaurants try to make it easier for their guests, by already calculating a meal for their kid’s, by putting meals together on a kid’s menu to choose, that are exceptional from their own knowledge of their own food. These foods are generally already known to be not spicy or difficult for most children to eat.

Usually a kid’s menu consists of meals that aren’t complex, that children would eat, instead of the child inspecting their food and wondering if it is going to be good or not before they eat it. For example, a restaurant offering burgers won’t have a deluxe burger with special sauces and a lot of add-ons for a kid’s meal. Instead, they will have a very simplified version of a burger that has very little add-ons, one burger patty, one sauce, and one slice of cheese. Instead of a full sandwich, they may have a grilled cheese sandwich instead.

They may also have a very simple food item that can be dipped into sauce that is packaged separately. This way the child is able to decide if they want to eat their food with or without sauce.

An entire meal, regardless of being a kid’s meal or not, also usually comes with a drink, but a lot smaller than a regular sized drink. Restaurants may also decide to put special drinks for children in the kid’s menu that they know that children commonly like to drink. Apple juice, chocolate milk, or orange juice is more appealing and appetizing to children in some cases than other drinks that the restaurant may have to offer.

Despite how picky children can be about food in general sometimes, they are far less thoughtful of the food to critique it at the level that an adult would. They have no clue what makes their food taste good, or why it is nasty to them. In a restaurant that already has good food items that kids generally love to eat, children are actually less picky than the general adult would be that orders their food from the main menu.

Restaurants have kid’s menus to keep things efficient and in order.

For the people that have a lot of kids to feed, this becomes really helpful when trying to order food for all of them. It makes things more organized for the restaurant when receiving many orders at once, and it saves a lot of time.

If this still doesn’t seem justifiable to why they have a kid’s menu, then imagine someone coming into the restaurant with a bus load of kids or a whole soccer team. Usually the adult(s) that supervises the large group of kids is going to have a hard time ordering food in a timely manner for all of them if there isn’t a kid’s menu. All of these kids have their own mind and what they like.

From what we have seen, restaurants would do well to have a kid’s menu than to not have one. We have seen large groups of children like this order nearly the same foods (all from the kid’s menu) with the adults thanking us for the good food before leaving the restaurant. The restaurants that have kid’s menus can please children easily with far less fuss than what they would get from adults ordering from the main menu. Some restaurants even thrive and profit from thousands of dollars a day by just having a kid’s menu. It is very handy to restaurants that are near public schools. A kid’s menu is not only appealing to preteens, but to teenagers too. Some adults also order from the kid’s menu.

Without a kid’s menu, some restaurants would end up taking too long to get all the orders out to everyone without messing up a lot of the orders when they get a lot of hungry kids. Because kid meals are so simplified, the kid’s menu helps to reduce the chance of orders getting messed up. For this reason, most restaurants find them worth having. Also these simplified kid meals are faster to make than the main dishes that restaurants offer on their main menu. All of these things can equal huge profit for a restaurant.

Restaurants have kid’s menus for more profit.

Besides the restaurants just having kid’s menus to just cater to easy customer service, they also have them too make more profit. Some restaurants only serve food that is appealing to children, without technically having a kid’s menu at all. These are the typical restaurants that let the children eat their food in an eating area with game rooms all throughout their establishment.

These restaurants design all their food and their potential for profit off of creating a fun experience for children. If the children love the experience enough after leaving, they will beg their parents to let them eat their again, winning the restaurant some loyal customers that will return.

It is a wonderful experience for a child to know that they can eat the foods they love when they are hungry, and burn all that energy off with some play time afterwards.

Some children also find it exciting when their favorite cartoon/movie characters can appear as a toy prize in their kid meal. This is one thing that pushed me as a child to make my parents return to the same restaurant. It was exciting to see what new toy I could get this time around. This is also relieving to some parents too, as it gives their children something to do after they eat food while they relax at the restaraunt and handle their own business.

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