Designing a great kid’s menu for your establishment that includes nutritious and tasty options that appeal to children and parents alike will lead to a growth in sales. The National Restaurant Association’s Kids LiveWell program focused on how to develop stellar kid’s menus and a few participants, including Applebee’s and Arby’s, shared their best practices and successes. Here below are a few tips from the experts:

-The menu should change at the same pace that kids’ tastes change:  Darin Dugan, senior vice president of marketing and culinary at Applebee’s states, “We approached the new menu by asking what kids and parents wanted and let that steer our development..the result has been very encouraging.”

Be aware of consumer demands: Listen to the guests be it children or adults, and use the feedback to create a menu that can meet their needs. In the case of Applebee’s, they studied preferences through focus groups, surveys and in-restaurant testing.

Find a balance between what parents want their children eating and what their children will eat:  Arby’s also conducted focus groups to find out what the demand was. According to Debbie Domer, Director of Brand Marketing for Arby’s, Arby’s found out that parents weren’t necessarily watching calories for their children, but were more so looking for wholesome options to choose from.

Make the offerings familiar: Kids will respond to offerings they are familiar with from home or school such as juice boxes or applesauce.

Increase brand awareness: Carrie Martin, Vice President of Operations bd’s Mongolian Grill is collaborating with Kids LiveWell, and has stated, “We’ve learned our brands support each other …we’re just now learning how to use the partnership to its fullest to get brand awareness going. We want to send the message that healthful eating can be fun.”

To read more tips on how to successfully re-engineer a kid’s menu to increase sales, click here