Menu engineering is the analysis of every dish by how well it sells and how much it earns, so the menu can be priced, placed and changed on evidence. We keep that analysis current from live POS sales and this week's supplier prices.
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The classic menu engineering matrix, introduced by Kasavana and Smith in the early 1980s, places each dish on two axes: popularity, from sales mix, and contribution margin, the selling price minus the plate cost. That gives four groups. Stars sell well and earn well. Plowhorses sell well but earn little. Puzzles earn well but do not sell. Dogs do neither.
The method is sound; the inputs are the problem. A menu engineering worksheet built in a spreadsheet uses the plate costs from the day it was made. When the price of olive oil, beef or prawns moves, a star can become a plowhorse without anyone noticing until the month-end figures. Restaurant menu engineering is most useful when it updates as the supplier invoices arrive.
read and matched to ingredients
plate cost per dish, with yield
Toast, Square, Lightspeed
stars, plowhorses, puzzles, dogs
price, placement, recipe
any recipe change, signed by a person
Menu engineering is a method for analysing a restaurant menu by two measures for each dish: how popular it is, from its share of sales, and how profitable it is, from its contribution margin after plate cost. Dishes are grouped into stars, plowhorses, puzzles and dogs, and the menu is then priced, designed and revised to sell more of the profitable items.
A puzzle is a dish with a high contribution margin but low popularity. It earns well each time it sells but does not sell often. The usual responses are to give it a better position on the menu, describe it more clearly, have staff recommend it, or adjust the price, and to drop it if none of those changes the sales.
Cost every recipe accurately, take the sales mix for a representative period from the POS, calculate each dish's contribution margin and popularity against the menu average, and plot them on the matrix. Then decide what to do with each group. The hard part is keeping the plate costs current, which is the part we automate from supplier invoices.
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Send us your recipes and a quarter of POS sales. We will build the matrix and show you which dishes have moved.
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