Menu engineering: how to know which dishes make you money

Do you know which dish makes you the most money? Not the one that sells the most, but the one that contributes the most to your monthly result. They are often not the same, and that is one of the clearest opportunities to improve a restaurant's profitability.

Menu engineering is a method for analyzing your menu with data: how much each dish sells and how much margin it leaves. With that you can decide what to highlight, what to adjust and what to remove.

The two numbers you need

For each dish on your menu you need two things:

1. Popularity. How many units sold in a period, for example the last month.
2. Contribution margin. What each unit leaves after subtracting the cost of its ingredients: selling price minus food cost.

Sales alone are not enough. A cheap dish that sells a lot can contribute less than a pricier one that sells half as much.

How to classify your dishes

You compare dishes within the same category (starters with starters, mains with mains) and classify each one by whether its popularity and margin are above or below the category average. The result is four groups.

Stars: popular and profitable

They sell a lot and leave a good margin. They are the heart of your menu.

What to do: keep their quality and presentation, give them a prominent spot on the menu and do not change them without a good reason.

Plowhorses: popular but low margin

People love them, but they leave little. They are often classics guests expect to find.

What to do: review the recipe and portions to lower the cost without it showing, adjust the price slightly or pair them with something more profitable.

Puzzles: profitable but unpopular

They leave a good margin, but hardly anyone orders them. Sometimes it is a problem of name, description or position on the menu.

What to do: rename them, improve the description, move them to a more visible spot and ask your floor team to recommend them.

Dogs: unpopular and unprofitable

They neither sell nor leave margin. They take up space on the menu and in the kitchen.

What to do: consider removing them or turning them into something different. A shorter menu is usually easier to manage and to sell.

How to set the popularity threshold

A common approach is this: if a category has ten dishes, each one would in theory get 10% of sales. Many operators consider a dish popular if it reaches at least 70% of that theoretical share, that is, 7% of its category's sales.

For margin, simply compare each dish's margin with the category's weighted average.

Common mistakes

• Analyzing too little data. One week is not representative. Use at least a month, and keep seasonality in mind.
• Forgetting add-ons. Extras and options with a surcharge change a dish's real margin.
• Not updating costs. If an ingredient's price goes up and you do not reflect it, your margins are wrong.
• Looking only at the numbers. A dish can be a dog on paper and still be the reason certain guests come in. Data helps you decide; it does not decide for you.

Menus are designed too

Menu engineering goes hand in hand with menu design. A few ideas that tend to work:

• Highlight your stars and puzzles with a box or a short description.
• Avoid neatly aligned price columns, which invite comparing on price alone.
• Use specific descriptions: origin, technique, accompaniment.
• Keep categories short. Too many options make choosing harder.

If you use a digital QR menu, you can change descriptions, prices and availability instantly, without reprinting anything.

Do it without spreadsheets

Doing this analysis by hand means exporting sales, cross-referencing them with costs and keeping a spreadsheet up to date. With a system that records every order (see digital kitchen tickets and kitchen displays), the report generates itself.

In Bookeando the menu engineering report tells you which dish sells, which earns its margin and which is dead weight on the menu, calculated from your real sales. The digital menu keeps a history of every price change, and reports can be exported to CSV on the Pro plan.

See everything included in plans and pricing or request a demo.